Can windows 10 manage a workgroup with Windows 2000

Question

Hello,

I am a new sysadmin for a machinist fabrication company. One of the issues that have been brought to my attention is that we have some machines that are running windows 2000 and my bosses want them to be networked to eliminate the need to manually transfer drawings, and mill programs to the machines via physical media. Some of them are being done by floppy disk and some by thumb drives. the machines work fine and have network capabilities but as you can imagine I can't connect them to our network due to the difference in OS, we are running server 2012 for our environment. Upgrading the OS on the machines is not feasible because in order to do so is not cost effective we would have to pull the command modules and send them to the parent company to have them updated this was quoted at approx. $30k. a solution that I have proposed is take a unmanaged switch and make a standalone network with one or two computers on the network. I have an unmanaged switch that will work, but my question is do I have to have windows 2000 on the computers that manage/use this new network or can I use a newer version i.e. windows 10 or 11 and if I can use the newer OS are there any extra steps to set up the workgroup, or is it just like setting up as if all devices had same OS?

Answer 1

Shouldn't be a problem, just enable SMBv1 on the windows 10 box.

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