Windows 2000 Professional Resource Kit (IT Professional) Book

If you install or support Windows 2000 Professional, Windows 2000 Professional Resource Kit is near-essential. It is worth having for the utilities alone, with over 200 tools and scripts for management and problem solving on the supplied CD. A few examples include utilities for registry backup and restore, process viewing and management, memory analysis and monitoring, a handy network clipboard, and the ability to lock floppy drives as a precaution against viruses. Then, of course, there is the book. With over 1750 pages this is value for money but not armchair reading. It is divided into several parts, covering deployment and installation, system configuration, network configuration, performance monitoring and troubleshooting. There are chapters on inter-operating with Netware, Unix and IBM systems. Each topic is covered in-depth, so for instance you get 60 pages on file systems, mostly devoted to NTFS (NT File System). If the worst comes to the worst and the system crashes, the chapter on Windows 2000 stop messages tells you how to interpret the dreaded blue screens. Another vital topic is security, and here there is full information about user rights and permissions, the Encrypted File System, public key security and how to protect portable computers. There is also a detailed index and glossary. This is a reference book and you are unlikely to read it cover-to-cover. The presentation is dry, and it is emphatically not a book aimed at end-users. Its value is in providing a single comprehensive resource, including information not found in typical third-party guides. --Tim AndersonRead More