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Remembering Windows 2000

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Re: Remembering Windows 2000

#141

Post by TeMPOraL »

Animats wrote: post #63

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.

> 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.

Re: Remembering Windows 2000

#142

Post by proverbialbunny »

T-A wrote: post #49
proverbialbunny wrote: post #3

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 late…

> No load times, even back then. Somebody at Disney seems to have had a different experience: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BBctBJ3mKNg&feature=youtu.be...

Wrong era.

Re: Remembering Windows 2000

#143

Post by proverbialbunny »

pwned1 wrote: post #9
proverbialbunny wrote: post #3

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 late…

I didn’t use 200 much, but I feel this way about windows Xp. It just worked. It seemed super stable and not bloated.

Windows XP is Windows 2000 with a theme. Though the difference in resources was Win2k could run on 32MB of ram, and XP ran on 256, despite being the same OS with the same functionality, even the same drivers.

If you had beefy enough hardware, which we all eventually did years after XP came out, it ran as fast and almost as stable as 2000.

If you didn't mind the bland theme, and wanted higher FPS while gaming, with more responsiveness (less of a delay when double clicking on a window, for example) then running Windows 2000 over XP was a no brainer. In competitive first person shooter circles at the time, people preferred Win2k to XP for these reasons.

Re: Remembering Windows 2000

#144

Post by mattkevan »

Wistar wrote: post #88
ogre_codes wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

YES. Windows 2000 was also one of the most consistently designed versions of Windows. XP also introduced tons of design language chaos as they only migrated some of the UI over to the new controls and left big chunks of the OS to languish. I think Control Panel had widget rot well into Windows 10 (Maybe still has this issue?). I only grudgingly moved to XP and shortly after switched to Desktop Linux full time. > I'm…

As someone once remarked "On XP everything looks as though it should go MOO! when you click on it."

Ha, that’s so true.

After growing up with Amiga and then MacOS, I only really encountered Windows XP when I started my first proper job.

Couldn’t believe that that was the default OS for professionals and businesses. With all the chunky graphics and bright colours it looked so childish - like it was designed for preschoolers, not 98% of the world’s computing.

There was even a puppy animation when doing a search.

Re: Remembering Windows 2000

#145

Post by EvanAnderson »

danfritz wrote: post #137

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

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

Re: Remembering Windows 2000

#146

Post by 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.)

Re: Remembering Windows 2000

#147

Post by FreakyT »

rubatuga wrote: post #97

The best macOS interface was 10.3 in my opinion, here’s some screenshots: https://guidebookgallery.org/screenshots/macosx103

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.

Re: Remembering Windows 2000

#148

Post by proverbialbunny »

james412 wrote: post #10

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.

Because this would increase stability?

Re: Remembering Windows 2000

#149

Post by julianz »

thaeli wrote: post #122
mixmastamyk wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, they forgot to mention the fantastic, intuitive, and functional GUI rivaled by Mac OS 9, Nextstep, OS/2, BeOS etc. This era was the pinnacle. While we've been thrown a few bones like start menu search, most of the gratuitous changes have been for the worse. Sleeker but harder to use for professionals. Gnome 2 was approaching Win2k but then made a hard turn into tablet/novice land. XFCE is in the neighborhood but…

MacOS 7.1 was the pinnacle, imo. MacOS 9 had lots of the space-wasting pretty chrome we're decrying here in WinXP.

I loved old-school Macs but come one, you couldn't even resize a window by dragging an edge. I think we've moved on from that.

Re: Remembering Windows 2000

#150

Post by julianz »

kccqzy wrote: post #131
amiga-workbench wrote: post #17

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 suppos…

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 s…

Once Vista became stable it was a really nice OS. I installed it for a parent at some point because that's what we had a license for, and was really surprised how fast and clean it was compared to Windows 8.
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