17 ms·

Windows 2000 Modernization Guide

198 points by gjvc 5y ago

fredoralive 5y ago
Kinda interesting, but I can’t help think that starting with Windows XP and using TweakUI etc. to turn off most of the annoying things XP added would be a slightly more useable NT 5.x experience, as it got support longer.
- AshamedCaptain 5y ago
  And XP was significantly faster to boot than W2K, to begin with. I don't think W2K is a very good choice.
- accrual 5y ago
  I was a big user of nLite in the XP days. It allows you to slipstream Service Packs and remove/disable lots of unwanted functionality directly in the XP ISO. There's a checkbox for almost everything. You'd boot directly into your perfectly customized desktop with everything working. https://www.nliteos.com/ https://www.nliteos.com/
  - comprev 5y ago
    nLite takes me back to the days of having a carputer in my TT, complete with a touchscreen, rugged industrial PC chassis and a special PSU hooked up to the ignition. Good times!
pcdoodle 5y ago
The guide seems to focus on getting office 07/10 running. Honestly, if I'm going to run an OS that old, I'd download the support packages for office 2000 that can open/save docx/xlsx. Would love to see a browser with ssl.
- timbit42 5y ago
  Try Legacy Proxy: https://metalbabble.wordpress.com/2020/12/06/better-web-browsing-with-legacy-proxy/ https://metalbabble.wordpress.com/2020/12/06/better-web-brow...
schnevets 5y ago
Beyond the step-by-step guide, the writer's main page has some compelling words about Windows products being less engaging since XP and the planned obsolescence that was built into Windows 8 and 10. I do feel like one could also protest bloat and planned obsolescence with a Linux desktop (as long as they aren't running Ubuntu).
- edoceo 5y ago
  Huh? Is Ubuntu the un-bloated one?
  - alekun 5y ago
    cof cof…snap to install calculator
    - rbanffy 5y ago
      Indeed. To use a snap to install something that is pretty much integral to the Gnome desktop and has no dependency on anything other than Gnome, this is ridiculous. Snaps are useful for packaging dependencies that aren't (AND CAN'T in a timely fashion) be provided by the distro.
  - reificator 5y ago
    I think what they’re trying to say is something like “If you want to act in protest against bloat and planned obsolescence you can use a Linux desktop other than Ubuntu”
- tryauuum 5y ago
  my xubuntu isn't bloated in any way. But I am afraid that they will make snapd mandatory in the 22.04 and I will have to migrate to something else...
whalesalad 5y ago
I don't think Microsoft realizes that if they re-introduced a lightweight Win2k style OS for professionals they could charge any price they wanted for it. I would gladly pay for Windows if it wasn't a hot pile of incomplete and disjointed consumer-focused noise. I have an i7 3770k box that I repurpose occassionally for random projects. It runs Linux really well, but Win10 is an absolute dog. I can't even imagine Windows 11? Overclocked, 16gb RAM, SSD's in RAID... it doesn't make sense.
- whalesalad 5y ago
  I would love to see the "internal wiki" at MS that explains how to do this yourself. I have to imagine that there are employees internally who feel this way too and run their own "lightened" OS.
  - zeusk 5y ago
    There are multiple stripped out SKUs internally but none of them are "win2000" style. More like no shell (OneCoreUAP) or no compositor/desktop (OneCore).
  - hyperionplays 5y ago
    Isnt that what windows embedded is? stripped out lightweight windows?
    - whalesalad 5y ago
      It's hard to say. MS changes the strategy all the time and there are so many SKUs it is hard to follow, at least for an outsider such as myself. I know there is a long-term release version that tends to recieve fewer updates and is considered more of an LTS/Stable release - but I think that there are also artificial limitations on this too as far as what it is capable of and how you can get a hold of it.
      - vladvasiliu 5y ago
        I haven't noticed any particular limitations, but my understanding is that it's not very straightforward to get by "official" means. At work, another team is in charge of point of sale and other similar devices running Windows IOT or whatever it's called now, and apparently licensing is completely different from the "regular" desktop and server installs.
tramtrist 5y ago
Been following and using BWC's (Blackwingcat) Kernelex for years. Those same instructions will get you very recent versions of Chrome as well for daily browsing use. BWC hasn't posted an update in quite a while. I hope he's doing well!
vxNsr 5y ago
I’m assuming this can only be run offline? The number of security vulnerabilities published and not are probably too numerous to risk getting this on the www
- mysterydip 5y ago
  I would think running it behind a hardware firewall/router/NAT and using a modern browser (someone further up mentioned recent versions of chrome) should take care of most vulnerabilities unless opening something malicious (document/app).
  - shawnz 5y ago
    There are many unpatched vulnerabilities that could be exploited just by downloading a file, for example CVE-2004-0209 or CVE-2005-2122
    - hulitu 5y ago
      So is windows 10. Every second month ransomware makes headlines and nobody seems to care.
      - mananaysiempre 5y ago
        The practical difference is that keeping on top of the Win10 vulns would take considerable effort, whereas exploiting (a stock install of) Win2K is “download Metasploit and run this one line to get a remote SYSTEM shell”. The argument is not that 10 is better or even more secure—surely all the added code has to count for something, although the (glaring absence of) security engineering in 2K gives me a sense of vague horror—it’s that running the latest 10 probably makes you substantially faster than the slowest camper, even if it doesn’t make you faster than the proverbial bear.
      - jodrellblank 5y ago
        Things nobody cares about don't make news headlines.
password4321 5y ago
ReactOS might be a good substitute by now, though they shoot for Windows Server 2003+. https://hn.algolia.com/?query=reactos%20comments%3E2&sort=byDate https://hn.algolia.com/?query=reactos%20comments%3E2&sort=by...
Chernobog 5y ago
Even though I’m not going to use Windows 2000 again, this was an interesting read. On a related note: I have an old scanner that I use about once every year. Drivers max out on XP support, so I installed Windows Fundamentals for Legacy PCs in a VM, which is a stripped down Windows XP. Perhaps someone in the W2k crowd would be happy with WinFLP as an alternative.
steviedotboston 5y ago
whats the most modern browser that works in win2k?
- timbit42 5y ago
  Newest Firefox is v12. Not sure about other browsers. It's not very useful on today's web but using Legacy Proxy makes it more useful: https://metalbabble.wordpress.com/2020/12/06/better-web-browsing-with-legacy-proxy/ https://metalbabble.wordpress.com/2020/12/06/better-web-brow...
kitsunesoba 5y ago
As much as I loved Windows 2000, the ability to use XP msstyle themes is a significant enough value add for me that for a retro build, I think I’d use XP instead unless the machine in question is old enough that it would’ve originally shipped with 98/98SE. Some of those themes looked great and it’s a bit of a bummer that there’s no way to use them on modern systems.
- accrual 5y ago
  > it’s a bit of a bummer that there’s no way to use them on modern systems I agree. It's odd knowing the original classic theme still exists in some form in Windows 10 and 11 for compatibility reasons, but there's no way to access it. You can install themes and lookalikes, but it's just not the same.
  - Avery3R 5y ago
    You can by modifying the security attributes on DWM's theming handle so that it's inaccessible(you could also just force close the handle but that's not reversible). https://winclassic.boards.net/thread/413/reversibly-enable-disable-classic-powershell https://winclassic.boards.net/thread/413/reversibly-enable-d...
kop316 5y ago
Silly question, I thought there were security vulnerabilities in Windows 2000 that MS said WONTFIX. A quick search showed this: https://www.computerworld.com/article/2527154/microsoft--patching-windows-2000--infeasible-.html https://www.computerworld.com/article/2527154/microsoft--pat... But there may be others as well.
- userbinator 5y ago
  There's probably plenty of local privilege escalations, but those are not really anything worry about for a single-user machine. That one you pointed to is an RCE, so definitely more severe. I wonder how easy it is to exploit those. I suspect the community is eventually going to fix them somehow (especially since the 2k source was leaked a long time ago) if it's enough of a concern.
wilhil 5y ago
Up until a few years ago I had to support a .Net 2 app for a global company. I had a few Windows 2000 VMs and they were a joy to use. Started in seconds - I could have LOADS of snapshots that would only take up a handful of MBs and generally speaking, it was excellent. Only reason I stopped was because I no longer needed to run that project. I'm not stuck in the past - I get why things get slower and are more complex... but, sometimes I do wish we could go backwards a little!
- dragontamer 5y ago
  Pre-Vista Windows is simply insufficient from a security perspective compared to modern post-Vista Windows. All XP-and-older versions of Windows allowed any program to access the hardware directly. Back then, a Win2000 program would need to access the "in" and "out" hardware instructions to talk with gamepads because... well... gamepads were read to directly through hardware instructions. Don't look at me like that! USB wasn't really that common yet, and there were all sorts of weird specific hardware differences in controllers still. It was a different world. Gamepads were glorified potentiometers (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Potentiometer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Potentiometer) and game-ports were just ADC converters controlled by Windows. And assembly language knowledge was much more common too! ---------- Letting modern software touch the hardware directly like that is a security nightmare. Vista+ forced everyone to write signed device drivers and hide that direct-hardware access behind a layer of APIs (the Windows Driver API). Today, if your video games touch hardware directly, you at least know about it... and the practice is discouraged (though still widely used for DRM and other such "features"). ------------- In any case, "stripped down" Windows 10 IoT core builds and runs on the Raspberry Pi.
  - rep_lodsb 5y ago
    Are you sure? I don't think any NT kernel allowed userspace code to directly access I/O ports. The earliest versions didn't even let graphics drivers do that, but that was changed (in either 3.51 or 4.0?) for performance reasons. For compatibility with DOS and 16-bit Windows versions, the kernel may emulate I/O access, similar to modern virtual machines. For simple devices, that layer of emulation may be very thin (with some accesses going directly to the hardware), but that isn't a security problem. A simple polled ADC can't do any harm to the system, at worst you get garbage if multiple programs were to use it at the same time.
smm11 5y ago
And a few days after Windows 2000 was released, I was obsessed with installing FreeBSD and then only the ports I needed, to keep things as slim as possible.
emptyparadise 5y ago
What I dream of is an unholy union: a modern Linux with a Windows 2000 VM as its GUI. The VM will have enough Wayland bits to provide any missing modern amenities such as a web browser isolated in a container far far away. It would be beautiful.
- accrual 5y ago
  It's clearly not the same, being neither Linux nor a Windows GUI, but I immediately thought of SerenityOS which was inspired by a similar ideal. :) https://serenityos.org/ https://serenityos.org/
- coldpie 5y ago
  XFCE gets you pretty much all the way there.
- dreamercz 5y ago
  Someone already mentioned it here, but you should checkout Chicago95, a Windows 95 based theme for GTK2 and GTK3.
_nickwhite 5y ago
Instead of "Making Windows 2000 Usable in 2021" I'd like to see something more along the lines of "Making Windows 11 Usable in 2021". Past attempts at doing this (oftentimes) produced shady utilities (or illegal ISOs) that would hack out "essential" Windows components. If done right, open-source, developed out in the open, I could see this being a hugely successful endeavor. Imagine being able to use a modern Windows system (officially) that had no bloatware or the things we hate about modern Windows. (yes, I know I'm almost describing Linux and MacOS here) To pull this off, I see a utility (kind of like Chocolatey) with modules that can be run to disable certain annoyances- and changes that can always be fully reverted if necessary. Create some global modules such as "gaming-only" that removes all the bloat needed except for gaming.
- LocalH 5y ago
  Do you really think MS would allow that to exist unhindered? Look at what they did recently when people started combating the forced Edge launches.
- hackerhandle 5y ago
  You might check out a tool called O&O Shut Up 10.
  - p1peridine 5y ago
    Or Blackbird v6 https://www.getblackbird.net/ https://www.getblackbird.net/
    - novok 5y ago
      It looks like blackbird hasn't been updated since nov 2020, while O&O shut up was updated just last month. One thing I wish O&O had was a feature / taskbar version that watches if any setting has been changed once an hour / restart, alerts you, and asks you if you want to restore that setting, along with auto update.
      - p1peridine 5y ago
GeekyBear 5y ago
I don't use Windows as my host OS, but I still keep a Windows 2000 VM around for running Win32 software. It's so much more lightweight than recent versions of Windows that if the software works in Windows 2000, I much prefer to run it there. I honestly can't think of any features of Office since Office 2k that I require for my personal use either. I just don't allow the Windows 2000 virtual machine access to the network.
jeffbee 5y ago
Honestly, I just run it as-is in VMWare, with contemporaneous applications, like my copy of EAGLE 5 that works perfectly. If it ever gets hosed I have a checkpoint VM image with all the patches and applications install, I can just warp immediately back to Windows 2000 nirvana.
Wowfunhappy 5y ago
One of these days, I need to create a guide like this for OS X 10.9 Mavericks. I have a bunch of tools at https://jonathanalland.com/old-osx-projects.html https://jonathanalland.com/old-osx-projects.html, but it could badly use some overarching instructions.
- The_SamminAter 5y ago
  Just wondering, why 10.9/Mavericks over 10.12/Sierra? As a side note, I’ve been using macOS Sierra as my main OS for a few years now (until quite recently when I switched to Manjaro), and find it works quite well, aside from not being able to run a large chunk of newer software.
KindOne 5y ago
Win2k has 16-bit colour in the tray icons. You can enable 32-bit colour if you hex the explorer.exe. I've used this program before: https://web.archive.org/web/20120824125326/http://www.r1ch.net/stuff/win2000traypatch/ https://web.archive.org/web/20120824125326/http://www.r1ch.n... Note: It will timeout when it tries to download the database. If you want to manually patch it yourself, open explorer.exe in a hex editor and edit this: --- Original: 57 6A 2C 6A 40 C7 44 24 18 01 00 Modified: 57 6A 2C 6A 40 C7 44 24 18 19 00 --- Original explorer.exe MD5: 59cf2b7dced9111f48f51b4b570e672d Modified explorer.exe MD5: 9ac937ca2217cf5a9b71cd6e9014f0e7 --- Windows will overwrite your changes since it has file protections. You can fix that via: http://smallvoid.com/article/winnt-wfp.html http://smallvoid.com/article/winnt-wfp.html If you are curious as to what this changes, you can look at this file in the leaked Win2k source code: private/shell/explorer/traynot.c line 991
jiggawatts 5y ago
What a lot of people don’t realise is that consumer editions of Windows are nearly free and ad-supported. The special LTSC edition of Windows has much more sane defaults, less telemetry, and no ads in the start menu. It’s designed for kiosks, virtual desktops, and for embedded controllers with consistency requirements. You might miss out on the latest DirectX features and various integrations, but it’ll feel more like Windows 2000.
- layer8 5y ago
  Note that the current Windows 10 LTSC has only 5 years support (instead of previously 10) and that it will be the last one based on Windows 10: https://winaero.com/microsoft-has-announced-windows-10-ltsc-version-21h2-and-windows-11-ltsc/amp/ https://winaero.com/microsoft-has-announced-windows-10-ltsc-...
  - jiggawatts 5y ago
    Windows 11 will have an LTSC version, but it’s not available yet…

198 points by gjvc 5y ago

Kinda interesting, but I can’t help think that starting with Windows XP and using TweakUI etc. to turn off most of the annoying things XP added would be a slightly more useable NT 5.x experience, as it got support longer.

AshamedCaptain 5y ago
And XP was significantly faster to boot than W2K, to begin with. I don't think W2K is a very good choice.
accrual 5y ago
I was a big user of nLite in the XP days. It allows you to slipstream Service Packs and remove/disable lots of unwanted functionality directly in the XP ISO. There's a checkbox for almost everything. You'd boot directly into your perfectly customized desktop with everything working. https://www.nliteos.com/ https://www.nliteos.com/
- comprev 5y ago
  nLite takes me back to the days of having a carputer in my TT, complete with a touchscreen, rugged industrial PC chassis and a special PSU hooked up to the ignition. Good times!

pcdoodle 5y ago

The guide seems to focus on getting office 07/10 running. Honestly, if I'm going to run an OS that old, I'd download the support packages for office 2000 that can open/save docx/xlsx. Would love to see a browser with ssl.

timbit42 5y ago
Try Legacy Proxy: https://metalbabble.wordpress.com/2020/12/06/better-web-browsing-with-legacy-proxy/ https://metalbabble.wordpress.com/2020/12/06/better-web-brow...

schnevets 5y ago

Beyond the step-by-step guide, the writer's main page has some compelling words about Windows products being less engaging since XP and the planned obsolescence that was built into Windows 8 and 10. I do feel like one could also protest bloat and planned obsolescence with a Linux desktop (as long as they aren't running Ubuntu).

edoceo 5y ago
Huh? Is Ubuntu the un-bloated one?
- alekun 5y ago
  cof cof…snap to install calculator
  - rbanffy 5y ago
    Indeed. To use a snap to install something that is pretty much integral to the Gnome desktop and has no dependency on anything other than Gnome, this is ridiculous. Snaps are useful for packaging dependencies that aren't (AND CAN'T in a timely fashion) be provided by the distro.
- reificator 5y ago
  I think what they’re trying to say is something like “If you want to act in protest against bloat and planned obsolescence you can use a Linux desktop other than Ubuntu”
tryauuum 5y ago
my xubuntu isn't bloated in any way. But I am afraid that they will make snapd mandatory in the 22.04 and I will have to migrate to something else...

whalesalad 5y ago

I don't think Microsoft realizes that if they re-introduced a lightweight Win2k style OS for professionals they could charge any price they wanted for it. I would gladly pay for Windows if it wasn't a hot pile of incomplete and disjointed consumer-focused noise. I have an i7 3770k box that I repurpose occassionally for random projects. It runs Linux really well, but Win10 is an absolute dog. I can't even imagine Windows 11? Overclocked, 16gb RAM, SSD's in RAID... it doesn't make sense.

whalesalad 5y ago
I would love to see the "internal wiki" at MS that explains how to do this yourself. I have to imagine that there are employees internally who feel this way too and run their own "lightened" OS.
- zeusk 5y ago
  There are multiple stripped out SKUs internally but none of them are "win2000" style. More like no shell (OneCoreUAP) or no compositor/desktop (OneCore).
- hyperionplays 5y ago
  Isnt that what windows embedded is? stripped out lightweight windows?
  - whalesalad 5y ago
    It's hard to say. MS changes the strategy all the time and there are so many SKUs it is hard to follow, at least for an outsider such as myself. I know there is a long-term release version that tends to recieve fewer updates and is considered more of an LTS/Stable release - but I think that there are also artificial limitations on this too as far as what it is capable of and how you can get a hold of it.
    - vladvasiliu 5y ago
      I haven't noticed any particular limitations, but my understanding is that it's not very straightforward to get by "official" means. At work, another team is in charge of point of sale and other similar devices running Windows IOT or whatever it's called now, and apparently licensing is completely different from the "regular" desktop and server installs.

tramtrist 5y ago

Been following and using BWC's (Blackwingcat) Kernelex for years. Those same instructions will get you very recent versions of Chrome as well for daily browsing use. BWC hasn't posted an update in quite a while. I hope he's doing well!

vxNsr 5y ago

I’m assuming this can only be run offline? The number of security vulnerabilities published and not are probably too numerous to risk getting this on the www

mysterydip 5y ago
I would think running it behind a hardware firewall/router/NAT and using a modern browser (someone further up mentioned recent versions of chrome) should take care of most vulnerabilities unless opening something malicious (document/app).
- shawnz 5y ago
  There are many unpatched vulnerabilities that could be exploited just by downloading a file, for example CVE-2004-0209 or CVE-2005-2122
  - hulitu 5y ago
    So is windows 10. Every second month ransomware makes headlines and nobody seems to care.
    - mananaysiempre 5y ago
      The practical difference is that keeping on top of the Win10 vulns would take considerable effort, whereas exploiting (a stock install of) Win2K is “download Metasploit and run this one line to get a remote SYSTEM shell”. The argument is not that 10 is better or even more secure—surely all the added code has to count for something, although the (glaring absence of) security engineering in 2K gives me a sense of vague horror—it’s that running the latest 10 probably makes you substantially faster than the slowest camper, even if it doesn’t make you faster than the proverbial bear.
    - jodrellblank 5y ago
      Things nobody cares about don't make news headlines.

password4321 5y ago

ReactOS might be a good substitute by now, though they shoot for Windows Server 2003+. https://hn.algolia.com/?query=reactos%20comments%3E2&sort=byDate https://hn.algolia.com/?query=reactos%20comments%3E2&sort=by...

Chernobog 5y ago

Even though I’m not going to use Windows 2000 again, this was an interesting read. On a related note: I have an old scanner that I use about once every year. Drivers max out on XP support, so I installed Windows Fundamentals for Legacy PCs in a VM, which is a stripped down Windows XP. Perhaps someone in the W2k crowd would be happy with WinFLP as an alternative.

steviedotboston 5y ago

whats the most modern browser that works in win2k?

timbit42 5y ago
Newest Firefox is v12. Not sure about other browsers. It's not very useful on today's web but using Legacy Proxy makes it more useful: https://metalbabble.wordpress.com/2020/12/06/better-web-browsing-with-legacy-proxy/ https://metalbabble.wordpress.com/2020/12/06/better-web-brow...

kitsunesoba 5y ago

As much as I loved Windows 2000, the ability to use XP msstyle themes is a significant enough value add for me that for a retro build, I think I’d use XP instead unless the machine in question is old enough that it would’ve originally shipped with 98/98SE. Some of those themes looked great and it’s a bit of a bummer that there’s no way to use them on modern systems.

accrual 5y ago
> it’s a bit of a bummer that there’s no way to use them on modern systems I agree. It's odd knowing the original classic theme still exists in some form in Windows 10 and 11 for compatibility reasons, but there's no way to access it. You can install themes and lookalikes, but it's just not the same.
- Avery3R 5y ago
  You can by modifying the security attributes on DWM's theming handle so that it's inaccessible(you could also just force close the handle but that's not reversible). https://winclassic.boards.net/thread/413/reversibly-enable-disable-classic-powershell https://winclassic.boards.net/thread/413/reversibly-enable-d...

kop316 5y ago

Silly question, I thought there were security vulnerabilities in Windows 2000 that MS said WONTFIX. A quick search showed this: https://www.computerworld.com/article/2527154/microsoft--patching-windows-2000--infeasible-.html https://www.computerworld.com/article/2527154/microsoft--pat... But there may be others as well.

userbinator 5y ago
There's probably plenty of local privilege escalations, but those are not really anything worry about for a single-user machine. That one you pointed to is an RCE, so definitely more severe. I wonder how easy it is to exploit those. I suspect the community is eventually going to fix them somehow (especially since the 2k source was leaked a long time ago) if it's enough of a concern.

wilhil 5y ago

Up until a few years ago I had to support a .Net 2 app for a global company. I had a few Windows 2000 VMs and they were a joy to use. Started in seconds - I could have LOADS of snapshots that would only take up a handful of MBs and generally speaking, it was excellent. Only reason I stopped was because I no longer needed to run that project. I'm not stuck in the past - I get why things get slower and are more complex... but, sometimes I do wish we could go backwards a little!

dragontamer 5y ago
Pre-Vista Windows is simply insufficient from a security perspective compared to modern post-Vista Windows. All XP-and-older versions of Windows allowed any program to access the hardware directly. Back then, a Win2000 program would need to access the "in" and "out" hardware instructions to talk with gamepads because... well... gamepads were read to directly through hardware instructions. Don't look at me like that! USB wasn't really that common yet, and there were all sorts of weird specific hardware differences in controllers still. It was a different world. Gamepads were glorified potentiometers (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Potentiometer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Potentiometer) and game-ports were just ADC converters controlled by Windows. And assembly language knowledge was much more common too! ---------- Letting modern software touch the hardware directly like that is a security nightmare. Vista+ forced everyone to write signed device drivers and hide that direct-hardware access behind a layer of APIs (the Windows Driver API). Today, if your video games touch hardware directly, you at least know about it... and the practice is discouraged (though still widely used for DRM and other such "features"). ------------- In any case, "stripped down" Windows 10 IoT core builds and runs on the Raspberry Pi.
- rep_lodsb 5y ago
  Are you sure? I don't think any NT kernel allowed userspace code to directly access I/O ports. The earliest versions didn't even let graphics drivers do that, but that was changed (in either 3.51 or 4.0?) for performance reasons. For compatibility with DOS and 16-bit Windows versions, the kernel may emulate I/O access, similar to modern virtual machines. For simple devices, that layer of emulation may be very thin (with some accesses going directly to the hardware), but that isn't a security problem. A simple polled ADC can't do any harm to the system, at worst you get garbage if multiple programs were to use it at the same time.

smm11 5y ago

And a few days after Windows 2000 was released, I was obsessed with installing FreeBSD and then only the ports I needed, to keep things as slim as possible.

emptyparadise 5y ago

What I dream of is an unholy union: a modern Linux with a Windows 2000 VM as its GUI. The VM will have enough Wayland bits to provide any missing modern amenities such as a web browser isolated in a container far far away. It would be beautiful.

accrual 5y ago
It's clearly not the same, being neither Linux nor a Windows GUI, but I immediately thought of SerenityOS which was inspired by a similar ideal. :) https://serenityos.org/ https://serenityos.org/
coldpie 5y ago
XFCE gets you pretty much all the way there.
dreamercz 5y ago
Someone already mentioned it here, but you should checkout Chicago95, a Windows 95 based theme for GTK2 and GTK3.

_nickwhite 5y ago

Instead of "Making Windows 2000 Usable in 2021" I'd like to see something more along the lines of "Making Windows 11 Usable in 2021". Past attempts at doing this (oftentimes) produced shady utilities (or illegal ISOs) that would hack out "essential" Windows components. If done right, open-source, developed out in the open, I could see this being a hugely successful endeavor. Imagine being able to use a modern Windows system (officially) that had no bloatware or the things we hate about modern Windows. (yes, I know I'm almost describing Linux and MacOS here) To pull this off, I see a utility (kind of like Chocolatey) with modules that can be run to disable certain annoyances- and changes that can always be fully reverted if necessary. Create some global modules such as "gaming-only" that removes all the bloat needed except for gaming.

LocalH 5y ago
Do you really think MS would allow that to exist unhindered? Look at what they did recently when people started combating the forced Edge launches.
hackerhandle 5y ago
You might check out a tool called O&O Shut Up 10.
- p1peridine 5y ago
  Or Blackbird v6 https://www.getblackbird.net/ https://www.getblackbird.net/
  - novok 5y ago
    It looks like blackbird hasn't been updated since nov 2020, while O&O shut up was updated just last month. One thing I wish O&O had was a feature / taskbar version that watches if any setting has been changed once an hour / restart, alerts you, and asks you if you want to restore that setting, along with auto update.
    - p1peridine 5y ago

GeekyBear 5y ago

I don't use Windows as my host OS, but I still keep a Windows 2000 VM around for running Win32 software. It's so much more lightweight than recent versions of Windows that if the software works in Windows 2000, I much prefer to run it there. I honestly can't think of any features of Office since Office 2k that I require for my personal use either. I just don't allow the Windows 2000 virtual machine access to the network.

jeffbee 5y ago

Honestly, I just run it as-is in VMWare, with contemporaneous applications, like my copy of EAGLE 5 that works perfectly. If it ever gets hosed I have a checkpoint VM image with all the patches and applications install, I can just warp immediately back to Windows 2000 nirvana.

Wowfunhappy 5y ago

One of these days, I need to create a guide like this for OS X 10.9 Mavericks. I have a bunch of tools at https://jonathanalland.com/old-osx-projects.html https://jonathanalland.com/old-osx-projects.html, but it could badly use some overarching instructions.

The_SamminAter 5y ago
Just wondering, why 10.9/Mavericks over 10.12/Sierra? As a side note, I’ve been using macOS Sierra as my main OS for a few years now (until quite recently when I switched to Manjaro), and find it works quite well, aside from not being able to run a large chunk of newer software.

KindOne 5y ago

Win2k has 16-bit colour in the tray icons. You can enable 32-bit colour if you hex the explorer.exe. I've used this program before: https://web.archive.org/web/20120824125326/http://www.r1ch.net/stuff/win2000traypatch/ https://web.archive.org/web/20120824125326/http://www.r1ch.n... Note: It will timeout when it tries to download the database. If you want to manually patch it yourself, open explorer.exe in a hex editor and edit this: --- Original: 57 6A 2C 6A 40 C7 44 24 18 01 00 Modified: 57 6A 2C 6A 40 C7 44 24 18 19 00 --- Original explorer.exe MD5: 59cf2b7dced9111f48f51b4b570e672d Modified explorer.exe MD5: 9ac937ca2217cf5a9b71cd6e9014f0e7 --- Windows will overwrite your changes since it has file protections. You can fix that via: http://smallvoid.com/article/winnt-wfp.html http://smallvoid.com/article/winnt-wfp.html If you are curious as to what this changes, you can look at this file in the leaked Win2k source code: private/shell/explorer/traynot.c line 991

jiggawatts 5y ago

What a lot of people don’t realise is that consumer editions of Windows are nearly free and ad-supported. The special LTSC edition of Windows has much more sane defaults, less telemetry, and no ads in the start menu. It’s designed for kiosks, virtual desktops, and for embedded controllers with consistency requirements. You might miss out on the latest DirectX features and various integrations, but it’ll feel more like Windows 2000.

layer8 5y ago
Note that the current Windows 10 LTSC has only 5 years support (instead of previously 10) and that it will be the last one based on Windows 10: https://winaero.com/microsoft-has-announced-windows-10-ltsc-version-21h2-and-windows-11-ltsc/amp/ https://winaero.com/microsoft-has-announced-windows-10-ltsc-...
- jiggawatts 5y ago
  Windows 11 will have an LTSC version, but it’s not available yet…