Having been impressed with Windows 2000, we felt it was time for our readers to read a labs report on Windows 2000 ready PC's. We set about sending our invitations to fifteen PC manufacturers in the U.K. We received replies from eleven of the manufacturers, of which five informed us they could not meet our deadline or could not participate, two manufacturers could not meet with our specification as they did not have Windows 2000 ready PC's. In the end we received four PC's for our labs. No it doesn't end there, of the four we received two of them failed to load Windows 2000 and were excluded. We were left with two PC's namely from Elonex and Simply.

We were a little dismayed to discover the lack of support from peripheral manufacturers for Windows 2000, video cards installed had 'beta' drivers, BAPCO's benchmark software SYSmark 2000 would not complete the full test under Windows 2000, 3DMark 2000 had similar problems, clearly highlighting Windows 2000 has little or no tolerance, which is why it is called 'Windows NT (non-tolerance)' in some circles as it does not tolerate sub standard hardware or drivers.

How we carried out our tests