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If the operating system's reliability is a concern, there's no getting around the fact that Microsoft Windows XP, 2000, and NT4 are the two most reliable operating systems supported by Active Call Center. Although Active Call Center will run fine on a Windows 98, or ME system, Windows XP, 2000, and NT4 provide some special features that help to increase overall system availability.
Windows NT platforms (NT, 2000, and XP) support system level applications called "services." Services are applications that can run automatically when a system starts up. The operating system performs special monitoring of a service while it's running, and if the service crashes, the operating system can reboot itself without any intervention from the user.
Starting with Active Call Center version 2.5, the Active Call Center Call Monitor can be run as a service on Windows NT platforms. In addition to the fault management features provided by the operating system, the Active Call Center service application adds an extra level of fault monitoring to detect some types of errors that the operating system may not detect. Running Active Call Center as a service on an NT platform is one of the best ways to minimize downtime since no external intervention is required to recover from most types of system interruptions.
Regardless of the choice of operating system, be sure to apply all of the Microsoft Service Packs for best performance. There are often significant differences between the service packs and the original software releases.
Important Note about Voice Modems and Windows 2000
Windows 2000 introduced a new universal voice modem driver called UniModem 5. This technology is relatively new in the NT environment, and our tests seem to indicate that it is not yet quite as robust as the older UniModem/V that shipped with Windows 98. For example, on a system running the Answering Machine call tree, a US Robotics modem on a Windows 98 machine was easily able to answer the thousands of calls in our test, but the same modem on the same machine running Windows 2000 would get locked up after about 100 or so calls. Therefore, despite the fact that Windows 2000 is a more reliable operating system overall, Windows 98 may be better for some voice modem configurations because the modem drivers for Windows 98 may be more reliable. Unfortunately, the only way to know for sure which operating system is best for a voice modem application is to do some hard core testing. The message here is simply that Windows 98 might be a better choice for voice modem applications than Windows 2000.