Earlier quoted context omitted.
I didn’t use 200 much, but I feel this way about windows Xp. It just worked. It seemed super stable and not bloated.
That Fisher Price colored theme though...
XP's classic mode looked somewhat like Windows 98/2000.
Remembering Windows 2000
21–30 of 243 posts
Re: Remembering Windows 2000
#22Windows 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.
Re: Remembering Windows 2000
#23Windows 2000 was great and really reduced bluescreen frequency compared to Windows 95 and 98.
Re: Remembering Windows 2000
#24The 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,…
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?
Re: Remembering Windows 2000
#25Windows 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!
Re: Remembering Windows 2000
#26I 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.
Re: Remembering Windows 2000
#27Windows 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 suppos…
You could also revert to the classic widget theme, even in Windows Vista and 7. And people absolutely did that - the classic theme was a lot leaner on system resources and visually clearer in many ways.
Re: Remembering Windows 2000
#28The 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,…
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…
It was so easy to ditch the Fisher-Price UI and pick the Classic UI in WinXP. I really can't imagine holding that UI against WinXP!
Re: Remembering Windows 2000
#29Microsoft'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 late…
> Microsoft's best OS of all time was Windows 2000. Imho, Snow Leopard was Apple's best. Windows 2000 was very good, but I'm also fond of Windows for Workgroups 3.11. It had a certain simplicity and directness that they lost in the move to Windows 95. (And WfWG could run both 32-bit drivers and 32-bit software, as long as Win32s was installed.)
Not all Win32 software ran on Win32s, as Win32s didn't support things like memory protection and multithreading, right?
Re: Remembering Windows 2000
#30Win 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.
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.