May 15, 2001 10:59 AM
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The big question contending today’s EDP Managers, Web Masters is to choose the perfect operating system for the their organizations needs, after all these years we now have a choice to choose an operating system apart from one from Microsoft.
The Ultimate fight for Best Operating System is fought between Microsoft’s Windows NT 4/Windows 2000 and Linux.
I do not have much experience on Windows 2000 so I will stick to NT 4.0 Comparison with Linux.
Three important parameters are used for Benchmarking Operating systems, they are Performance, Reliability and security.
So here I go with the comparison of Microsoft Windows NT 4.0 with Linux
Performance
As per the recent tests in the market, Windows NT 4.0 with Internet Information Server 4.0 delivered 41 percent better performance on a single processor system and 125 percent better performance on a 4-way system than Linux and Apache.
Reliability & Stability
Windows NT 4.0 has been widely accused of crashes (famous for blue screen messages) and lack of stability, Microsoft officially denies this, but there is concrete evidence to prove its lack of stability at least in the following cases:
• Visual Basic 16-bit applications when they are not run in separate memory space it gives blue screen with flashing error messages, we have to manually configure and run it in separate memory space.
• Machine with static IP Address and have both IPX/SPX and TCP/IP protocols used also leads to the famous blue screen.
But apart from the above two points Microsoft Windows NT 4.0 is the only one operating system which is truly tested in real time complex environments and runs perfectly well at NASDAQ, DELL COMPUTERS, Boeing Company etc that cannot be said for Linux.
Security
There are certain loopholes in Windows NT 4.0 with Internet Information Server 4.0 which allows potential hackers to gain access to systems or shut them down, Microsoft periodically releases Patches to fix this loopholes, but it is far better than Linux which only provides access controls for files and directories where as NT provides security settings for each object in Windows NT.
I do not want give any conclusions, I simply wanted to state technical facts as they are with out the hype surrounding them and let the final decision be yours.
