Today you can buy a Windows PC system from hundreds of manufacturers and choose from thousands of options and separate programs. However, the interactions between these components often result in havoc, with programs wiping out each other's files, and hardware devices configured with the same addresses or interrupt levels. End-users are faced with an encyclopedia of acronyms that are totally meaningless to many engineers, let alone the average homeowner trying to do their taxes.

I will describe work being done in the Windows NT operating system to bring order to this chaos, from the technical challenges of discovering and identifying hardware, to creating a simple user-interface for installing hardware and software, to managing thousands of systems with absolutely no end-user involvement at all.

Delivery of High-Quality Uncompressed Video over ATM to Windows NT Desktop
Sherali Zeadally, University of Southern California

Dreams in a Nutshell
Steven Sommer, Microsoft Research Institute, Macquarie University

Adding Response Time Measurement of CIFS File Server Performance to NetBench
Karl L. Swartz, Network Appliance

This session will highlight the strengths and weakness of CORBA and DCOM for building real distributed applications. May also include distributed Java-related issues.

Moving the Ensemble Groupware System to Windows NT and Wolfpack
K. Birman, W. Vogels, K. Guo, M. Hayden, T. Hickey, R. Friedman, S. Maffeis, R. van Renesse, and A. Vaysburd, Cornell University

UNIX Application Portability to Windows NT via an Alternative Environment Subsystem
Stephen Walli, Softway Systems, Inc.

Porting UNIX to Windows NT
David Korn, AT&T Labs Research