Need average timeline to up to Win. 2000

The NT4 machines will upgrade ok without too many other changes - Win2K was designed to upgrade from NT4. This doesn't mean that you'll need to do complete backups first, though!!

Assuming you do the servers on a weekend...

Have a rollback plan. Allow yourself time to rollback if you cant make them work. I'd suggest that if you haven't got them working by Sunday morning, then rollback!

Unfortunately for you, Win95 doesn't "upgrade" to Win2K. You'll need to re-install the other softwareon those boxes. Furthermore you may have issues of software not running under Win2K.

I'd allow a whole weekend for the three servers and suggest you could do 2-3 clients per day depending on the software they have installed.

Hopefully the terminal server clients wont have much extra software, but that may be wishful thinking!

On the good news front... you should be able to do a staged rollout as the clients will be able to still happily work with the servers when they're Win2K.

The best way to approach this is to build on a "new" machine and swap over when its ready. This means having an extra machine, though. And is unlikely for you with the server class machines.

Good luck,

Cheers,
Tim.

Ooops... my most important line read wrong...

I was trying to say you definitely DO need to do backups before starting !!.

Cheers,
Tim.

Just an add on to the previous reply: We are a bit larger in the server department and client side. We have spent 400 Manhours over 2 Months to build and repeatedly test a "test network". We used this to verify and validate information before we rolled or upgraded our whole system. We are now confident that we will be able to roll 15 servers to Win2000 Server in less than 48 hours. We will most likely keep our client side on Win9x for the time being.
Just additional information to help you. The process we went through was a blessing, now any of the tech's in our department can do the process of upgrading by themselves!

FYI Win95 CAN uprade to windows 2000. I still wouldn't recommend it though. I've talked to people from Microsoft on this issue. They said that even though it is possible, they don't recommend it because the registries are so different between the2 OS's. You end up getting wierd error messages, BSOD, system hangs, etc. NT's registry is very similar though, so those machines shouldn't be a problem. Hope this helps.

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