Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Remembering Windows 2000

howtogeek.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

221–230 of 243 posts

Re: Remembering Windows 2000

#221

Post by whywhywhywhy »

TheRealSteel wrote: post #42
2bitencryption wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

ah, just thinking of Snow Leopard makes me swoon... I don't know if the rose-tinted glasses are too strong, or if that OS was really as snappy, simple, and polished as I remember.

I'm almost certain that Snow Leopard woke up from sleep on a 2010 Macbook Pro faster than Mojave wakes up on a 2019, but I don't have proof. It was definitely more reliable.

The wake from sleep behavior is really bad on modern MBPs, feels like it takes an eternity, too much black screen then the password screen just isn't responsive for a good 10 seconds sometimes.

Actually the power on behavior is bad too, without the chime you can never really tell if the thing is working or not.

Re: Remembering Windows 2000

#223

Post by otabdeveloper4 »

mixmastamyk wrote: post #34
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…

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…

> Gnome 2 was approaching Win2k but then made a hard turn into tablet/novice land.

Hard disagree, Gnome 3 is like i3 except without the legacy cruft.

Re: Remembering Windows 2000

#224

Post by barking »

vezycash wrote: post #110
barking wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One of the first things I do is to pin the control panel and a couple of its icons to start so I can avoid the settings way of getting there.

appwiz.cpl run this from RUN or command prompt

I didn't know about that. As I have it set up though, I can hit the windows key and type 'fea' (from Programs and Features) and then enter.

Re: Remembering Windows 2000

#225

Post by whywhywhywhy »

snarfy wrote: post #206
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…

We have three layers of it now. Control Panel: win 3.0 lineage Computer Management/device manager: WinNT lineage Settings: Win8 lineage It's all a big mess. You want to configure your audio settings or printer? You'll find options in all three areas, all with slightly different UI controls.

What option do they have though? If they throw all the old out and replace it people freak out.

If anything slowly rendering the older stuff obsolete and moving settings into the new unified settings system makes the most sense to move forward without people freaking out.

Your only options, for windows users is to do things very slowly or just don't move forward or innovate at all and as of today there is very little reason to dig into the older versions apart from very esoteric settings.

Re: Remembering Windows 2000

#226

Post by whywhywhywhy »

tomc1985 wrote: post #87
gruez wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's sad that they got rid of it in windows 8 and later. >the classic theme was a lot leaner on system resources maybe , but it probably also made things run slower because it forces everything to be done in software rather than hardware. https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20130327-00/?p=48... >Starting in Windows Vista, a lot of visual effects were offloaded to the graphics card. Consequently, the impact on…

What's really sad is the classic widgets are still there -- you can see them occasionally in Win10 when the compositor glitches out. Weirder, MDI windows use Win7's classic\b\b\b\b\b\b aero basic styling, so apparently some of the Win7 styling is also still available. Another major annoyance: the resize area for a window is seemingly 1 pixel wide. You used to be able to specify a width and all windows would be border…

>the resize area for a window is seemingly 1 pixel wide. You used to be able to specify a width and all windows would be bordered with it. I get that Win10 looks sleeker but did they really have to take that control away

It's really a bit of a mistake, maybe a limitation(?) of the Windows UI system.

I mean the border on OS X is 1px too but the resize area is about 8 pixels.

Would love it if MS could do another spin on the deep details and just make it all work nice.

Re: Remembering Windows 2000

#227

Post by DanBC »

whywhywhywhy wrote: post #225
snarfy wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We have three layers of it now. Control Panel: win 3.0 lineage Computer Management/device manager: WinNT lineage Settings: Win8 lineage It's all a big mess. You want to configure your audio settings or printer? You'll find options in all three areas, all with slightly different UI controls.

What option do they have though? If they throw all the old out and replace it people freak out. If anything slowly rendering the older stuff obsolete and moving settings into the new unified settings system makes the most sense to move forward without people freaking out. Your only options, for windows users is to do things very slowly or just don't move forward or innovate at all and as of today there is very little…

Windows 10 was released in 2015. Windows 8 was released in 2012. From a user POV the settings menus shouldn't be so complex after that long.

There are a few examples of things that are now much harder than they need to be because the settings have been spread over several different places, and you have to know the correct route to them or you get an incomplete settings menu.

Some Dell laptops will use a generic Windows driver for a mouse device, instead of installing the correct drivers for the trackpoint / Pointstick and touchpad. This is a suboptimal experience, and installing the correct drivers is harder than it needs to be.

But once you've installed the correct drivers where do you find the settings?

Start > Settings > Touchpad will give some settings, but not for the pointstick.

Device manager doesn't give you the settings.

Search > Control Panel > Hardware and Sound > Dell Touchpad > Launch Mouse Control Panel will give you a window that then allows you to open the Dell settings.

The easier way is to open the hidden icons in the notification area, right click Dell Touchpad, and open the settings from there.

Re: Remembering Windows 2000

#228

Post by elwes5 »

Miraste wrote: post #174
elwes5 wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree on the vertical space thing. I would add that lack of contrast between controls is very annoying. That 'flat' look is a pain. Can I or can I not click on this? The one that is a real pain is the disappearing scroll bar. It is there. The space for it is used. But just gone until you hover over it. Then it is clunky to use in relation to all of the other windows controls. The rules for making a GUI were dead si…

I must use scrolling windows differently than you, because I haven't clicked and dragged a scroll bar probably for years. The only thing I need a scroll indicator for is to see how far I am down the page, which I only do when I'm actively scrolling. MacOS disappearing scrollbars (which do not waste space when inactive, but pop in over content when you scroll) are my ideal implementation.

My point is that it is terribly inconsistent. There are basically 4 ways now. You can see the scroll bar. The scroll bar is borderline invisible color wise to the background. Fade in out, some are over the text (which is annoying if you happen to be reading that bit and activate it). Fade in out space kept but the control is invisible. The fade in out has a second issue. Can I scroll? It suffers from the 'bellow the fold' problem of usability. As in there was more stuff on the page but I missed it. All because a paragraph break worked out just right.

Re: Remembering Windows 2000

#229

Post by bmn__ »

freeflight wrote: post #201
ajtjp wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The proper thing to do in the Windows XP control panel is to switch it to Classic View. No more trying to figure out what category something is in and being wrong half the time, just the same options as you had in Windows 98, plus a few new ones. Even in Classic View, there are admittedly some items that have user interface styles that date back to Windows 3.1 (one example being part of the Fonts area), so there are…

Tho that only helps with certain things, depending on localization. For example, the German version of Windows XP renamed the entry for "Software" to "Programme und Funktionen"/"Programs and functions". It's something that even over a decade later keeps catching me off-guard because for the longest time I was so used to look for "S like software". And Windows 10 did it again with the whole "App" thing where I'm still…

> the whole "App" thing

https://i.imgur.com/TTRyEOT.png

Re: Remembering Windows 2000

#230

Post by iggldiggl »

whywhywhywhy wrote: post #226
tomc1985 wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's really sad is the classic widgets are still there -- you can see them occasionally in Win10 when the compositor glitches out. Weirder, MDI windows use Win7's classic\b\b\b\b\b\b aero basic styling, so apparently some of the Win7 styling is also still available. Another major annoyance: the resize area for a window is seemingly 1 pixel wide. You used to be able to specify a width and all windows would be border…

>the resize area for a window is seemingly 1 pixel wide. You used to be able to specify a width and all windows would be bordered with it. I get that Win10 looks sleeker but did they really have to take that control away It's really a bit of a mistake, maybe a limitation(?) of the Windows UI system. I mean the border on OS X is 1px too but the resize area is about 8 pixels. Would love it if MS could do another spin o…

>> the resize area for a window is seemingly 1 pixel wide. >> You used to be able to specify a width and all windows >> would be bordered with it. I get that Win10 looks sleeker >> but did they really have to take that control away

> It's really a bit of a mistake, maybe a limitation(?) > of the Windows UI system. > > I mean the border on OS X is 1px too > but the resize area is about 8 pixels.

Is it? My impression is that Windows behaves the same there, i.e. the border is drawn 1 px wide, but the full width of it is still available for grabbing, only it's being drawn invisible. If I hover my mouse over a window border, the cursor certainly switches into resize mode for more than just 1 pixel's worth of distance.

Post reply on HN