A+ Guide to Managing and Maintaining Your PCFifth Edition

Chapter 13

Understanding and Installing Windows 2000 and Windows NT

2A+ Guide to Managing and Maintaining Your PC, Fifth Edition

Windows NT/2000/XP ArchitectureWindows NT Introduced a new file system – NTFS – that is

also used by Windows 2000/XP

Windows 2000 A true 32-bit, module-oriented OS Includes desktop OS (Windows 2000

Professional) and server OSs (Windows 2000 Server, Windows 2000 Advanced Server, and Windows 2000 Datacenter Server)

Windows XP Additional support for multimedia, PnP, and legacy software

3A+ Guide to Managing and Maintaining Your PC, Fifth Edition

Windows NT/2000/XP Modes

4A+ Guide to Managing and Maintaining Your PC, Fifth Edition

User Mode Processor mode in which programs:

Have only limited access to system information

Can access hardware only through other OS services

Contains several subsystems

The Windows tools (e.g., Windows Explorer) primarily run on user mode

5A+ Guide to Managing and Maintaining Your PC, Fifth Edition

Programs Interacting with Win32

6A+ Guide to Managing and Maintaining Your PC, Fifth Edition

Kernel Mode Processor mode in which programs have

extensive access to system information and hardware

Used by two main components

HAL (hardware abstraction layer)

Executive services: interface between the subsystems and HAL

7A+ Guide to Managing and Maintaining Your PC, Fifth Edition

Workgroups

Logical groups of computers and users that share resources

Each computer maintains a list of users and their rights on that particular PC

Use peer-to-peer networking model

8A+ Guide to Managing and Maintaining Your PC, Fifth Edition

A Windows Workgroup

9A+ Guide to Managing and Maintaining Your PC, Fifth Edition

Domains

Groups of networked computers that share a centralized directory database of user account information and security

Use client/server model

Have a domain controller which stores and controls the SAM database (user, group, and computer accounts)

10A+ Guide to Managing and Maintaining Your PC, Fifth Edition

A Windows Domain

11A+ Guide to Managing and Maintaining Your PC, Fifth Edition

Windows NT/2000/XP Logon

Default administrator account

Has the privileges to all software and hardware

Can create user accounts and assign them rights

12A+ Guide to Managing and Maintaining Your PC, Fifth Edition

How Windows NT/2000/XP Manages Hard Drives

13A+ Guide to Managing and Maintaining Your PC, Fifth Edition

A Choice of File Systems

14A+ Guide to Managing and Maintaining Your PC, Fifth Edition

FAT

Uses three components to manage data on a logical drive FAT: lists how each cluster is used

Directories: files and directories info + the first cluster no of the file or directory

Data files

15A+ Guide to Managing and Maintaining Your PC, Fifth Edition

NTFS

Uses a database - the master file table (MFT)

Each file or directory occupies a row

16A+ Guide to Managing and Maintaining Your PC, Fifth Edition

Master File Table (MFT)

17A+ Guide to Managing and Maintaining Your PC, Fifth Edition

Advantages of NTFS over FAT Recoverable

Supports encryption and disk quotas (Windows 2000/XP only)

Supports compression, mirroring drives, and large volume drives

Provides added security when booting from floppy disks

Uses smaller cluster sizes

18A+ Guide to Managing and Maintaining Your PC, Fifth Edition

Advantages of FAT over NTFS

Less overhead; best for hard drives < 500 MB

Backward-compatibility with Windows 9x and DOS OSs

Allows booting from a DOS or Windows 9x startup disk to access the drive

19A+ Guide to Managing and Maintaining Your PC, Fifth Edition

Installing Hardware

If device is PnP: If device is not PnP:Windows automatically: Identifies the device Determines and assigns

system resources Configures the device Loads device drivers Informs system of

configuration changes

Use Add/Remove Hardware applet in Control Panel (administrative privileges required)

May need to update device driver

20A+ Guide to Managing and Maintaining Your PC, Fifth Edition

Last Known Good Configuration A copy of hardware configuration from the

registry that is saved by the OS each time it boots and the first logon is made with no errors

Contained in the registry key: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\HARDWARE

Reverting to it causes loss of any changes made to hardware configuration since Last Known Good was saved