
Remembering Windows 2000 - dsr12
https://www.howtogeek.com/676095/remembering-windows-2000-microsofts-forgotten-masterpiece/
======
amiga-workbench
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.

~~~
kccqzy
Windows 2000 always reminded me of brutalist architecture. It was efficient,
functional, and worked well, but it wasn't pretty at all.

This is probably a very unpopular opinion but I rather liked Windows Vista's
design. It was still very compact compared with later designs, and it had a
certain charm from its prevalent use of translucency. I disliked XP for the
same reason you cited, and upgraded to Vista almost as soon as it came out,
despite early Vista's instability.

~~~
brnt
But, and I say that as a brutalist hater, W2K is then one of those more humane
brutalist designs. Some detailing, rounded instead of sharp edges, a concrete
that is ever so slightly warmed toned than basic concrete, nooks and crannies
to break up long flat surfaces.

I find flatUI far more brutalist in the way it disorients by removing and
humane clues as to its structure and use.

------
qubex
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 9 _x_ 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
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?

~~~
ladzoppelin
But Vista was not a technical failure but more a commercial failure. I am not
an expert but I am pretty sure massive chunks of the OS were updated in Vista
that took years to debug and smooth out to what is now Windows 10. You are
also correct that XP was technically more advanced than 2000 but I am not sure
of the specifics. All I remember is pro audio applications and audio device
drive drivers ran much better in Windows XP sp2.

~~~
vezycash
1\. Driver issues plagued Vista.

2\. Xp capable systems weren't powerful enough to run the new generation of
operating systems.

Vista was the scapegoat to force hardware upgrade.

Samething happened with windows 8 forcing upgrade to touch screen.

------
proverbialbunny
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.

~~~
pwned1
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
That Fisher Price colored theme though...

~~~
Sohcahtoa82
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
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
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.

------
ThrowawayB7
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
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.

------
hateful
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.

~~~
torgoguys
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).

------
User23
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/)

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

------
MisterTea
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
But you need lots of power to run a browser nowadays.

Love the expression 'over powered terminals' that's sooo true!

~~~
zozbot234
> 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
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
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.

~~~
anthk
AMSN under TCL/TK was even faster than Slack under Electron.

------
cryptoz
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!

------
james412
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
Because this would increase stability?

~~~
james412
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.

------
superkuh
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.

------
lsllc
_" 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
I remember writing essays in Word, and if you didn't save them every minute,
who knows how much work you might randomly lose.

------
larme
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.

------
noir_lord
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
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
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.

------
ibiza
> 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.

------
desktopninja
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!

------
Animats
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
> _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
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".

------
Borlands
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)

------
peterburkimsher
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
I know company that have a sawmill device running on Windows98SE.

Also not connected to internet and working standalone.

------
cyberjunkie
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!

------
rubatuga
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
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.

------
CapriciousCptl
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.

------
htk
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”.

------
at_a_remove
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."

------
theandrewbailey
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.

------
jarjoura
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
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.

------
JohnBooty
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.

------
Neil44
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)

------
RandomGuyDTB
> 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.

~~~
mirekrusin
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.

------
machinehermit
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.

------
stevenicr
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
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.

------
peter_d_sherman
>"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
No. The BUS would still hinder it. For realistic purposes, 2k needed 96-128MB.

------
cesarb
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).

------
nix23
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.

------
dhosek
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.

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

~~~
adarioble
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!

------
Svperstar
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.

------
VectorLock
Windows 2000 will always be my favorite version of Windows.

Its a good thing MacOSX came along right before Windows XP.

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

------
yesenadam
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.)

------
DonCarlitos
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...

------
nurettin
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...](https://slashdot.org/story/00/02/11/1840225/windows-2000-has-65000-bugs)
[2] [https://www.zdnet.com/article/bugfest-
win2000-has-63000-defe...](https://www.zdnet.com/article/bugfest-
win2000-has-63000-defects/)

------
iso-8859-1
You can get back that old-school Windows feeling on Linux with
[https://github.com/grassmunk/Chicago95](https://github.com/grassmunk/Chicago95)

~~~
zozbot234
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
I miss Gorilla and the one with a metallic theme. And the one from the Java
Metal theme.

------
ur-whale
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.

------
danfritz
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
The floppies only bootstrapped an environment to install the rest of the OS
from a larger storage media, though.

~~~
zozbot234
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.

------
rado
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?

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

------
desktopninja
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
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.

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

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

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

~~~
bad_op3rator
It was mainly because Win2k was basically the next version of WinNT which had
nothing in common with Win95/98 under the hood.

~~~
Avery3R
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

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

------
libria
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.

------
outworlder
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
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.

------
koiz
What a great OS.

------
foobar_
133 MHz

64 MB

2 GB

Luxury. Back in the '95 days you were lucky if you had 4 MB RAM.

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

