> First, it was the first solid (in relative terms) consumer operating system from MS.
That was actually Windows 2000, based on the NT 4 code base. It was near perfect, given the era it was made in.
The only reason I upgraded from Windows 2000 was that Microsoft was extremely reluctant to back-port USB- or WiFi-fixes and support, effectively forcing you to upgrade to XP if you wanted to fully use your modern hardware.
For that reason alone, XP always left a sour taste in my mouth.
> That was actually Windows 2000, based on the NT 4 code base. It was near perfect, given the era it was made in.
I also remember Windows 2000 fondly. It was really really stable. Even if it looked like it's frozen like a polar ice cap (they weren't melting that bad back then), a short coffee break would give it enough time to normalize itself and continue like nothing happened.
I stuck with Windows 2000 for many years after XP was released. XP brought absolutely nothing I wanted and a lot of things I didn’t want. All the truly interesting stuff, like WinFS, never made it in.
WinFS wasn’t destined for Windows 2000 nor XP, but rather Vista.
I was an intern at Microsoft in 2004, and personally helped make it clear that WinFS also wasn’t ready anyway. Fwiw, I think the iOS model of “makes users and apps no longer care about directories” has been more successful than the original WinFS plan of “maybe it’s all a SQL-ish database instead”.
I actually ran a series of them in VMs for years because of their quick response and light resource usage, and they still ran all the stuff I needed. Loved that OS
I have a Windows XP VM to run the software for my MD player. You're right, the OS from that era is lightning quick in today's hardware, even in a VM. Also, the USB passthhru is problem-free interestingly.
Windows 2000 was the first rock solid OS from Microsoft, targetting both desktops and servers,but the desktop version was targeted at business users, not consumers. The consumer version at the time was the horrible Windows ME.
Ha! I had the same with windows 2000 as compared to NT4. I stayed on NT4 as long as I could, and never really liked windows 2000 because it took twice the resources to do the same job at half the speed. Windows XP was 2000 with more (ugly) eye candy and a lot of bloat, so I didn’t like that either, but hardware improved enough that by the end of its reign it was quite fast.
One thing I read when dicking with how USB drivers work is that the Microsoft's first USB driver model was hopelessly broken, so they started over. And that also turned out badly enough that they redid it again. That's what ended up in XP and it mostly worked okay.
You can see why they didn't want to/couldn't backport USB drivers.
That was actually Windows 2000, based on the NT 4 code base. It was near perfect, given the era it was made in.
The only reason I upgraded from Windows 2000 was that Microsoft was extremely reluctant to back-port USB- or WiFi-fixes and support, effectively forcing you to upgrade to XP if you wanted to fully use your modern hardware.
For that reason alone, XP always left a sour taste in my mouth.