Compaq, Dell, IBM and HP are among the Major PC makers that begin selling Windows 2000 systems on January 24-th.

This is almost three weeks before Microsoft officially kicks off the release inSan Francisco on Feb 17 at the Windows 2000 conference. Win2K will be available on PC_s, notebooks and Servers. Steve Ballmer who was promoted to CEO on Thursday said: "Windows 2000 is the most important product we_ve done since Windows 95. We have great hope for the product for the business user-it_s spot on." If you want to buy a retail copy you will have to wait till Feb 17, but this is a way for Microsoft to preload the channel so systems can actually be sold by the seventeenth. The quality is looking pretty good, but obviously a load of bugs will be found right after the release. Create a testbed, test all your own apps, and test them again before you go close to any kind of production environment with it, but this is normal business policy anyway.