6 ms·

I remember preferring Windows 2000 but can’t remember exactly why. Very similar to 98 but felt more refined somehow.

mvkel 3y ago
For me it was the top window gradient. I think in win98 it was 256 colors and in windows 2000 it was 16-bit
estebank 3y ago
NT kernel with it's related stability, true-color interface, no XP "fisher price" UI. 2000 was probably the pinnacle of that era's design language. Ironically, XP made it more feasible to use 2000 day to day as drivers for XP worked on the earlier 2000.
- derefr 3y ago
  Re: XP UI — did you ever try Windows Server 2003?
  - EvanAnderson 3y ago
    Server 2003 was my daily driver on a laptop for a few years. Most XP software ran fine but it had none of the XP visual cruft. Until Windows 7 it was peak Windows for me.
    - deepspace 3y ago
      I ran that rare beast, Windows XP64. It was basically Server2003 x64 with the XP UI. Driver compatibility was terrible, as you might expect, but it could support a vast amount of memory (relative to XP). I used the base O/S only to run VMware Workstation, and then ran small instances of XP, each dedicated to a task like audio, video, etc, on top of that. Along with FreeBSD and various flavors of Linux. That was my daily driver until late 2010. Solid as a rock.
      - EvanAnderson 3y ago
        XP64 was an odd animal. I had a Customer who usd it to run Unigraphics CAD. The Dell Precision machines they had with factory-loaded XP64 were fine. Trying to get their random other machines to run it w/ working audio, video, and chipset drivers was a pain. I never ran it as a desktop OS myself. I installed plenty of the server version it was based on (W2K3 x64) but those boxes always had standard VGA drivers, no audio, and sometimes a RAID controller driver, but that was usually it.
      - bonton89 3y ago
        I adopted XP64 kind of late IIRC (after Vista introduction) so the driver situation seemed fine to me. I had a cheap USB 56K modem I had to replace but otherwise all my hardware worked.
      - sillywalk 3y ago
        Was that XP for x86-64 or XP for Itanium? I'd imagine both were pretty rare.
  - genmud 3y ago
    IIRC you could actually run XP themes on 2k3 if you started the theme service. Under the hood they were almost the same exact same kernel (I think server / 5.2 had a slightly different IP stack and some server tweaks for task scheduling, shadow volumes and memory caching). Likewise if you wanted the non XP (Luna I think it was called?) styles you could just stop the theme service and it was effectively win2k style.
    - chungy 3y ago
      > Under the hood they were almost the same exact same kernel Literally the exact same kernel if you count XP x64 Edition. Even the exact same Windows Updates apply to both. :) But yeah, Windows XP (32-bit; NT 5.1) and Server 2003 (NT 5.2) were pretty close. The latter was pretty much "XP Server Edition", albeit some significant kernel changes were made, especially to improve network performance. It was the only time that the client and server versions of NT had diverged. Granted, the Windows Server team didn't feel like NT 6.0 was ready for the primetime when Vista launched, but instead of having two branches of the operating system again, Windows Server 2008 was launched identifying as "Service Pack 1" from the get-go, with Windows Vista's SP1 updating the OS to include all of the underlying improvements made for Server 2008. From that point forward, they were the same, including the same Windows Updates. It's also the point that Windows Vista got all of its technical flaws fixed. (Reputation flaws not withstanding, it wouldn't be until Windows Vista SP3 aka Windows 7, that the reputation would get reset...)
- int_19h 3y ago
  XP "fisher price" UI was trivial to disable in settings, giving you that same slate gray look of 98/2K, but with 24-bit color icons. This was actually possible to do all the way up to and including Win7, which even had the icon taskbar working in that "Windows Classic" theme. And it was very good design - pretty easy on the eyes and not distracting, but you could also tell which element is which easily at a glance (unlike these days, when everything is flat).
  - abhiyerra 3y ago
    I know this sounds petty but the XP’s Classic’s task bar gray was ever slightly off from Windows 2000 and it drove me nuts. I think Windows 2000 was visually the best.
    - keyringlight 3y ago
      Once you were back to the 9x/2k style chrome, I'm fairly sure you also had access to the older style of color/size customization for it as well. On a minor tangent, I miss how well the high contrast theme used to display on windows itself and the majority of applications that were still made within that standard toolkit, using it now seems to lack polish and most applications are doing their own thing within their window.
    - int_19h 3y ago
      It was slightly warmer than 2K (which itself was noticeably warmer than 98). However, the nice thing about the Windows Classic theme is that you could change all of the colors arbitrarily, including the bezels.
  - badsectoracula 3y ago
    While you could disable the fisher price theme in XP (and Vista and 7), even in classic theme you still had the "plastic" icons.
    - int_19h 3y ago
      Yup, but this was all customizable. In fact it even included the old icons in the box - they were used if you ever set it to use 8-bit color mode - so you just needed to point the shell at the right DLLs in the registry (for which there were third-party utilities). It's so sad to look back and remember how insanely customizable desktop UI was back then, compared to what we have now. In Win11, you can't even have a vertical taskbar anymore.
- bigstrat2003 3y ago
  I always thought that the Windows XP color theme was vastly over hated. I thought it looked nice, but even if one didn't enjoy it, I cannot understand why people acted like it killed their dog.
  - bombcar 3y ago
    It was grating. If XP had worked on release as well as it did three years later there would have been little complaining. But having that UI show up in 640 VGA because it couldn’t find drivers would make you angry, and you’d take it out on it.
  - Narishma 3y ago
    I hated the blue and red default but was fine with the two other alternatives.
retrac 3y ago
Windows 2000 was based on NT. While it had the Windows 98 interface it was very different underneath. It's a bit bonkers, but MS sold two superficially-identical operating systems for five plus years, that were in reality, about as different as two OSes could be; different histories, different underlying architecture, little code shared between the kernels and only part of the userland. And yet the two OS families had almost exactly the same UI and API.
- nikau 3y ago
  it made sense at the time, pcs had limited ram and win98 ran much better.
  - EvanAnderson 3y ago
    With a decent amount of RAM, though, 2000 was far more stable.
    - Dalewyn 3y ago
      I think you need to understand that most people maybe had 16~32MB of system RAM on average circa 1999, while Windows 2000 ideally wanted at least a staggering 128MB as just a sysreq recommendation. Windows 98 was fine with 16MB minimum or even 8MB with some wizardry. How much did 128MB of RAM cost in 1999? According to a Reddit thread that Copilot found, about $370 in 2020 dollars[1]. Copilot also dug up another thread[2] where people reminisced about RAM capacity and pricing in the 90s. So in very basic terms, 128MB of RAM (let alone more!) back then would be like buying 128GB of RAM today. Most people simply aren't going to buy ~$400 of RAM just like that, especially when upgrade cycles were also much shorter than today. There was a very practical reason Windows 9x existed alongside Windows NT until XP merged the lines in 2001 when 256~512MB of RAM and more became much more affordable. [1]: https://www.reddit.com/r/mac/comments/finsjm/how_much_did_128mb_of_ram_cost_in_1999/ https://www.reddit.com/r/mac/comments/finsjm/how_much_did_12... [2]: https://www.vogons.org/viewtopic.php?t=62239 https://www.vogons.org/viewtopic.php?t=62239
      - 3y ago
ack_complete 3y ago
IIRC, Windows 2000 had an overall bluer theme that reduced the green background and orange-tinged 3D colors of 98, and brought in a new set of icons. Also, it added alpha blending to GDI and started using it in Explorer.
- jwells89 3y ago
  It also used a lighter base gray than 95/98 did, which contributed to it feeling significantly less dreary. This is why for me, the canonical “classic Windows” theme is the 2k version.
  - amlib 3y ago
    The base color also had an off-white beige tone to it. To this day I'm curious if this was made as an attempt to counter balance the usual white balance of pc monitors at the time, which where set at or above 9300K, producing a blue-ish tint.
- pixl97 3y ago
  When win2000 was still in testing (was this called Memphis, can't remember) the UI elements like the X to close the window would light up in blue. Never made it to release.
marpstar 3y ago
USB flash drives worked out of box without drivers? Maybe that was just me... The gradient on the "My Computer" icon was also very satisfying: https://www.howtogeek.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/windows_2000_hero.jpg https://www.howtogeek.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/windows...
- jwells89 3y ago
  In general I’m a fan of the aesthetic of Win2K’s icons. Strikes a nice middleground between old and new, and as you’ve described it’s just satisfying somehow.
markus_zhang 3y ago
Win 2000 is the first MS Windows that did not crash very often. I used it as my primary desktop OS for as long as I could until I switched to XP. The best Windows IMHO.
- ilrwbwrkhv 3y ago
  I agree. I still feel deeply nostalgic for Windows 2000. Everything was instant. And almost every program did more than what Slack does today and yet Slack is sluggishly slow. We went wrong somewhere.
  - markus_zhang 3y ago
    100%. And the UI is intuitive. If it looks like a button, it is. The scrollbar doesn't disappear randomly and actually is wide enough to grab easily. Everything deteriorated once they went to the flat design. I need to find out which consultancy made the recommendation and everyone followed.
    - ilrwbwrkhv 3y ago
      Flat design was welcomed by a lot of designers as it required far lesser skill compared to designers before the flat era. As a result it spread rapidly.
      - markus_zhang 3y ago
        Thanks for the explanation, but why? Is drawing a proper button that hard comparing to a rectangle?
      - JoshuaRogers 3y ago
        This might be a bit disingenuous. Another slightly less insulting yet equally valid interpretation is that design as a whole has shifted over the last decade plus to value form over function. The current unbridled minimalist aesthetic has a futuristic look attracts companies that want to look futuristic (Apple, Tesla, Microsoft…) And for companies that aren’t leaders? Many of them want to be seen as such anyway, or at least not seen as irrelevant. (We might remember how X started popping up in all manner of names when XP came out.) To some degree there is room for this as long as function remains a primary goal, however we might reasonably argue that the current competition in technology is to look sleek, not to actually empower end users, leading to a design language that’s main purpose is to look nice but not be ultimately useful.
dep_b 3y ago
I ran Windows 2000 from the last beta until they stopped supporting it. The only thing I ever loved more were my Commodore 64, my Amiga 500 and Blue/White G3 tower running Mac OS and Mac OS X. It was extremely consistent in terms of UX, more so than Windows 98 that had all kinds of 16-bit cruft left in it. It did not use a lot of resources, I was a bit of a tweaker back then and I just shut down any services I didn't need for home use and it was absolutely fine on 64MB. It ran all games and applications that I tried to run. I HATED the Windows XP UI, never installed it. Why install something slower and uglier? 2000 was way better out of the box without ever experiencing issues in terms of compatibility. It's true Vista had a ton of nice new features under the hood, but the inconsistency in terms of UX of every Windows version after 2000 felt extremely off-putting.
- bombcar 3y ago
  I remember editing driver INI files to get newer video cards to install on 2000. They’d ship with XP drivers but you just needed to modify the INI to let them show up and work in 2K.

For me it was the top window gradient. I think in win98 it was 256 colors and in windows 2000 it was 16-bit

NT kernel with it's related stability, true-color interface, no XP "fisher price" UI. 2000 was probably the pinnacle of that era's design language. Ironically, XP made it more feasible to use 2000 day to day as drivers for XP worked on the earlier 2000.

derefr 3y ago
Re: XP UI — did you ever try Windows Server 2003?
- EvanAnderson 3y ago
  Server 2003 was my daily driver on a laptop for a few years. Most XP software ran fine but it had none of the XP visual cruft. Until Windows 7 it was peak Windows for me.
  - deepspace 3y ago
    I ran that rare beast, Windows XP64. It was basically Server2003 x64 with the XP UI. Driver compatibility was terrible, as you might expect, but it could support a vast amount of memory (relative to XP). I used the base O/S only to run VMware Workstation, and then ran small instances of XP, each dedicated to a task like audio, video, etc, on top of that. Along with FreeBSD and various flavors of Linux. That was my daily driver until late 2010. Solid as a rock.
    - EvanAnderson 3y ago
      XP64 was an odd animal. I had a Customer who usd it to run Unigraphics CAD. The Dell Precision machines they had with factory-loaded XP64 were fine. Trying to get their random other machines to run it w/ working audio, video, and chipset drivers was a pain. I never ran it as a desktop OS myself. I installed plenty of the server version it was based on (W2K3 x64) but those boxes always had standard VGA drivers, no audio, and sometimes a RAID controller driver, but that was usually it.
    - bonton89 3y ago
      I adopted XP64 kind of late IIRC (after Vista introduction) so the driver situation seemed fine to me. I had a cheap USB 56K modem I had to replace but otherwise all my hardware worked.
    - sillywalk 3y ago
      Was that XP for x86-64 or XP for Itanium? I'd imagine both were pretty rare.
- genmud 3y ago
  IIRC you could actually run XP themes on 2k3 if you started the theme service. Under the hood they were almost the same exact same kernel (I think server / 5.2 had a slightly different IP stack and some server tweaks for task scheduling, shadow volumes and memory caching). Likewise if you wanted the non XP (Luna I think it was called?) styles you could just stop the theme service and it was effectively win2k style.
  - chungy 3y ago
    > Under the hood they were almost the same exact same kernel Literally the exact same kernel if you count XP x64 Edition. Even the exact same Windows Updates apply to both. :) But yeah, Windows XP (32-bit; NT 5.1) and Server 2003 (NT 5.2) were pretty close. The latter was pretty much "XP Server Edition", albeit some significant kernel changes were made, especially to improve network performance. It was the only time that the client and server versions of NT had diverged. Granted, the Windows Server team didn't feel like NT 6.0 was ready for the primetime when Vista launched, but instead of having two branches of the operating system again, Windows Server 2008 was launched identifying as "Service Pack 1" from the get-go, with Windows Vista's SP1 updating the OS to include all of the underlying improvements made for Server 2008. From that point forward, they were the same, including the same Windows Updates. It's also the point that Windows Vista got all of its technical flaws fixed. (Reputation flaws not withstanding, it wouldn't be until Windows Vista SP3 aka Windows 7, that the reputation would get reset...)
int_19h 3y ago
XP "fisher price" UI was trivial to disable in settings, giving you that same slate gray look of 98/2K, but with 24-bit color icons. This was actually possible to do all the way up to and including Win7, which even had the icon taskbar working in that "Windows Classic" theme. And it was very good design - pretty easy on the eyes and not distracting, but you could also tell which element is which easily at a glance (unlike these days, when everything is flat).
- abhiyerra 3y ago
  I know this sounds petty but the XP’s Classic’s task bar gray was ever slightly off from Windows 2000 and it drove me nuts. I think Windows 2000 was visually the best.
  - keyringlight 3y ago
    Once you were back to the 9x/2k style chrome, I'm fairly sure you also had access to the older style of color/size customization for it as well. On a minor tangent, I miss how well the high contrast theme used to display on windows itself and the majority of applications that were still made within that standard toolkit, using it now seems to lack polish and most applications are doing their own thing within their window.
  - int_19h 3y ago
    It was slightly warmer than 2K (which itself was noticeably warmer than 98). However, the nice thing about the Windows Classic theme is that you could change all of the colors arbitrarily, including the bezels.
- badsectoracula 3y ago
  While you could disable the fisher price theme in XP (and Vista and 7), even in classic theme you still had the "plastic" icons.
  - int_19h 3y ago
    Yup, but this was all customizable. In fact it even included the old icons in the box - they were used if you ever set it to use 8-bit color mode - so you just needed to point the shell at the right DLLs in the registry (for which there were third-party utilities). It's so sad to look back and remember how insanely customizable desktop UI was back then, compared to what we have now. In Win11, you can't even have a vertical taskbar anymore.
bigstrat2003 3y ago
I always thought that the Windows XP color theme was vastly over hated. I thought it looked nice, but even if one didn't enjoy it, I cannot understand why people acted like it killed their dog.
- bombcar 3y ago
  It was grating. If XP had worked on release as well as it did three years later there would have been little complaining. But having that UI show up in 640 VGA because it couldn’t find drivers would make you angry, and you’d take it out on it.
- Narishma 3y ago
  I hated the blue and red default but was fine with the two other alternatives.

retrac 3y ago

Windows 2000 was based on NT. While it had the Windows 98 interface it was very different underneath. It's a bit bonkers, but MS sold two superficially-identical operating systems for five plus years, that were in reality, about as different as two OSes could be; different histories, different underlying architecture, little code shared between the kernels and only part of the userland. And yet the two OS families had almost exactly the same UI and API.

nikau 3y ago
it made sense at the time, pcs had limited ram and win98 ran much better.
- EvanAnderson 3y ago
  With a decent amount of RAM, though, 2000 was far more stable.
  - Dalewyn 3y ago
    I think you need to understand that most people maybe had 16~32MB of system RAM on average circa 1999, while Windows 2000 ideally wanted at least a staggering 128MB as just a sysreq recommendation. Windows 98 was fine with 16MB minimum or even 8MB with some wizardry. How much did 128MB of RAM cost in 1999? According to a Reddit thread that Copilot found, about $370 in 2020 dollars[1]. Copilot also dug up another thread[2] where people reminisced about RAM capacity and pricing in the 90s. So in very basic terms, 128MB of RAM (let alone more!) back then would be like buying 128GB of RAM today. Most people simply aren't going to buy ~$400 of RAM just like that, especially when upgrade cycles were also much shorter than today. There was a very practical reason Windows 9x existed alongside Windows NT until XP merged the lines in 2001 when 256~512MB of RAM and more became much more affordable. [1]: https://www.reddit.com/r/mac/comments/finsjm/how_much_did_128mb_of_ram_cost_in_1999/ https://www.reddit.com/r/mac/comments/finsjm/how_much_did_12... [2]: https://www.vogons.org/viewtopic.php?t=62239 https://www.vogons.org/viewtopic.php?t=62239
    - 3y ago

ack_complete 3y ago

IIRC, Windows 2000 had an overall bluer theme that reduced the green background and orange-tinged 3D colors of 98, and brought in a new set of icons. Also, it added alpha blending to GDI and started using it in Explorer.

jwells89 3y ago
It also used a lighter base gray than 95/98 did, which contributed to it feeling significantly less dreary. This is why for me, the canonical “classic Windows” theme is the 2k version.
- amlib 3y ago
  The base color also had an off-white beige tone to it. To this day I'm curious if this was made as an attempt to counter balance the usual white balance of pc monitors at the time, which where set at or above 9300K, producing a blue-ish tint.
pixl97 3y ago
When win2000 was still in testing (was this called Memphis, can't remember) the UI elements like the X to close the window would light up in blue. Never made it to release.

marpstar 3y ago

USB flash drives worked out of box without drivers? Maybe that was just me... The gradient on the "My Computer" icon was also very satisfying: https://www.howtogeek.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/windows_2000_hero.jpg https://www.howtogeek.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/windows...

jwells89 3y ago
In general I’m a fan of the aesthetic of Win2K’s icons. Strikes a nice middleground between old and new, and as you’ve described it’s just satisfying somehow.

markus_zhang 3y ago

Win 2000 is the first MS Windows that did not crash very often. I used it as my primary desktop OS for as long as I could until I switched to XP. The best Windows IMHO.

ilrwbwrkhv 3y ago
I agree. I still feel deeply nostalgic for Windows 2000. Everything was instant. And almost every program did more than what Slack does today and yet Slack is sluggishly slow. We went wrong somewhere.
- markus_zhang 3y ago
  100%. And the UI is intuitive. If it looks like a button, it is. The scrollbar doesn't disappear randomly and actually is wide enough to grab easily. Everything deteriorated once they went to the flat design. I need to find out which consultancy made the recommendation and everyone followed.
  - ilrwbwrkhv 3y ago
    Flat design was welcomed by a lot of designers as it required far lesser skill compared to designers before the flat era. As a result it spread rapidly.
    - markus_zhang 3y ago
      Thanks for the explanation, but why? Is drawing a proper button that hard comparing to a rectangle?
    - JoshuaRogers 3y ago
      This might be a bit disingenuous. Another slightly less insulting yet equally valid interpretation is that design as a whole has shifted over the last decade plus to value form over function. The current unbridled minimalist aesthetic has a futuristic look attracts companies that want to look futuristic (Apple, Tesla, Microsoft…) And for companies that aren’t leaders? Many of them want to be seen as such anyway, or at least not seen as irrelevant. (We might remember how X started popping up in all manner of names when XP came out.) To some degree there is room for this as long as function remains a primary goal, however we might reasonably argue that the current competition in technology is to look sleek, not to actually empower end users, leading to a design language that’s main purpose is to look nice but not be ultimately useful.

dep_b 3y ago

I ran Windows 2000 from the last beta until they stopped supporting it. The only thing I ever loved more were my Commodore 64, my Amiga 500 and Blue/White G3 tower running Mac OS and Mac OS X. It was extremely consistent in terms of UX, more so than Windows 98 that had all kinds of 16-bit cruft left in it. It did not use a lot of resources, I was a bit of a tweaker back then and I just shut down any services I didn't need for home use and it was absolutely fine on 64MB. It ran all games and applications that I tried to run. I HATED the Windows XP UI, never installed it. Why install something slower and uglier? 2000 was way better out of the box without ever experiencing issues in terms of compatibility. It's true Vista had a ton of nice new features under the hood, but the inconsistency in terms of UX of every Windows version after 2000 felt extremely off-putting.

bombcar 3y ago
I remember editing driver INI files to get newer video cards to install on 2000. They’d ship with XP drivers but you just needed to modify the INI to let them show up and work in 2K.