Comdex: Gartner urges caution on Windows 2000

At a Comdex seminar on mobile computing Tuesday, Gartner's vice president and research area director Kenneth Dulaney, said the research giant is urging caution for Windows 2000: "The first time Gartner will say to its clients 'go ahead and deploy it' is probably 2001," he said.

Seminar panelists also suggest that notebooks need to plan for 500Mb to install Windows 2000 and derided the program for its sheer weight of code, thought to be 33 million lines. Performance gains for mobile users were also questioned: "There is a real risk that when Windows 2000 comes out it will not run on anything apart from the most sophisticated notebooks," said Gartner Group's Martin Reynolds. "I know today, Windows NT 5, the betas look fairly fast, but my suspicion is that Microsoft will put the next period to good use writing lots more nice slow code to get this thing stable."

The roll out of Windows 2000 is not likely to happen quickly. Assuming it ships in the mid-2000 time frame with a service pack six to nine months later and IT departments pinned down with Y2K and Euro compliance, European companies look particularly unlikely to upgrade upon launch.

Earlier this year Gartner warned corporates not to use NT 5.0 until they had cleared up all Y2K issues -- expected to take at least twelve months.