Network World Magazine recently compared W2K to the other available Operating Systems in a first comparative test.

Network World farmed out the tests to Centennial Networking Labs (CNL) at North Carolina State University in Raleigh. Win2K did not blow everyone out of the water. CNL technical director John Bass remarked as he stated that "each OS had its strengths and weaknesses". But the overall W2K score was 7.78 out of 10, Netware got 7.61, 6.35 for Red Hat and UnixWare came last with 6.10. The only area where Win2K lagged behind was in the CNL file services benchmark. There it only scored 5.6 against a whopping 9.3 for NetWare and 6.7 for Red Hat. Tech Director Bass commented that disk drive device drivers may have been the culprit. Not having stable and up-to-date drivers is an issue for all makers of W2K peripherals for the coming months. Then there was the issue of configuring Win2K_s disk caching mechanism that influenced speed significantly, but NT still lagged behind NetWare and Red Hat. but the Red Hat score went down big time when it turned out that Linux started slowing with more than 100 users. The one space where NetWare was the clear leader was networking performance, which is historically its strong point anyway. NetWare scored 9.6 with W2K making 8.4, Red Hat 7.4 and 7.5 for UnixWare. File and Print Management for NetWare and W2K both scored 8. Where W2K really shone was an 8 for stability and fault tolerance, and the other strong area was security. W2K scored a whopping 9, where UnixWare took 8, and Linux and NetWare just got a 6. Last area where W2K did well was scalability, where it got an 8 in a tie with UnixWare, NetWare and Red Hat only got a 6. Comparing all of the OS-es, Red Hat did not achieve the top score in any of the areas. That made the testers position Linux as "an inexpensive alternative that will give you bare-bones network services with decent performance."