When it comes to actually sitting down and using Windows 2000, the design mantra becomes obvious: Windows 2000 is the easiest Windows yet. And though the interface is largely similar to Windows 98 and NT 4.0, Microsoft has tweaked the user experience in subtle ways that makes it simpler yet more powerful, enabling beginners and power users alike to get their work done efficiently.
If you're a Windows NT user, it's likely that you've looked longingly at the Windows 98 user interface and wished that you could get an interface that refined. Fear not: The Windows 2000 GUI is even better than that of Windows 98. In Windows 2000, the desktop is less cluttered and a "personalized" Start Menu hides those icons that are rarely accessed. Common tools have been consolidated into the Control Panel. And everything is highly customizable if desired.
It's also likely that any Windows NT administrator will understand the basics of the Windows user interface so we won't waste time here on trivia such as opening folders and renaming files. Instead, this chapter will focus solely on those user interface features that are new and unique to Windows 2000 so you can get up to speed quickly.
Using the Desktop
Like Windows NT 4.0 before it, each user that logs into a Windows 2000 machine gets a unique desktop environment. But Microsoft has finally moved user settings out of the Windows directory: Now the desktop is accessible alongside other user-specific data in C:\Documents and Settings\[username]\Desktop by default.
Although the desktop is, in many ways, just another folder on the system, it is also far more than that: The desktop is the logical root of the shell namespace, the logical view of the system that you see in My Computer and Explorer. Below the desktop, the shell namespace consists of special logical folders (also called nodes) such as My Documents, My Computer, and My Network Places, which correspond to icons on the desktop. My Documents maps to the My Documents folder, which is found in C:\Documents and Settings\[username]\My Documents by default. My Computer is used to contain all of the local and mapped network drives that are accessible to the current user. And My Network Places--which replaces Network Neighborhood from earlier versions of Windows--provides a view of the network to which the system is connected.
Compared to earlier versions of Windows, the Windows 2000 Desktop is less cluttered, with fewer icons (Figure). And Active Desktop, that much maligned feature first introduced in Internet Explorer 4.0 and Windows 98, has been downplayed in Windows 2000. It is still available, however, from the desktop context menu (right-click the desktop to access the Active Desktop options) and it provides users with an HTML-enabled desktop that is of questionable value in a server environment because of its resource requirements.
Using the Taskbar
The Windows 2000 Taskbar sits at the bottom the desktop by default. This taskbar consists of three basic sections: The Start button, the toolbar area, and the tray notification area (usually simply called the tray). The Start button provides access to the Start menu, which contains shortcuts to application programs and system utilities (Figure). The toolbar area provides space for taskbar toolbars. By default two toolbars are provided. The first is reserved for open window icons.
