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Remembering Windows 2000

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Re: Remembering Windows 2000

#151

Post by Koshkin »

thought_alarm wrote: post #135
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…

I actually hated Win2K when it came out and tried to hold to NT 4.0 as long as I could, although I'm sure some of that was just youthful arrogance. If I recall correctly, Win2K was a lot slower than NT 4.0 on the same hardware, and it featured some really bad UI ideas, like menus that auto-hide advanced menu items. By the time XP was released I gave up the fight. The initial XP theme was just awful; clearly a knee-je…

Some would say even today that it was NT4 that was the pinnacle. There are many things that can be said, but indeed Win2k was a hog compared to NT4 while being a fairly modest improvement (despite all the new features like Active Directory).

Re: Remembering Windows 2000

#153

Post by zozbot234 »

EvanAnderson wrote: post #145
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.

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.

Re: Remembering Windows 2000

#154

Post by Koshkin »

proverbialbunny wrote: post #139
ubercow13 wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No load times?! I seem to remember Win 95-XP era involved almost comically long boot times especially if you waited for your hard drive to stop churning after getting to the desktop, but maybe I am misremembering. It wasn't so much the OS's fault, though.

Yah 95-Me era ran pretty slow and horrible. Though 95 was pretty revolutionary when it came out.

The actual revolution came with Windows Game SDK (later known as DirectX) which allowed Windows to finally surpass MS-DOS as a gaming platform.

Re: Remembering Windows 2000

#155

Post by zozbot234 »

iso-8859-1 wrote: post #152

You can get back that old-school Windows feeling on Linux with https://github.com/grassmunk/Chicago95

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.

Re: Remembering Windows 2000

#156

Post by nonamenoslogan »

hyperman1 wrote: post #93
erichurkman wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Windows XP even before SP2 was a _delight_ compared to the true train wreck that shipped on consumer PCs before it: Windows "Mistake Edition" Me.

Windows Me was a strange beast. On some (most?) PCs it was an absolute disaster up to corrupting hard disks, on others it was a solid step up from win98. But you could never say beforehand how it was going to behave, even on 2 identical PCs. I never understood what triggered its abysmall behaviour. Oh well, who cares now, it lies in its well deserved grave, I guess.

I have similar recollection of ME, on my personal 333MHz Celeron with 128mb of RAM laptop it ran fantastically, never had issues and was stable and while 2000/XP were also stable, ME was fast compared to 2000/XP on the same hardware.

Other people I know couldn't get past a VxD error on the first install, others couldn't get faster K6 or PIII's to be stable with it.

It was a love it or hate it thing--my opinion of Vista and 8.0 are similar.

Re: Remembering Windows 2000

#157

Post by Bnshsysjab »

barrkel wrote: post #121
linguae wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly. One of my annoyances with Microsoft's post-Windows 2000 design philosophy is its penchant for consuming large amounts of vertical space. This started with the large title bars used in the Windows XP Luna theme. I wasn't impressed with this "Fischer-Price" theme and always switched to the Windows Classic theme, which I continued to do even during the Windows 7 days. Next, Microsoft introduced the ribbon in Of…

Linux has been much worse for margins in UIs, FWIW.

Also curious about this, I use mostly Openbox and GTK based apps and don’t have an issue

Re: Remembering Windows 2000

#158

Post by Koshkin »

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.

Interestingly, 'bloated' was exactly the word used most often to describe XP on forums back then.

Re: Remembering Windows 2000

#159

Post by mobilio »

peterburkimsher wrote: post #128

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 cod…

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

Also not connected to internet and working standalone.

Re: Remembering Windows 2000

#160

Post by rbranson »

hateful wrote: post #114

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…

Windows 2000 came out before Windows ME.
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