43 ms·

Remembering Windows 2000

272 points by dsr12 6y ago

lsllc 6y ago
"If you used a PC in the late ’90s, you were quite familiar with the frequent crashes, lockups, and reboots that were common on MS-DOS, Windows 3.x, and Windows 9x. The DOS-based PC ecosystem was a house of cards built on an ancient patchwork of code that ran on endless variations of hardware." House of cards literally and figuratively -- I have fond memories of fighting with QEMM386 and PROTOCOL.INI/NET.CFG and IRQs to get both my network card _and_ sound card working at the same time, only to then have to then get that all to work with Windows!
- dehrmann 6y ago
  I remember writing essays in Word, and if you didn't save them every minute, who knows how much work you might randomly lose.
proverbialbunny 6y ago
Microsoft's best OS of all time was Windows 2000. Imho, Snow Leopard was Apple's best. There is something nice about a bug free operating system that "just works" as intended. No problems, no hassles. No load times, even back then. Back then it was common to have a computer with 128MB+ of ram but Windows 2000 ran on 64MB of that, so it was the first non page file heavy OS that just snapped. In comparison, a year later Windows XP could use over 256MB of ram before getting to the same speed, and this was when computer magazines were recommending less than 512MB of ram, because it was overkill. Today computers are fast, but Catalina feels quite a bit slower than Windows 2000 did when it came out, and Catalina is quite a bit more buggy. Extreme system stability is nice, but I question if most people even know what that is like.
- 2bitencryption 6y ago
  ah, just thinking of Snow Leopard makes me swoon... I don't know if the rose-tinted glasses are too strong, or if that OS was really as snappy, simple, and polished as I remember.
  - schoolornot 6y ago
    10.6 was also Apple's peak server OS. Open Directory + Workgroup Manager set my standard for how OpenLDAP ought to be managed.
    - Wowfunhappy 6y ago
      Notably, it was also their last server os. OS X server lived on, but as just an app.
  - TheRealSteel 6y ago
    I'm almost certain that Snow Leopard woke up from sleep on a 2010 Macbook Pro faster than Mojave wakes up on a 2019, but I don't have proof. It was definitely more reliable.
    - wyclif 6y ago
      I learned Python on a white MacBook running Snow Leopard. Those were the days. I don't remember a single instance where it crashed. Super reliable.
    - whywhywhywhy 6y ago
      The wake from sleep behavior is really bad on modern MBPs, feels like it takes an eternity, too much black screen then the password screen just isn't responsive for a good 10 seconds sometimes. Actually the power on behavior is bad too, without the chime you can never really tell if the thing is working or not.
  - whalesalad 6y ago
    Snow Leopard was an entire release dedicated to making Leopard faster and more stable ... so at first glance it makes sense your memory of it is so positive.
- mschaef 6y ago
  > Microsoft's best OS of all time was Windows 2000. Imho, Snow Leopard was Apple's best. Windows 2000 was very good, but I'm also fond of Windows for Workgroups 3.11. It had a certain simplicity and directness that they lost in the move to Windows 95. (And WfWG could run both 32-bit drivers and 32-bit software, as long as Win32s was installed.)
  - bluedino 6y ago
    Not all Win32 software ran on Win32s, as Win32s didn't support things like memory protection and multithreading, right?
    - hyperman1 6y ago
      Correct. win32s was mostly a shim layer that let you access 32 bit registers and the win32 API. But the actual OS was still the 16 bit windows/dos hybrid
    - simcop2387 6y ago
      I believe it supported memory protection, but not preemetive multithreading and multiprocessing. It was still cooperative multiprocessing underneath. If the program was written correctly (most were initially, since Win 3.1 was more common for a few years still), it would function on both just swimmingly.
    - mschaef 6y ago
      Not at all.... The best way to think of Win32s was that it was analogous to a "DOS Extender", but for Windows. The main point of what it did was to allow the use of a different memory model under an existing operating system. In the case of Windows 3.1x, this really meant eliminating the notion of segments, by widening segment offsets from 16 to 32 bits. In 16-bit Windows, accessing linear structures >64K requires additional pointer arithmetic, which Win32 eliminated. The way it did this was to hook into the executable loader to add support for the PE binary format used by Windows NT. It also provided a set of shim libraries that took the existing 16-bit Windows API and projected it into the 32-bit address space. The underlying implementation was still 16-bit, but it could now be called from 32-bit code. This essentially meant that Win32s was the subset of Win32 that was in common with Win16 (and so was missing lots of features from Windows NT). So think about where this puts WfWG3.11: * So Win32s added a 32-bit executable loader and shim Win32 API libraries. * Down in the foundation of Windows (since Windows/386) was VMM, which provided 32-bit OS services * WfWG 3.11 introduced something called "32 Bit File Access", which was a natively 32-bit implementation of the file system running in VMM. So the original line of Windows development has already made major strides towards being a 32-bit OS, even before Windows 95. What Windows 95 does is build out that 32-bit shim layer, so there are more full fledged 32-bit implementations of more of the Win32 API, and to do that, it also expands VMM to provide the necessary 32-bit services. (For threading and the like). So far more evolutionary than the 'full 32-bit rewrite that it was once viewed to be. One easy way to see the impact of all this is in Notepad. Notepad is essentially a wrapper around the standard Windows edit control, which stayed implemented in 16-bit code through all of what I've described above. This is why Notepad was always limited to 32K (IIRC) files on these older versions of Windows, and does not have that limitation on versions of Windows that were fully implemented in 32-bit code. I also tend to think this is a good engineering solution to a tricky problem. Windows 95 was originally intended to run on very small machines... think 8MB or so in a world where you needed 32MB to run Windows NT. Even if they'd had the engineering resources to fully rebuild consumer Windows as 32-bit, there's no way they'd have come close to meeting their memory budget (or their sales targets).
- pwned1 6y ago
  I didn’t use 200 much, but I feel this way about windows Xp. It just worked. It seemed super stable and not bloated.
  - ianlevesque 6y ago
    That Fisher Price colored theme though...
    - rbinv 6y ago
      XP's classic mode looked somewhat like Windows 98/2000.
    - Sohcahtoa82 6y ago
      Not sure why so many people complain about it when it was trivial to enable a classic theme to make it look like Win2K.
      - smcl 6y ago
        I did the same but I recall there was a few elements that remained - the windows logo on the start menu was a bit colourful, and a few other bits couldn’t be changed too
        ajtjp 6y ago
        The Windows logo in the Start menu was a bit colorful in Windows 95 and NT 4.0 as well. I'll grant you that the logo itself is slightly different in XP, but it had been colorful for years by that point.
      - jcfields 6y ago
        It was also commonplace to use the UXTheme patcher to enable third-party custom window themes. I used the Watercolor theme, which was modeled after the Whistler beta builds before they (bafflingly) switched it out for Luna. I have a soft spot for Windows 2000 because I was very impressed with it when it first came out (coming from Win9x), but there wasn't much point to using it over XP after XP came out. Windows XP is just an improved version of 2000, and it was updated for much longer. Windows 2000 doesn't even support wi-fi without third-party utilities.
- T-A 6y ago
  > No load times, even back then. Somebody at Disney seems to have had a different experience: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BBctBJ3mKNg&feature=youtu.be&t=235 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BBctBJ3mKNg&feature=youtu.be...
  - jhoechtl 6y ago
    Load times were terrible. Time makes you forget the bad and glorify the good.
  - proverbialbunny 6y ago
    Wrong era.
    - hoistbypetard 6y ago
      The OS in the cartoon was called "Doors 2000". Seems pretty squarely targeted at this.
      - proverbialbunny 6y ago
        Everything in the 90s had 2000 in its name.
- ubercow13 6y ago
  No load times?! I seem to remember Win 95-XP era involved almost comically long boot times especially if you waited for your hard drive to stop churning after getting to the desktop, but maybe I am misremembering. It wasn't so much the OS's fault, though.
  - proverbialbunny 6y ago
    Yah 95-Me era ran pretty slow and horrible. Though 95 was pretty revolutionary when it came out.
    - Koshkin 6y ago
      The actual revolution came with Windows Game SDK (later known as DirectX) which allowed Windows to finally surpass MS-DOS as a gaming platform.
      - jacobush 6y ago
        Yeah... imagine if they would have shipped that in a single task version, sort of like a DOS / XBOX1 hybrid. Games would have rocked, even on frugal hardware.
        anthk 6y ago
        Well, DirectX ran games better than DOS.
  - ajtjp 6y ago
    It depends on if you're talking boot times, or program loading times. I agree, every computer I had until 2007 had terrible boot times. But I've compared how long it takes to start Word on my Pentium II 450 MHz running Windows 98, with Word 2000, to my Core i5 2500 K (3.3 GHz) running Windows 8.1, with Word 2010. The Pentium II wins. I don't how much of the difference was Windows versus Office, but it's a sad indication of the slowdown in software outpacing the speedup in hardware.
larme 6y ago
Windows 2000 is my favorite windows version. I like the color scheme and how lightweight (from today's perspective) it is. A vm of win2000 and office 2003 is a good option for old office file comparability.
Neil44 6y ago
2000 was so stable, and ran well in 128mb ram. It also introduced Active Directory with group policies, which still runs the majority of business Windows networks today (*source: I made that up)
james412 6y ago
Aside from the deep consistency of 2000's UI (after all it more or less progressively improved on the 3.x traditional widget set with in some cases little more than a recompile required to get the new theme), 2000 was the first consumer experience of a PC OS featuring real per-process virtual memory, and this is probably a big reason why everyone (including myself) remembers it so fondly.
- proverbialbunny 6y ago
  Because this would increase stability?
  - james412 6y ago
    NT had it first, but NT didn't really get much of any consumer exposure. Windows 95 was much closer to the Windows 3.1 everything-shared memory model: 16-bit apps (which were still in widespread use) continued being able to access hardware and each others' memory, and memory belonging to the most recently executed 32-bit app. NTVDM in Windows 2000 also supported 16-bit apps, but they were strictly isolated from each other, the hardware, and any 32-bit app. The upshot was a 16-bit utility that would crash or corrupt an unrelated app (or the entire machine) in 3.1 or 95 would only crash itself in 2000. The driver model was also completely redesigned, but I don't know much about that. Any time you hear the old meme about Linux being more stable than Windows, it's important to realize it dates back 20 years when Linux had per-process virtual memory and Windows did not.
desktopninja 6y ago
By far the best GUI experience. I will also attest to its rock solid stability. Next to BeOS (#1), it's on my top list of favorite OS's On both OS's ATI's TV Wonder ran like a dream!
Svperstar 6y ago
I was just starting college and Windows 2000 was all the rage. I installed it but I had a nasty issue where I kept getting a BSOD randomly in games after 5-30 minutes of gameplay. I updated my drivers for everything and spent hours looking for a solution. No dice. Went back to 98 till XP dropped.
qubex 6y ago
The memories this brings back! I turned 18 midway through 1999 and since I was deeply interested in multiprocessor OSes (chiefly, BeOS) I asked for (and was lucky enough to get) a dual PIII-450 system as an 18th birthday/high-school graduation gift. I dual booted BeOS 5.5 and Windows NT 4.0. Windows 98SE would work, but it didn’t have support for SMP, so one of the processors would be deactivated. On the other hand, it NT 4.0 didn’t support USB, and I had several USB peripherals (my very first digital camera, a Canon IXUS, and a flatbed scanner). That’s why in June 1999 I joined the Windows 2000 beta programme. It was amazing to have the full power of the dual processors, the “interesting” new GUI, and USB support all rolled into one system. I remember being quite smitten with Windows from just about then until a couple of years after the release of XP (the fabled “XP SP2” being when I jumped ship and switched to Mac OS X 10.2). Anyway, yes, Windows 2000 (or “Win 2k” as it was affectionately known in those millennial years) was a true monument, a watershed, a massive accomplishment when compared technically to its immediate predecessor Windows NT 4.0 (SP6a) and an immense effort bring the NT line to “functional parity” with the Windows 9x line. I was stunned that it was replaced so soon by Windows XP (and also, stunned that XP endured for so long thereafter, but that’s another story).
- core-questions 6y ago
  Well, despite the "fisher-price" UI, XP did build upon 2000 in many good ways - much better 9x compatibility, newer DirectX, lots of small UI improvements, and then SP3's firewall which finally made Windows somewhat safe to use, despite the continual security war and dangerous IE 6. XP stuck around because Vista simply wasn't compelling. A technical failure by MS, released too early, for no good reason; it never had the things we were promised like the database filesystem, and offered really no reason for a normal consumer to want to upgrade. So around it stuck, just like 7 did while 8 floundered. Things are different with 10, the Eternal Windows, and so who knows what will happen next in regards to this tick-tock cadence of OS progress?
  - JohnBooty 6y ago
    It was so easy to ditch the Fisher-Price UI and pick the Classic UI in WinXP. I really can't imagine holding that UI against WinXP!
ThrowawayB7 6y ago
For those who liked Windows 2000's no-nonsense interface, another forgotten masterpiece IMO was Windows Server 2003 as a desktop OS. It had all of the clean minimalism of Windows 2000, both in terms of UI and lack of cruft, with the good bits of XP installable on demand. It's my most fondly remembered Microsoft OS.
- TeMPOraL 6y ago
  Same here. I don't remember where I got it from, I think I had a license from MSDN AA when I went to university. It was hands down my favorite Windows ever. 2000 was the second most-favorite, and 7 was the third.
noir_lord 6y ago
Win 2000 was a revolution for me, back then I was a heavy delphi user and it's debugger crashing would kill Win98, like straight BOOM gone. Win 2000 just shook it off and kept going, that alone was worth the upgrade.
- bluedino 6y ago
  We had twice-daily reboots for anyone in our marketing department that worked with Photoshop or Quark. After upgrading from Windows 98 to Windows 2000, all the problems were solved and I looked like a hero.
  - noir_lord 6y ago
    David Cutler is a Man of Focus, Commitment and Sheer Fucking Will - the bodies of microsoft operating systems he buried that day are the foundations of what they are today.
superkuh 6y ago
I was given cracked/pirate install disk at a LAN party in ~2000 because I was having SMB network problems with 98. Win2k was so much better in all ways and it could play counter-strike and medal of honor just fine. I kept using it till the mid-2000s around my switch to Ubuntu 5.04.
amiga-workbench 6y ago
Windows 2000 also represents the zenith of UI design for Microsoft software. I'm still rather baffled about how people look back fondly on XP, it looked like a toy for toddlers, and installing the Zune theme was the first thing I did after a fresh install to try and tone it down. The in-your-face over decoration of UI's thankfully hasn't persisted, but instead we're seeing a similar kind of decadence among our supposedly minimal and flat interfaces. The misuse of space and screen real-estate has gotten pretty bad as of late, and I'm all for an appropriate amount of whitespace (I keep railing against certain linux DE's for not getting this right) but modern software seems to be devoid of any kind of efficiency with layout or a sensible information density.
- zozbot234 6y ago
  You could also revert to the classic widget theme, even in Windows Vista and 7. And people absolutely did that - the classic theme was a lot leaner on system resources and visually clearer in many ways.
  - gruez 6y ago
    It's sad that they got rid of it in windows 8 and later. >the classic theme was a lot leaner on system resources maybe, but it probably also made things run slower because it forces everything to be done in software rather than hardware. https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20130327-00/?p=4833 https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20130327-00/?p=48... >Starting in Windows Vista, a lot of visual effects were offloaded to the graphics card. Consequently, the impact on system performance for those visual effects is negligible, and sometimes turning off the effect actually makes your system run slower because you disabled hardware acceleration, forcing operations to be performed in software.
    - sergeykish 6y ago
      Windows 10 is full of distractions, one time I thought my display was broken - transparency on title bar. And animations just add latency. Disable transparency and windows animations (Settings > Display > Show transparency on Windows, Show animations in windows). Also disable "Fade or slide menus into view". Much better experience and not much to offload.
CapriciousCptl 6y ago
I have many not so fond memories of hitting a specific key sequence to allow loading an hdd controller driver or something like it when installing win2k. But it was miles better than 98se. And wow the contemporaneous ME was such an enormous disaster at the time— still remember one of the other computer nerds in high school espousing the benefits of what he saw as the soon to come “made for Windows ME” games.” Thankfully my dad knew better and saw through the ME hype, sparing the expense and the terribly buggy UX.
theandrewbailey 6y ago
My uncle put Windows 2000 on a new PC I got around 2001 or so. I liked the stability, but didn't like how it didn't run any DOS games. You really had to mess something up for it to crash. Fun fact: turning off the machine while booting would corrupt the installation, requiring a reformat and reinstall. It happened to me at least once. I used it until about 2005, when running 2000 instead of XP didn't make sense anymore.
User23 6y ago
Windows 2000, with New NT Technology! I always got a giggle out of that. It's the only Windows OS I've ever professionally developed for and I have to say I found it surprisingly pleasant when I could avoid the legacy APIs. Jeffrey Richter's book[1] was a great resource and helped me to appreciate the OS. [1] https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1572319968/ https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1572319968/
rbinv 6y ago
Windows 2000 was great and really reduced bluescreen frequency compared to Windows 95 and 98.
- bad_op3rator 6y ago
  It was mainly because Win2k was basically the next version of WinNT which had nothing in common with Win95/98 under the hood.
  - Avery3R 6y ago
    Yeah, windows has had 3 major flavors in its history. Win 1.x-3.x were just GUIs on top of DOS. Win9x was a true operating system with a kernel, but the kernel was still running on top of DOS. NT, what we have now, is a kernel that runs directly on the hardware. On 32-bit machines dos programs are run using a virtual machine
  - gpvos 6y ago
    2000 was also more stable than NT 3.51 and NT4. XP was a bit more stable again, but also contained more cruft.
cryptoz 6y ago
Windows 2000 is easily the best Microsoft OS I've used. I miss it dearly. I wrote VB6 apps for fun on it and was just the happiest clam. What an incredibly simple and enjoyable development experience!
JohnBooty 6y ago
I did some of my best development work on Windows 2000. From a developer's perspective it was just so simple, stable, and fast. MSSQL + IIS + ASP/PHP was a breeze for those early web apps.
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Borlands 6y ago
Recommended for admin systems class, ended up using it as personal OS for much longer. It was a beast of stability! (Although win98 rev2 was a quite good ironed out OS before win2000 and with less requirements, given you didn’t install/uninstall a lot of apps, prob windows registry messing up)
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pcdoodle 6y ago
Steve Gibson was running 2000 until about 2011. I was doing the same on a 1GHz p3 laptop.
desktopninja 6y ago
Wouldn't it be nice for MS to release A GNU/linux distro with the official Win2k UI. PS. That network monitor icon in the taskbar was quite brilliant!
- anthk 6y ago
  Icewm has something similar to that tray icon. Also, with Chicago 95 icon theme and some IceWM/GTK2-3 themes you can almost copycat the W2k theme.
RandomGuyDTB 6y ago
> Windows 2000 also served as an alternative to its successor, Windows XP, for several years. XP included some features that were controversial at the time. These included an Internet-based product activation system that complained if you changed your PC hardware, and a colorful new shell interface some derided as “Fisher-Price.” Did nobody ever change the theme back to Windows Classic? It was really simple to switch over (like, ten clicks at most) and then you could get comfortable with the 2000 interface again.
- scrooched_moose 6y ago
  I usually ran it in the silver theme: http://pcdesktops.emuunlim.com/pictures/skins/desktopx/winxpsilverv1.jpg http://pcdesktops.emuunlim.com/pictures/skins/desktopx/winxp... It was a big improvement over the default.
- mirekrusin 6y ago
  First thing I did after reinstall or if I was "fixing printer" or whatever in the family, then drop all crap from startup/registry, defrag, uninstall every toolbar/crapware that had uninstall. I always thought who is responsible for not giving to people system cleaned up like that? Mystery.
cesarb 6y ago
Windows 2000, together with Windows ME, was the last Windows version which didn't have WPA (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Product_Activation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Product_Activation), so you didn't have to worry when you upgraded your hardware (not to mention the privacy implications).
discreteevent 6y ago
Just a reminder that "Showstopper", about the development of Windows NT, is a great read.
VectorLock 6y ago
Windows 2000 will always be my favorite version of Windows. Its a good thing MacOSX came along right before Windows XP.
Animats 6y ago
I managed to avoid the whole Windows-on-DOS family. I went from DOS 6.2 to Windows NT 3.51, then Windows NT 4, then Windows 2000, then Windows 7. Only the good ones. Why run Microsoft's dud products? Now, Ubuntu 18.04 LTS. It's too bad that Microsoft no longer sells a good desktop OS. Windows 10 is a warmed-over tablet GUI forced onto a desktop. With ads. With terrible updates which break things. Do not want.
- TeMPOraL 6y ago
  > Windows 10 is a warmed-over tablet GUI forced onto a desktop. With ads. With terrible updates which break things. ... as a Service. I'm stuck with it, but God, I miss Win2k and Win2k3.
  - Animats 6y ago
    I was OK with Windows 7. So was most of corporate America. That's when they finally got the thing pretty much debugged. Between the Static Driver Verifier and the classifier for panic dumps sent to Microsoft HQ, they were finally able to get the kernel to crash very rarely. Microsoft had to apply heavy pressure to get companies and individuals to upgrade to Windows 10. It was "an offer you can't refuse", not an improved product. That's different from previous versions, where there was real forward progress. Yes, "as a Service", and with built-in spyware, er, "telemetry".
- AbraKdabra 6y ago
  Try the LTSC version, all the "good" Windows without the crap.
outworlder 6y ago
Windows 2000, like many 'server' Windows OS, took FOREVER AND EVER to boot up. It could have been more popular on desktop-class machines if it wasn't due to that.
- mirekrusin 6y ago
  Yeah, slow spinning disks that needed defrag from time to time. I think we would all be surprised if booted from current cpu, ssd and amount of ram.
- anthk 6y ago
  Windows 20000 had a workstation release.
- zlynx 6y ago
  It was ridiculously fast on RAID-0 15k SCSI drives. Disk speed has been holding back computing for 25 years.
DonCarlitos 6y ago
Unpopular opinion: Remembering with great fondness Quarterdeck's DESQview/X, the open systems, off-the-shelf windowing environment that could have won the windowing war. How life would have been different if it had...
at_a_remove 6y ago
I still have Windows 2000 (air-gapped, naturally) running on an ancient system for some pretty old hardware. I remember being on the Beta list for it when it was "NT 5."
pmlnr 6y ago
Windows 2000 ran smoothly on a pentium 1 233mhz laptop with 96MB memory and allowed me to do websites in 2001.
- adarioble 6y ago
  I share the same memory. I remember being very impressed how it run on my Dell laptops Pentium 233 MMX and 64 MB RAM. It even had the driver support for 3Com 14.4k PCMCIA modem... ah the nostalgia!
nurettin 6y ago
I remember[1] Windows 2000 somewhat differently. It was the windows that made me finally install debian potato. [2] > Overall, there are more than 65,000 "potential issues" that could emerge as problems, as discovered by Microsoft's Prefix tool. Microsoft is estimating that 28,000 of these are likely to be "real" problems. And now I'm curious about what this Prefix tool was. [1] https://slashdot.org/story/00/02/11/1840225/windows-2000-has-65000-bugs https://slashdot.org/story/00/02/11/1840225/windows-2000-has... [2] https://www.zdnet.com/article/bugfest-win2000-has-63000-defects/ https://www.zdnet.com/article/bugfest-win2000-has-63000-defe...
MisterTea 6y ago
People tend to forget this was during a period when computers were computers and actual work was done on them. Now they're over powered terminals.
- nix23 6y ago
  But you need lots of power to run a browser nowadays. Love the expression 'over powered terminals' that's sooo true!
  - zozbot234 6y ago
    > But you need lots of power to run a browser nowadays. Quite right; the vast majority of "actual work" that one would do locally on the machine, requires a lot less power than booting up a web browser and surfing to a random "modern" website. Funny how that works. We're all forgetting about the 'real' work that we routinely do on our computers, because that kind of thing has gotten so rock-solid and doesn't even measurably tax compute resources - even as browsing the web, of all things, has only become increasingly fiddly and heavy on our systems.
    - TeMPOraL 6y ago
      Problem is, the actual work we used to do locally and now do over webapps has to pay the performance price of browsing the web - resulting in severe UX degradation for anything but the most casual of uses.
      - ajtjp 6y ago
        It's partially modern web frameworks, too. I happened to load up the web version of Slack on a Core 2 Duo running at 2.2 GHz today, and it was unusable. By comparison, I remember using AIM via Meebo (remember that site?) on dial-up back in the late 2000's, on a Pentium 166 MHz laptop. It wasn't exactly snappy, but it was better than Slack was today on a 2 GHz laptop with 500 times the bandwidth and a fraction of the latency. It probably would have been even better if I'd been using a native AIM client instead of Meebo, but I'm amazed by how inefficient some modern websites are.
libria 6y ago
This is such an "ok boomer" thread, but what can we take away from it? What lesson can we take from this to repeat the success with today's tech? IMO the key was drivers: > While the press criticized some of Windows 2000’s driver support at launch, the OS actually supported far more hardware configurations than Windows NT 4.0. I ran NT 4 as a desktop and it was quite the chore with a mix of hacks and repurposing other drivers for similar hardware. This reminds me of the Linux desktop experience now. With comprehensive driver support and an intuitive UX, Linux can be dominant as a desktop alternative to Win/Mac. The litmus test is if Mom and Dad can manage it themselves, it's attained equal status to the above.
Havoc 6y ago
If only it had been better at gaming. Everything about it seemed solid but gaming always felt like a 2nd class citizen.
rubatuga 6y ago
The best macOS interface was 10.3 in my opinion, here’s some screenshots: https://guidebookgallery.org/screenshots/macosx103 https://guidebookgallery.org/screenshots/macosx103
- FreakyT 6y ago
  I loved the "brushed metal" look in 10.3, I remember trying to install various mods to force "brushed metal" onto more applications. You can't really tell from the static screenshots, but Apple put a lot of effort into making brushed metal windows look good -- it wasn't just a static texture, but instead a composition of multiple layered elements that scaled in different ways as you resized the window. I remember seeing "brushed metal" themes on Linux and Windows at the time, and none of them could come close to 10.3's level of polish.
- anthk 6y ago
  10.4 was better.
ur-whale 6y ago
Not that Win2K was that amazing (the Win32 API was then and still is today really full of inconsistencies, always favoring quantity over quality), but it certainly was the best Windows I've worked with.
nix23 6y ago
Yes i have to say i pirated W2k, WinME (preinstalled) was unbearable, i put my money away for one year to buy a nice Desktop, and Windows ME just made me sad, nothing worked, i just had no additional 300$ to buy Win2000pro...i was so mad about Microsoft, i called them to ask for a exchange from WinME to W2K..cost still 300$ thanks Microsoft.
ibiza 6y ago
> It Was Rock-Solid Stable, Unlike Windows Me. Under Windows NT, each process runs w/ its own LDT (Local Descriptor Table). Process memory bounds are enforced by the processor MMU. Windows 95, 98, Me, used a single shared LDT, for better backwards compatibility, but with far less protection. I believe I've got this right, but happy to be corrected. The sad thing about this, is just how long Windows users had to suck it up (5 years!?), until 2K finally came along, pushed as a consumer OS.
hateful 6y ago
From what I remember it went like this: Microsoft: we're giving everyone the NT Kernel Geeks: No, we want 9x Kernel Microsoft: Fine, here's Windows ME Geeks: Noooooo! Microsoft: Releases Windows 2000 Geeks: We want Windows 2000 It was so much more solid than Windows ME and they had 99% of the NT compatibility layer figured out by SP1 (if that's what it was called). But the best thing for me was that I had 2 processor motherboard with 2x 1Ghz P3s and the 9x Kernel couldn't handle that.
- rbranson 6y ago
  Windows 2000 came out before Windows ME.
- torgoguys 6y ago
  Who was clamoring for the 9x kernel? No me nor any geeks I knew... And as sibling mentioned, ME was before 2000. I remember this because at one point the actively marketed versions were Windows ME, NT and of course CE for those ARM devices. Some people, complaining Windows was slow, pointed out that if you rearrange those version identifiers you get Windows CE-ME-NT (cement).
rado 6y ago
My first job was on Windows 2000. Rock solid, fast, with perfectly consistent UI. How did we end up with the 10 different UI styles of Windows 10?
jarjoura 6y ago
Call me cynical, but Win2k was probably developed by a small and tight-knit group of engineers, PMs and designers. It felt focused and ran most software well. I think if I remember correctly, Win2k was meant to replace the Windows 98/DOS kernel but they couldn't get it to work in time. That's when WinXP came out instead. WinXP felt like the result of a much bigger org. Am I correct to speculate that in Microsoft, the NT teams and the DOS teams merged to create WinXP? If so, that would explain XP and that probably created all kind of tonal and structural shifts, a result that was a massive eyesore of an OS. Plus their attempt to come up with a cute theme-able UI like OS X's Aqua was seriously half baked.
- zozbot234 6y ago
  That's what Vista felt like too, compared to XP. And then it only got worse with Win 8+ and Win 10. Huge increases in bloat, for not much actual function.
foobar_ 6y ago
133 MHz 64 MB 2 GB Luxury. Back in the '95 days you were lucky if you had 4 MB RAM.
- anthk 6y ago
  When 2000 arrived everyone had at least 64/128MB of RAM for sure, and the k7/Pentium2 was the most common CPU.
cyberjunkie 6y ago
Windows 2000 felt like a tank. You'd boot it thinking it was meant to run servers and web sites, but you could run it on your PC, and play games on it. It was robust. You could finally boast of high uptimes like the Linux folk!
koiz 6y ago
What a great OS.
dhosek 6y ago
This was the last version of Windows I used outside of work. I remember that it didn't support a lot of things I had hoped to do with my PC. A lot of "Windows" software either didn't run at all in Win2k or was unreliable in it. Games and multimedia software were especial offenders.
peterburkimsher 6y ago
Windows 2000 is still in use in a microSD factory in Taiwan! It's being used by some pick & place machines and ovens. The machines are rented with a 30-year lease. Changing the software will void the warranty. They're not connected to the Internet. My task was to parse the binary data to log machine usage and yield, and post that to a SQL database. There's no .NET framework. I went back to Visual Studio 2005, and coded it all in C++. It was an interesting challenge! I was left with a good impression of how reliable Win2k is though, especially compared to newer OSes (even macOS > 10.9). I hope that some flavour of Linux will break into the mainstream this decade, probably taking cues from the Win2k/OS9 user experience.
- mobilio 6y ago
  I know company that have a sawmill device running on Windows98SE. Also not connected to internet and working standalone.
machinehermit 6y ago
I loved Windows 2000 but it is so long ago. KDE plasma with the windows like menu is just better in every way. I use to have a dual boot into Windows 10 but even that has been gone for a year or two.
duncans 6y ago
Try it out in your browser - emulated in WebAssembly: https://bellard.org/jslinux/vm.html?url=https://bellard.org/jslinux/win2k.cfg&mem=192&graphic=1&w=1024&h=768 https://bellard.org/jslinux/vm.html?url=https://bellard.org/...
danfritz 6y ago
The article missed the best part, you could install Windows 2000 from 4 floppy disks! I've used it a lot in my younger years, it only was manageable after SP4. God those updates took forever
- EvanAnderson 6y ago
  The floppies only bootstrapped an environment to install the rest of the OS from a larger storage media, though.
  - zozbot234 6y ago
    Even Linux did that back in the day. CD-ROM boot was far from universally supported, let alone USB mass storage. Boot floppies were the most reliable way of starting up an external OS.
yesenadam 6y ago
Gee, I was using Windows ME until 2012, then OS X 10.4 until this year. After all the comments on this page, I shall feel less ashamed/embarrassed about that in future, seems I got good operating systems. I loved them, they worked great. (And still do.)
iso-8859-1 6y ago
You can get back that old-school Windows feeling on Linux with https://github.com/grassmunk/Chicago95 https://github.com/grassmunk/Chicago95
- zozbot234 6y ago
  Chicago95 is nice, but I'd like to see a reimplementation of the old GTK2 themes, now that GTK3 seems to have gotten a stable theming interface. It could even be merged upstream, or at least be contributed to the major distro repositories.
  - anthk 6y ago
    I miss Gorilla and the one with a metallic theme. And the one from the Java Metal theme.
htk 6y ago
There’s a great book on the history of Windows NT (precursor of Windows 2000) called “Show Stopper!: The Breakneck Race to Create Windows NT and the Next Generation at Microsoft”.
carldaddy 6y ago
Would Microsoft consider putting in the classic desktop in Windows 10 if enough people wanted it?
deleted 6y ago
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stevenicr 6y ago
Would still use win2k today as far as UI and such is concerned. Still remember the day my last w2k machine booted - an ex was on myspace and just had to have the added benefits of 'zwinky' - foggy memory, but I think it was some kind of cartoon emoji thing you could use around myspace - well it apparently came with crapware installer that also loaded some malware that killed the machine on the next upgrade. what a terrible way to lose my favorite machine at the time.
- u801e 6y ago
  I had a desktop with Win2k installed on it from 2002 through 2010. My account was a regular user account and I only logged into the Administrator account if I needed to install or upgrade. I actually lost the installation due to a lightning strike that damaged the system board. The surge protector wasn't enough it seems.
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peter_d_sherman 6y ago
>"For a true blast from the past, let’s take a look at Windows 2000 Professional’s bare minimum system requirements at the time: 133 MHz or higher Pentium-compatible CPU. 64 megabytes (MB) of RAM recommended minimum; more memory generally improves responsiveness. 2 GB hard disk with a minimum of 650 MB of free space." My guess is that with any reasonable speed SSD and a swap file -- you could have a responsive system at as little as 32 megabytes (MB) of RAM -- or possibly even less...
- anthk 6y ago
  No. The BUS would still hinder it. For realistic purposes, 2k needed 96-128MB.
whywhywhywhy 6y ago
Remember how much more solid it felt than 98, Windows dragged and resized smoothly and I don't remember them really having tearing.

272 points by dsr12 6y ago

"If you used a PC in the late ’90s, you were quite familiar with the frequent crashes, lockups, and reboots that were common on MS-DOS, Windows 3.x, and Windows 9x. The DOS-based PC ecosystem was a house of cards built on an ancient patchwork of code that ran on endless variations of hardware." House of cards literally and figuratively -- I have fond memories of fighting with QEMM386 and PROTOCOL.INI/NET.CFG and IRQs to get both my network card _and_ sound card working at the same time, only to then have to then get that all to work with Windows!

dehrmann 6y ago
I remember writing essays in Word, and if you didn't save them every minute, who knows how much work you might randomly lose.

proverbialbunny 6y ago

Microsoft's best OS of all time was Windows 2000. Imho, Snow Leopard was Apple's best. There is something nice about a bug free operating system that "just works" as intended. No problems, no hassles. No load times, even back then. Back then it was common to have a computer with 128MB+ of ram but Windows 2000 ran on 64MB of that, so it was the first non page file heavy OS that just snapped. In comparison, a year later Windows XP could use over 256MB of ram before getting to the same speed, and this was when computer magazines were recommending less than 512MB of ram, because it was overkill. Today computers are fast, but Catalina feels quite a bit slower than Windows 2000 did when it came out, and Catalina is quite a bit more buggy. Extreme system stability is nice, but I question if most people even know what that is like.

2bitencryption 6y ago
ah, just thinking of Snow Leopard makes me swoon... I don't know if the rose-tinted glasses are too strong, or if that OS was really as snappy, simple, and polished as I remember.
- schoolornot 6y ago
  10.6 was also Apple's peak server OS. Open Directory + Workgroup Manager set my standard for how OpenLDAP ought to be managed.
  - Wowfunhappy 6y ago
    Notably, it was also their last server os. OS X server lived on, but as just an app.
- TheRealSteel 6y ago
  I'm almost certain that Snow Leopard woke up from sleep on a 2010 Macbook Pro faster than Mojave wakes up on a 2019, but I don't have proof. It was definitely more reliable.
  - wyclif 6y ago
    I learned Python on a white MacBook running Snow Leopard. Those were the days. I don't remember a single instance where it crashed. Super reliable.
  - whywhywhywhy 6y ago
    The wake from sleep behavior is really bad on modern MBPs, feels like it takes an eternity, too much black screen then the password screen just isn't responsive for a good 10 seconds sometimes. Actually the power on behavior is bad too, without the chime you can never really tell if the thing is working or not.
- whalesalad 6y ago
  Snow Leopard was an entire release dedicated to making Leopard faster and more stable ... so at first glance it makes sense your memory of it is so positive.
mschaef 6y ago
> Microsoft's best OS of all time was Windows 2000. Imho, Snow Leopard was Apple's best. Windows 2000 was very good, but I'm also fond of Windows for Workgroups 3.11. It had a certain simplicity and directness that they lost in the move to Windows 95. (And WfWG could run both 32-bit drivers and 32-bit software, as long as Win32s was installed.)
- bluedino 6y ago
  Not all Win32 software ran on Win32s, as Win32s didn't support things like memory protection and multithreading, right?
  - hyperman1 6y ago
    Correct. win32s was mostly a shim layer that let you access 32 bit registers and the win32 API. But the actual OS was still the 16 bit windows/dos hybrid
  - simcop2387 6y ago
    I believe it supported memory protection, but not preemetive multithreading and multiprocessing. It was still cooperative multiprocessing underneath. If the program was written correctly (most were initially, since Win 3.1 was more common for a few years still), it would function on both just swimmingly.
  - mschaef 6y ago
    Not at all.... The best way to think of Win32s was that it was analogous to a "DOS Extender", but for Windows. The main point of what it did was to allow the use of a different memory model under an existing operating system. In the case of Windows 3.1x, this really meant eliminating the notion of segments, by widening segment offsets from 16 to 32 bits. In 16-bit Windows, accessing linear structures >64K requires additional pointer arithmetic, which Win32 eliminated. The way it did this was to hook into the executable loader to add support for the PE binary format used by Windows NT. It also provided a set of shim libraries that took the existing 16-bit Windows API and projected it into the 32-bit address space. The underlying implementation was still 16-bit, but it could now be called from 32-bit code. This essentially meant that Win32s was the subset of Win32 that was in common with Win16 (and so was missing lots of features from Windows NT). So think about where this puts WfWG3.11: * So Win32s added a 32-bit executable loader and shim Win32 API libraries. * Down in the foundation of Windows (since Windows/386) was VMM, which provided 32-bit OS services * WfWG 3.11 introduced something called "32 Bit File Access", which was a natively 32-bit implementation of the file system running in VMM. So the original line of Windows development has already made major strides towards being a 32-bit OS, even before Windows 95. What Windows 95 does is build out that 32-bit shim layer, so there are more full fledged 32-bit implementations of more of the Win32 API, and to do that, it also expands VMM to provide the necessary 32-bit services. (For threading and the like). So far more evolutionary than the 'full 32-bit rewrite that it was once viewed to be. One easy way to see the impact of all this is in Notepad. Notepad is essentially a wrapper around the standard Windows edit control, which stayed implemented in 16-bit code through all of what I've described above. This is why Notepad was always limited to 32K (IIRC) files on these older versions of Windows, and does not have that limitation on versions of Windows that were fully implemented in 32-bit code. I also tend to think this is a good engineering solution to a tricky problem. Windows 95 was originally intended to run on very small machines... think 8MB or so in a world where you needed 32MB to run Windows NT. Even if they'd had the engineering resources to fully rebuild consumer Windows as 32-bit, there's no way they'd have come close to meeting their memory budget (or their sales targets).
pwned1 6y ago
I didn’t use 200 much, but I feel this way about windows Xp. It just worked. It seemed super stable and not bloated.
- ianlevesque 6y ago
  That Fisher Price colored theme though...
  - rbinv 6y ago
    XP's classic mode looked somewhat like Windows 98/2000.
  - Sohcahtoa82 6y ago
    Not sure why so many people complain about it when it was trivial to enable a classic theme to make it look like Win2K.
    - smcl 6y ago
      I did the same but I recall there was a few elements that remained - the windows logo on the start menu was a bit colourful, and a few other bits couldn’t be changed too
      - ajtjp 6y ago
        The Windows logo in the Start menu was a bit colorful in Windows 95 and NT 4.0 as well. I'll grant you that the logo itself is slightly different in XP, but it had been colorful for years by that point.
    - jcfields 6y ago
      It was also commonplace to use the UXTheme patcher to enable third-party custom window themes. I used the Watercolor theme, which was modeled after the Whistler beta builds before they (bafflingly) switched it out for Luna. I have a soft spot for Windows 2000 because I was very impressed with it when it first came out (coming from Win9x), but there wasn't much point to using it over XP after XP came out. Windows XP is just an improved version of 2000, and it was updated for much longer. Windows 2000 doesn't even support wi-fi without third-party utilities.
T-A 6y ago
> No load times, even back then. Somebody at Disney seems to have had a different experience: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BBctBJ3mKNg&feature=youtu.be&t=235 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BBctBJ3mKNg&feature=youtu.be...
- jhoechtl 6y ago
  Load times were terrible. Time makes you forget the bad and glorify the good.
- proverbialbunny 6y ago
  Wrong era.
  - hoistbypetard 6y ago
    The OS in the cartoon was called "Doors 2000". Seems pretty squarely targeted at this.
    - proverbialbunny 6y ago
      Everything in the 90s had 2000 in its name.
ubercow13 6y ago
No load times?! I seem to remember Win 95-XP era involved almost comically long boot times especially if you waited for your hard drive to stop churning after getting to the desktop, but maybe I am misremembering. It wasn't so much the OS's fault, though.
- proverbialbunny 6y ago
  Yah 95-Me era ran pretty slow and horrible. Though 95 was pretty revolutionary when it came out.
  - Koshkin 6y ago
    The actual revolution came with Windows Game SDK (later known as DirectX) which allowed Windows to finally surpass MS-DOS as a gaming platform.
    - jacobush 6y ago
      Yeah... imagine if they would have shipped that in a single task version, sort of like a DOS / XBOX1 hybrid. Games would have rocked, even on frugal hardware.
      - anthk 6y ago
        Well, DirectX ran games better than DOS.
- ajtjp 6y ago
  It depends on if you're talking boot times, or program loading times. I agree, every computer I had until 2007 had terrible boot times. But I've compared how long it takes to start Word on my Pentium II 450 MHz running Windows 98, with Word 2000, to my Core i5 2500 K (3.3 GHz) running Windows 8.1, with Word 2010. The Pentium II wins. I don't how much of the difference was Windows versus Office, but it's a sad indication of the slowdown in software outpacing the speedup in hardware.

larme 6y ago

Windows 2000 is my favorite windows version. I like the color scheme and how lightweight (from today's perspective) it is. A vm of win2000 and office 2003 is a good option for old office file comparability.

Neil44 6y ago

2000 was so stable, and ran well in 128mb ram. It also introduced Active Directory with group policies, which still runs the majority of business Windows networks today (*source: I made that up)

james412 6y ago

Aside from the deep consistency of 2000's UI (after all it more or less progressively improved on the 3.x traditional widget set with in some cases little more than a recompile required to get the new theme), 2000 was the first consumer experience of a PC OS featuring real per-process virtual memory, and this is probably a big reason why everyone (including myself) remembers it so fondly.

proverbialbunny 6y ago
Because this would increase stability?
- james412 6y ago
  NT had it first, but NT didn't really get much of any consumer exposure. Windows 95 was much closer to the Windows 3.1 everything-shared memory model: 16-bit apps (which were still in widespread use) continued being able to access hardware and each others' memory, and memory belonging to the most recently executed 32-bit app. NTVDM in Windows 2000 also supported 16-bit apps, but they were strictly isolated from each other, the hardware, and any 32-bit app. The upshot was a 16-bit utility that would crash or corrupt an unrelated app (or the entire machine) in 3.1 or 95 would only crash itself in 2000. The driver model was also completely redesigned, but I don't know much about that. Any time you hear the old meme about Linux being more stable than Windows, it's important to realize it dates back 20 years when Linux had per-process virtual memory and Windows did not.

desktopninja 6y ago

By far the best GUI experience. I will also attest to its rock solid stability. Next to BeOS (#1), it's on my top list of favorite OS's On both OS's ATI's TV Wonder ran like a dream!

Svperstar 6y ago

I was just starting college and Windows 2000 was all the rage. I installed it but I had a nasty issue where I kept getting a BSOD randomly in games after 5-30 minutes of gameplay. I updated my drivers for everything and spent hours looking for a solution. No dice. Went back to 98 till XP dropped.

qubex 6y ago

The memories this brings back! I turned 18 midway through 1999 and since I was deeply interested in multiprocessor OSes (chiefly, BeOS) I asked for (and was lucky enough to get) a dual PIII-450 system as an 18th birthday/high-school graduation gift. I dual booted BeOS 5.5 and Windows NT 4.0. Windows 98SE would work, but it didn’t have support for SMP, so one of the processors would be deactivated. On the other hand, it NT 4.0 didn’t support USB, and I had several USB peripherals (my very first digital camera, a Canon IXUS, and a flatbed scanner). That’s why in June 1999 I joined the Windows 2000 beta programme. It was amazing to have the full power of the dual processors, the “interesting” new GUI, and USB support all rolled into one system. I remember being quite smitten with Windows from just about then until a couple of years after the release of XP (the fabled “XP SP2” being when I jumped ship and switched to Mac OS X 10.2). Anyway, yes, Windows 2000 (or “Win 2k” as it was affectionately known in those millennial years) was a true monument, a watershed, a massive accomplishment when compared technically to its immediate predecessor Windows NT 4.0 (SP6a) and an immense effort bring the NT line to “functional parity” with the Windows 9x line. I was stunned that it was replaced so soon by Windows XP (and also, stunned that XP endured for so long thereafter, but that’s another story).

core-questions 6y ago
Well, despite the "fisher-price" UI, XP did build upon 2000 in many good ways - much better 9x compatibility, newer DirectX, lots of small UI improvements, and then SP3's firewall which finally made Windows somewhat safe to use, despite the continual security war and dangerous IE 6. XP stuck around because Vista simply wasn't compelling. A technical failure by MS, released too early, for no good reason; it never had the things we were promised like the database filesystem, and offered really no reason for a normal consumer to want to upgrade. So around it stuck, just like 7 did while 8 floundered. Things are different with 10, the Eternal Windows, and so who knows what will happen next in regards to this tick-tock cadence of OS progress?
- JohnBooty 6y ago
  It was so easy to ditch the Fisher-Price UI and pick the Classic UI in WinXP. I really can't imagine holding that UI against WinXP!

ThrowawayB7 6y ago

For those who liked Windows 2000's no-nonsense interface, another forgotten masterpiece IMO was Windows Server 2003 as a desktop OS. It had all of the clean minimalism of Windows 2000, both in terms of UI and lack of cruft, with the good bits of XP installable on demand. It's my most fondly remembered Microsoft OS.

TeMPOraL 6y ago
Same here. I don't remember where I got it from, I think I had a license from MSDN AA when I went to university. It was hands down my favorite Windows ever. 2000 was the second most-favorite, and 7 was the third.

noir_lord 6y ago

Win 2000 was a revolution for me, back then I was a heavy delphi user and it's debugger crashing would kill Win98, like straight BOOM gone. Win 2000 just shook it off and kept going, that alone was worth the upgrade.

bluedino 6y ago
We had twice-daily reboots for anyone in our marketing department that worked with Photoshop or Quark. After upgrading from Windows 98 to Windows 2000, all the problems were solved and I looked like a hero.
- noir_lord 6y ago
  David Cutler is a Man of Focus, Commitment and Sheer Fucking Will - the bodies of microsoft operating systems he buried that day are the foundations of what they are today.

superkuh 6y ago

I was given cracked/pirate install disk at a LAN party in ~2000 because I was having SMB network problems with 98. Win2k was so much better in all ways and it could play counter-strike and medal of honor just fine. I kept using it till the mid-2000s around my switch to Ubuntu 5.04.

amiga-workbench 6y ago

Windows 2000 also represents the zenith of UI design for Microsoft software. I'm still rather baffled about how people look back fondly on XP, it looked like a toy for toddlers, and installing the Zune theme was the first thing I did after a fresh install to try and tone it down. The in-your-face over decoration of UI's thankfully hasn't persisted, but instead we're seeing a similar kind of decadence among our supposedly minimal and flat interfaces. The misuse of space and screen real-estate has gotten pretty bad as of late, and I'm all for an appropriate amount of whitespace (I keep railing against certain linux DE's for not getting this right) but modern software seems to be devoid of any kind of efficiency with layout or a sensible information density.

zozbot234 6y ago
You could also revert to the classic widget theme, even in Windows Vista and 7. And people absolutely did that - the classic theme was a lot leaner on system resources and visually clearer in many ways.
- gruez 6y ago
  It's sad that they got rid of it in windows 8 and later. >the classic theme was a lot leaner on system resources maybe, but it probably also made things run slower because it forces everything to be done in software rather than hardware. https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20130327-00/?p=4833 https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20130327-00/?p=48... >Starting in Windows Vista, a lot of visual effects were offloaded to the graphics card. Consequently, the impact on system performance for those visual effects is negligible, and sometimes turning off the effect actually makes your system run slower because you disabled hardware acceleration, forcing operations to be performed in software.
  - sergeykish 6y ago
    Windows 10 is full of distractions, one time I thought my display was broken - transparency on title bar. And animations just add latency. Disable transparency and windows animations (Settings > Display > Show transparency on Windows, Show animations in windows). Also disable "Fade or slide menus into view". Much better experience and not much to offload.

CapriciousCptl 6y ago

I have many not so fond memories of hitting a specific key sequence to allow loading an hdd controller driver or something like it when installing win2k. But it was miles better than 98se. And wow the contemporaneous ME was such an enormous disaster at the time— still remember one of the other computer nerds in high school espousing the benefits of what he saw as the soon to come “made for Windows ME” games.” Thankfully my dad knew better and saw through the ME hype, sparing the expense and the terribly buggy UX.

theandrewbailey 6y ago

My uncle put Windows 2000 on a new PC I got around 2001 or so. I liked the stability, but didn't like how it didn't run any DOS games. You really had to mess something up for it to crash. Fun fact: turning off the machine while booting would corrupt the installation, requiring a reformat and reinstall. It happened to me at least once. I used it until about 2005, when running 2000 instead of XP didn't make sense anymore.

User23 6y ago

Windows 2000, with New NT Technology! I always got a giggle out of that. It's the only Windows OS I've ever professionally developed for and I have to say I found it surprisingly pleasant when I could avoid the legacy APIs. Jeffrey Richter's book[1] was a great resource and helped me to appreciate the OS. [1] https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1572319968/ https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1572319968/

rbinv 6y ago

Windows 2000 was great and really reduced bluescreen frequency compared to Windows 95 and 98.

bad_op3rator 6y ago
It was mainly because Win2k was basically the next version of WinNT which had nothing in common with Win95/98 under the hood.
- Avery3R 6y ago
  Yeah, windows has had 3 major flavors in its history. Win 1.x-3.x were just GUIs on top of DOS. Win9x was a true operating system with a kernel, but the kernel was still running on top of DOS. NT, what we have now, is a kernel that runs directly on the hardware. On 32-bit machines dos programs are run using a virtual machine
- gpvos 6y ago
  2000 was also more stable than NT 3.51 and NT4. XP was a bit more stable again, but also contained more cruft.

cryptoz 6y ago

Windows 2000 is easily the best Microsoft OS I've used. I miss it dearly. I wrote VB6 apps for fun on it and was just the happiest clam. What an incredibly simple and enjoyable development experience!

JohnBooty 6y ago

I did some of my best development work on Windows 2000. From a developer's perspective it was just so simple, stable, and fast. MSSQL + IIS + ASP/PHP was a breeze for those early web apps.

deleted 6y ago

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Borlands 6y ago

Recommended for admin systems class, ended up using it as personal OS for much longer. It was a beast of stability! (Although win98 rev2 was a quite good ironed out OS before win2000 and with less requirements, given you didn’t install/uninstall a lot of apps, prob windows registry messing up)

deleted 6y ago

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pcdoodle 6y ago

Steve Gibson was running 2000 until about 2011. I was doing the same on a 1GHz p3 laptop.

desktopninja 6y ago

Wouldn't it be nice for MS to release A GNU/linux distro with the official Win2k UI. PS. That network monitor icon in the taskbar was quite brilliant!

anthk 6y ago
Icewm has something similar to that tray icon. Also, with Chicago 95 icon theme and some IceWM/GTK2-3 themes you can almost copycat the W2k theme.

RandomGuyDTB 6y ago

> Windows 2000 also served as an alternative to its successor, Windows XP, for several years. XP included some features that were controversial at the time. These included an Internet-based product activation system that complained if you changed your PC hardware, and a colorful new shell interface some derided as “Fisher-Price.” Did nobody ever change the theme back to Windows Classic? It was really simple to switch over (like, ten clicks at most) and then you could get comfortable with the 2000 interface again.

scrooched_moose 6y ago
I usually ran it in the silver theme: http://pcdesktops.emuunlim.com/pictures/skins/desktopx/winxpsilverv1.jpg http://pcdesktops.emuunlim.com/pictures/skins/desktopx/winxp... It was a big improvement over the default.
mirekrusin 6y ago
First thing I did after reinstall or if I was "fixing printer" or whatever in the family, then drop all crap from startup/registry, defrag, uninstall every toolbar/crapware that had uninstall. I always thought who is responsible for not giving to people system cleaned up like that? Mystery.

cesarb 6y ago

Windows 2000, together with Windows ME, was the last Windows version which didn't have WPA (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Product_Activation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Product_Activation), so you didn't have to worry when you upgraded your hardware (not to mention the privacy implications).

discreteevent 6y ago

Just a reminder that "Showstopper", about the development of Windows NT, is a great read.

VectorLock 6y ago

Windows 2000 will always be my favorite version of Windows. Its a good thing MacOSX came along right before Windows XP.

Animats 6y ago

I managed to avoid the whole Windows-on-DOS family. I went from DOS 6.2 to Windows NT 3.51, then Windows NT 4, then Windows 2000, then Windows 7. Only the good ones. Why run Microsoft's dud products? Now, Ubuntu 18.04 LTS. It's too bad that Microsoft no longer sells a good desktop OS. Windows 10 is a warmed-over tablet GUI forced onto a desktop. With ads. With terrible updates which break things. Do not want.

TeMPOraL 6y ago
> Windows 10 is a warmed-over tablet GUI forced onto a desktop. With ads. With terrible updates which break things. ... as a Service. I'm stuck with it, but God, I miss Win2k and Win2k3.
- Animats 6y ago
  I was OK with Windows 7. So was most of corporate America. That's when they finally got the thing pretty much debugged. Between the Static Driver Verifier and the classifier for panic dumps sent to Microsoft HQ, they were finally able to get the kernel to crash very rarely. Microsoft had to apply heavy pressure to get companies and individuals to upgrade to Windows 10. It was "an offer you can't refuse", not an improved product. That's different from previous versions, where there was real forward progress. Yes, "as a Service", and with built-in spyware, er, "telemetry".
AbraKdabra 6y ago
Try the LTSC version, all the "good" Windows without the crap.

outworlder 6y ago

Windows 2000, like many 'server' Windows OS, took FOREVER AND EVER to boot up. It could have been more popular on desktop-class machines if it wasn't due to that.

mirekrusin 6y ago
Yeah, slow spinning disks that needed defrag from time to time. I think we would all be surprised if booted from current cpu, ssd and amount of ram.
anthk 6y ago
Windows 20000 had a workstation release.
zlynx 6y ago
It was ridiculously fast on RAID-0 15k SCSI drives. Disk speed has been holding back computing for 25 years.

DonCarlitos 6y ago

Unpopular opinion: Remembering with great fondness Quarterdeck's DESQview/X, the open systems, off-the-shelf windowing environment that could have won the windowing war. How life would have been different if it had...

at_a_remove 6y ago

I still have Windows 2000 (air-gapped, naturally) running on an ancient system for some pretty old hardware. I remember being on the Beta list for it when it was "NT 5."

pmlnr 6y ago

Windows 2000 ran smoothly on a pentium 1 233mhz laptop with 96MB memory and allowed me to do websites in 2001.

adarioble 6y ago
I share the same memory. I remember being very impressed how it run on my Dell laptops Pentium 233 MMX and 64 MB RAM. It even had the driver support for 3Com 14.4k PCMCIA modem... ah the nostalgia!

nurettin 6y ago

I remember[1] Windows 2000 somewhat differently. It was the windows that made me finally install debian potato. [2] > Overall, there are more than 65,000 "potential issues" that could emerge as problems, as discovered by Microsoft's Prefix tool. Microsoft is estimating that 28,000 of these are likely to be "real" problems. And now I'm curious about what this Prefix tool was. [1] https://slashdot.org/story/00/02/11/1840225/windows-2000-has-65000-bugs https://slashdot.org/story/00/02/11/1840225/windows-2000-has... [2] https://www.zdnet.com/article/bugfest-win2000-has-63000-defects/ https://www.zdnet.com/article/bugfest-win2000-has-63000-defe...

MisterTea 6y ago

People tend to forget this was during a period when computers were computers and actual work was done on them. Now they're over powered terminals.

nix23 6y ago
But you need lots of power to run a browser nowadays. Love the expression 'over powered terminals' that's sooo true!
- zozbot234 6y ago
  > But you need lots of power to run a browser nowadays. Quite right; the vast majority of "actual work" that one would do locally on the machine, requires a lot less power than booting up a web browser and surfing to a random "modern" website. Funny how that works. We're all forgetting about the 'real' work that we routinely do on our computers, because that kind of thing has gotten so rock-solid and doesn't even measurably tax compute resources - even as browsing the web, of all things, has only become increasingly fiddly and heavy on our systems.
  - TeMPOraL 6y ago
    Problem is, the actual work we used to do locally and now do over webapps has to pay the performance price of browsing the web - resulting in severe UX degradation for anything but the most casual of uses.
    - ajtjp 6y ago
      It's partially modern web frameworks, too. I happened to load up the web version of Slack on a Core 2 Duo running at 2.2 GHz today, and it was unusable. By comparison, I remember using AIM via Meebo (remember that site?) on dial-up back in the late 2000's, on a Pentium 166 MHz laptop. It wasn't exactly snappy, but it was better than Slack was today on a 2 GHz laptop with 500 times the bandwidth and a fraction of the latency. It probably would have been even better if I'd been using a native AIM client instead of Meebo, but I'm amazed by how inefficient some modern websites are.

libria 6y ago

This is such an "ok boomer" thread, but what can we take away from it? What lesson can we take from this to repeat the success with today's tech? IMO the key was drivers: > While the press criticized some of Windows 2000’s driver support at launch, the OS actually supported far more hardware configurations than Windows NT 4.0. I ran NT 4 as a desktop and it was quite the chore with a mix of hacks and repurposing other drivers for similar hardware. This reminds me of the Linux desktop experience now. With comprehensive driver support and an intuitive UX, Linux can be dominant as a desktop alternative to Win/Mac. The litmus test is if Mom and Dad can manage it themselves, it's attained equal status to the above.

Havoc 6y ago

If only it had been better at gaming. Everything about it seemed solid but gaming always felt like a 2nd class citizen.

rubatuga 6y ago

The best macOS interface was 10.3 in my opinion, here’s some screenshots: https://guidebookgallery.org/screenshots/macosx103 https://guidebookgallery.org/screenshots/macosx103

FreakyT 6y ago
I loved the "brushed metal" look in 10.3, I remember trying to install various mods to force "brushed metal" onto more applications. You can't really tell from the static screenshots, but Apple put a lot of effort into making brushed metal windows look good -- it wasn't just a static texture, but instead a composition of multiple layered elements that scaled in different ways as you resized the window. I remember seeing "brushed metal" themes on Linux and Windows at the time, and none of them could come close to 10.3's level of polish.
anthk 6y ago
10.4 was better.

ur-whale 6y ago

Not that Win2K was that amazing (the Win32 API was then and still is today really full of inconsistencies, always favoring quantity over quality), but it certainly was the best Windows I've worked with.

nix23 6y ago

Yes i have to say i pirated W2k, WinME (preinstalled) was unbearable, i put my money away for one year to buy a nice Desktop, and Windows ME just made me sad, nothing worked, i just had no additional 300$ to buy Win2000pro...i was so mad about Microsoft, i called them to ask for a exchange from WinME to W2K..cost still 300$ thanks Microsoft.

ibiza 6y ago

> It Was Rock-Solid Stable, Unlike Windows Me. Under Windows NT, each process runs w/ its own LDT (Local Descriptor Table). Process memory bounds are enforced by the processor MMU. Windows 95, 98, Me, used a single shared LDT, for better backwards compatibility, but with far less protection. I believe I've got this right, but happy to be corrected. The sad thing about this, is just how long Windows users had to suck it up (5 years!?), until 2K finally came along, pushed as a consumer OS.

hateful 6y ago

From what I remember it went like this: Microsoft: we're giving everyone the NT Kernel Geeks: No, we want 9x Kernel Microsoft: Fine, here's Windows ME Geeks: Noooooo! Microsoft: Releases Windows 2000 Geeks: We want Windows 2000 It was so much more solid than Windows ME and they had 99% of the NT compatibility layer figured out by SP1 (if that's what it was called). But the best thing for me was that I had 2 processor motherboard with 2x 1Ghz P3s and the 9x Kernel couldn't handle that.

rbranson 6y ago
Windows 2000 came out before Windows ME.
torgoguys 6y ago
Who was clamoring for the 9x kernel? No me nor any geeks I knew... And as sibling mentioned, ME was before 2000. I remember this because at one point the actively marketed versions were Windows ME, NT and of course CE for those ARM devices. Some people, complaining Windows was slow, pointed out that if you rearrange those version identifiers you get Windows CE-ME-NT (cement).

rado 6y ago

My first job was on Windows 2000. Rock solid, fast, with perfectly consistent UI. How did we end up with the 10 different UI styles of Windows 10?

jarjoura 6y ago

Call me cynical, but Win2k was probably developed by a small and tight-knit group of engineers, PMs and designers. It felt focused and ran most software well. I think if I remember correctly, Win2k was meant to replace the Windows 98/DOS kernel but they couldn't get it to work in time. That's when WinXP came out instead. WinXP felt like the result of a much bigger org. Am I correct to speculate that in Microsoft, the NT teams and the DOS teams merged to create WinXP? If so, that would explain XP and that probably created all kind of tonal and structural shifts, a result that was a massive eyesore of an OS. Plus their attempt to come up with a cute theme-able UI like OS X's Aqua was seriously half baked.

zozbot234 6y ago
That's what Vista felt like too, compared to XP. And then it only got worse with Win 8+ and Win 10. Huge increases in bloat, for not much actual function.

foobar_ 6y ago

133 MHz 64 MB 2 GB Luxury. Back in the '95 days you were lucky if you had 4 MB RAM.

anthk 6y ago
When 2000 arrived everyone had at least 64/128MB of RAM for sure, and the k7/Pentium2 was the most common CPU.

cyberjunkie 6y ago

Windows 2000 felt like a tank. You'd boot it thinking it was meant to run servers and web sites, but you could run it on your PC, and play games on it. It was robust. You could finally boast of high uptimes like the Linux folk!

koiz 6y ago

What a great OS.

dhosek 6y ago

This was the last version of Windows I used outside of work. I remember that it didn't support a lot of things I had hoped to do with my PC. A lot of "Windows" software either didn't run at all in Win2k or was unreliable in it. Games and multimedia software were especial offenders.

peterburkimsher 6y ago

Windows 2000 is still in use in a microSD factory in Taiwan! It's being used by some pick & place machines and ovens. The machines are rented with a 30-year lease. Changing the software will void the warranty. They're not connected to the Internet. My task was to parse the binary data to log machine usage and yield, and post that to a SQL database. There's no .NET framework. I went back to Visual Studio 2005, and coded it all in C++. It was an interesting challenge! I was left with a good impression of how reliable Win2k is though, especially compared to newer OSes (even macOS > 10.9). I hope that some flavour of Linux will break into the mainstream this decade, probably taking cues from the Win2k/OS9 user experience.

mobilio 6y ago
I know company that have a sawmill device running on Windows98SE. Also not connected to internet and working standalone.

machinehermit 6y ago

I loved Windows 2000 but it is so long ago. KDE plasma with the windows like menu is just better in every way. I use to have a dual boot into Windows 10 but even that has been gone for a year or two.

duncans 6y ago

Try it out in your browser - emulated in WebAssembly: https://bellard.org/jslinux/vm.html?url=https://bellard.org/jslinux/win2k.cfg&mem=192&graphic=1&w=1024&h=768 https://bellard.org/jslinux/vm.html?url=https://bellard.org/...

danfritz 6y ago

The article missed the best part, you could install Windows 2000 from 4 floppy disks! I've used it a lot in my younger years, it only was manageable after SP4. God those updates took forever

EvanAnderson 6y ago
The floppies only bootstrapped an environment to install the rest of the OS from a larger storage media, though.
- zozbot234 6y ago
  Even Linux did that back in the day. CD-ROM boot was far from universally supported, let alone USB mass storage. Boot floppies were the most reliable way of starting up an external OS.

yesenadam 6y ago

Gee, I was using Windows ME until 2012, then OS X 10.4 until this year. After all the comments on this page, I shall feel less ashamed/embarrassed about that in future, seems I got good operating systems. I loved them, they worked great. (And still do.)

iso-8859-1 6y ago

You can get back that old-school Windows feeling on Linux with https://github.com/grassmunk/Chicago95 https://github.com/grassmunk/Chicago95

zozbot234 6y ago
Chicago95 is nice, but I'd like to see a reimplementation of the old GTK2 themes, now that GTK3 seems to have gotten a stable theming interface. It could even be merged upstream, or at least be contributed to the major distro repositories.
- anthk 6y ago
  I miss Gorilla and the one with a metallic theme. And the one from the Java Metal theme.

htk 6y ago

There’s a great book on the history of Windows NT (precursor of Windows 2000) called “Show Stopper!: The Breakneck Race to Create Windows NT and the Next Generation at Microsoft”.

carldaddy 6y ago

Would Microsoft consider putting in the classic desktop in Windows 10 if enough people wanted it?

deleted 6y ago

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stevenicr 6y ago

Would still use win2k today as far as UI and such is concerned. Still remember the day my last w2k machine booted - an ex was on myspace and just had to have the added benefits of 'zwinky' - foggy memory, but I think it was some kind of cartoon emoji thing you could use around myspace - well it apparently came with crapware installer that also loaded some malware that killed the machine on the next upgrade. what a terrible way to lose my favorite machine at the time.

u801e 6y ago
I had a desktop with Win2k installed on it from 2002 through 2010. My account was a regular user account and I only logged into the Administrator account if I needed to install or upgrade. I actually lost the installation due to a lightning strike that damaged the system board. The surge protector wasn't enough it seems.

deleted 6y ago

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peter_d_sherman 6y ago

>"For a true blast from the past, let’s take a look at Windows 2000 Professional’s bare minimum system requirements at the time: 133 MHz or higher Pentium-compatible CPU. 64 megabytes (MB) of RAM recommended minimum; more memory generally improves responsiveness. 2 GB hard disk with a minimum of 650 MB of free space." My guess is that with any reasonable speed SSD and a swap file -- you could have a responsive system at as little as 32 megabytes (MB) of RAM -- or possibly even less...

anthk 6y ago
No. The BUS would still hinder it. For realistic purposes, 2k needed 96-128MB.

whywhywhywhy 6y ago

Remember how much more solid it felt than 98, Windows dragged and resized smoothly and I don't remember them really having tearing.