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> The entire system requirements of a windows 2k PC were 64M of ram, It was 128MB (and XP doubled that. Which was on of the reasons I abandoned Windows XP for

> The entire system requirements of a windows 2k PC were 64M of ram, It was 128MB (and XP doubled that. Which was on of the reasons I abandoned Windows XP for Linux) > and yes it could display a background picture on a HD+ level display and pretty much do everything that is possible on a modern PC that your average user is doing. Very very very few people had HD displays back then. I had a 19” display that could do 1024×768 and I was the envy of a few of my friends. Higher resolutions came a little later. Also remember that icons were 8bit and 64x64 pixels. Desktops didn’t support widgets (unless you turned on ActiveDesktop but that ran like crap on even powerful machines of that era) and so on and so forth. And that’s just the desktop. Everything was less secure back then. Telnet and rcp were still the norm. SSLv3 was still common. Keys were a lower bit length. There wasn’t as much bounds checks or any of the other stuff that have made our platforms more secure. Sure there’s a lot of waste too. Like writing applications in browser sandboxes rather than native code. But a lot of the reason systems back then were leaner was because they needed to be rather than because modern systems are wasteful. It’s like the whole Y2K problem: why store a the year as two digits? Because memory was constrained and now it isn’t. Source: was a software developer for Windows 2000, now I write software for Linux.

dTal 4y ago
>Very very very few people had HD displays back then. I had a 19” display that could do 1024×768 That's HD! Slightly better in fact: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/720p https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/720p And, for what it's worth, as I recall 1600x1200 CRT monitors were high end but not unusual at all in the mid-2000s, and Win2000 and XP drove plenty of them in their time.
- hnlmorg 4y ago
  It’s not HD by any of the conventional definitions of HD and only just meets the bare minimum of HD in real terms. Also mid-2000s is 5 years after when I was talking about. Which is a really long time in computing terms. By then most people were running XP too. But as others have pointed out, there were graphics cards and monitors that could do much higher resolutions also available at that time.
StillBored 4y ago
https://web.archive.org/web/20000815225947/http://www.microsoft.com/windows2000/guide/professional/sysreq/default.asp https://web.archive.org/web/20000815225947/http://www.micros... It ran like crap in 64M, 256M was about right IIRC, although I had some servers with multiple GB (you really wanted to keep it under 512M for a desktop though because that kept PAE off and the kernel would then keep everything mapped, which sped it up a lot IIRC). In the USA you were seeing people with 1024x768? I suspect a lot of your friends weren't installing graphics card drivers. I can't tell you how many PC's I saw stuck at 1024x768x16 (or maybe it was x256) whatever the max VESA res that windows ME/etc supported. I would go to peoples houses, install their video card drivers and set their monitors at 1280x1024, or frequently higher for people with bigger monitors and then tell them to upgrade to win2k. And then they would be shocked at how much smoother their PC would run. I also would adjust the menushow delay and a couple other things. I got a reputation for making peoples computers way faster, but also sometimes setting the resolution to high... laugh
- hnlmorg 4y ago
  Maybe I was running 1280x1024 then. Feels like a whole other life time ago so might be getting some of the numbers mixed up on my own set up. But there definitely were lots of people still running 1024x786 on 15” screens. Albeit they either did so for eye comfort reasons or because they were still on old 9x systems. This was England, not USA. Not even London, so possibly a couple of years behind the curve.
antod 4y ago
> The entire system requirements of a windows 2k PC were 64M of ram, It was 128MB (and XP doubled that. Which was on of the reasons I abandoned Windows XP for Linux) I tried 2000 on a 486 with 64MB. It installed and ran fine without crashing, except for the unholy slowness. I suspect the CPU and ancient HD were bigger culprits than the 64MB though. Very very very few people had HD displays back then. I had a 19” display that could do 1024×768 and I was the envy of a few of my friends. Higher resolutions came a little later. 1024x768 was doable on 15" and some higher refresh 14" monitors in the mid 90s, but kinda hard on the eyes. by 1997 though I had a coworker running 1600x1200 on a 19" or 21" with NT4 - that took some squinting. I suspect he liked people not being able to see what he was up to unless they got real close. 1280x1024 was pretty good on a 17" or 19" back then - 1024x768 felt a bit lores on a 19".
- hnlmorg 4y ago
  > I tried 2000 on a 486 with 64MB. It installed and ran fine without crashing, except for the unholy slowness. I suspect the CPU and ancient HD were bigger culprits than the 64MB though. It would install because the minimum requirements were 32MB. But the published recommended requirements were 128MB. > 1280x1024 was pretty good on a 17" or 19" back then - 1024x768 felt a bit lores on a 19". Yeah, in hindsight I think i was running 1280x1024

dTal 4y ago

>Very very very few people had HD displays back then. I had a 19” display that could do 1024×768 That's HD! Slightly better in fact: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/720p https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/720p And, for what it's worth, as I recall 1600x1200 CRT monitors were high end but not unusual at all in the mid-2000s, and Win2000 and XP drove plenty of them in their time.

hnlmorg 4y ago
It’s not HD by any of the conventional definitions of HD and only just meets the bare minimum of HD in real terms. Also mid-2000s is 5 years after when I was talking about. Which is a really long time in computing terms. By then most people were running XP too. But as others have pointed out, there were graphics cards and monitors that could do much higher resolutions also available at that time.

StillBored 4y ago

https://web.archive.org/web/20000815225947/http://www.microsoft.com/windows2000/guide/professional/sysreq/default.asp https://web.archive.org/web/20000815225947/http://www.micros... It ran like crap in 64M, 256M was about right IIRC, although I had some servers with multiple GB (you really wanted to keep it under 512M for a desktop though because that kept PAE off and the kernel would then keep everything mapped, which sped it up a lot IIRC). In the USA you were seeing people with 1024x768? I suspect a lot of your friends weren't installing graphics card drivers. I can't tell you how many PC's I saw stuck at 1024x768x16 (or maybe it was x256) whatever the max VESA res that windows ME/etc supported. I would go to peoples houses, install their video card drivers and set their monitors at 1280x1024, or frequently higher for people with bigger monitors and then tell them to upgrade to win2k. And then they would be shocked at how much smoother their PC would run. I also would adjust the menushow delay and a couple other things. I got a reputation for making peoples computers way faster, but also sometimes setting the resolution to high... laugh

hnlmorg 4y ago
Maybe I was running 1280x1024 then. Feels like a whole other life time ago so might be getting some of the numbers mixed up on my own set up. But there definitely were lots of people still running 1024x786 on 15” screens. Albeit they either did so for eye comfort reasons or because they were still on old 9x systems. This was England, not USA. Not even London, so possibly a couple of years behind the curve.

antod 4y ago

> The entire system requirements of a windows 2k PC were 64M of ram, It was 128MB (and XP doubled that. Which was on of the reasons I abandoned Windows XP for Linux) I tried 2000 on a 486 with 64MB. It installed and ran fine without crashing, except for the unholy slowness. I suspect the CPU and ancient HD were bigger culprits than the 64MB though. Very very very few people had HD displays back then. I had a 19” display that could do 1024×768 and I was the envy of a few of my friends. Higher resolutions came a little later. 1024x768 was doable on 15" and some higher refresh 14" monitors in the mid 90s, but kinda hard on the eyes. by 1997 though I had a coworker running 1600x1200 on a 19" or 21" with NT4 - that took some squinting. I suspect he liked people not being able to see what he was up to unless they got real close. 1280x1024 was pretty good on a 17" or 19" back then - 1024x768 felt a bit lores on a 19".

hnlmorg 4y ago
> I tried 2000 on a 486 with 64MB. It installed and ran fine without crashing, except for the unholy slowness. I suspect the CPU and ancient HD were bigger culprits than the 64MB though. It would install because the minimum requirements were 32MB. But the published recommended requirements were 128MB. > 1280x1024 was pretty good on a 17" or 19" back then - 1024x768 felt a bit lores on a 19". Yeah, in hindsight I think i was running 1280x1024