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Remembering Windows 2000

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Re: Remembering Windows 2000

#111

Post by jhoechtl »

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...

Load times were terrible. Time makes you forget the bad and glorify the good.

Re: Remembering Windows 2000

#112

Post by ibiza »

> It Was Rock-Solid Stable, Unlike Windows Me.

Under Windows NT, each process runs w/ its own LDT (Local Descriptor Table). Process memory bounds are enforced by the processor MMU.

Windows 95, 98, Me, used a single shared LDT, for better backwards compatibility, but with far less protection. I believe I've got this right, but happy to be corrected.

The sad thing about this, is just how long Windows users had to suck it up (5 years!?), until 2K finally came along, pushed as a consumer OS.

Re: Remembering Windows 2000

#113

Post by vezycash »

elwes5 wrote: post #84
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…

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…

>lack of contrast between controls is very annoying. That 'flat' look is a pain. Can I or can I not click on this?

Vs code. How many seconds does it take to figure out the active code tab?

Re: Remembering Windows 2000

#114

Post by hateful »

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 motherboard with 2x 1Ghz P3s and the 9x Kernel couldn't handle that.

Re: Remembering Windows 2000

#116

Post by adarioble »

pmlnr wrote: post #73

Windows 2000 ran smoothly on a pentium 1 233mhz laptop with 96MB memory and allowed me to do websites in 2001.

I share the same memory. I remember being very impressed how it run on my Dell laptops Pentium 233 MMX and 64 MB RAM. It even had the driver support for 3Com 14.4k PCMCIA modem... ah the nostalgia!

Re: Remembering Windows 2000

#117

Post by simcop2387 »

bluedino wrote: post #29
mschaef wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

I believe it supported memory protection, but not preemetive multithreading and multiprocessing. It was still cooperative multiprocessing underneath. If the program was written correctly (most were initially, since Win 3.1 was more common for a few years still), it would function on both just swimmingly.

Re: Remembering Windows 2000

#118

Post by arprocter »

zozbot234 wrote: post #48
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…

XP introduced a "new" control panel arrangement by default, but you could easily revert to a simple folder view. Windows 10 is a mess today because of the overlap between the classic Control Panel and the new settings app, but there was nothing like this back then.

The Control Panel vs Settings thing is definitely annoying, and confusingly certain things exist in both; one of which is date and time

I had a machine that refused to sync NTP until I went into Control Panel, even though everything looked fine in the new Settings

Re: Remembering Windows 2000

#119

Post by vezycash »

ladzoppelin wrote: post #82
core-questions wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

But Vista was not a technical failure but more a commercial failure. I am not an expert but I am pretty sure massive chunks of the OS were updated in Vista that took years to debug and smooth out to what is now Windows 10. You are also correct that XP was technically more advanced than 2000 but I am not sure of the specifics. All I remember is pro audio applications and audio device drive drivers ran much better in W…

1. Driver issues plagued Vista.

2. Xp capable systems weren't powerful enough to run the new generation of operating systems.

Vista was the scapegoat to force hardware upgrade.

Samething happened with windows 8 forcing upgrade to touch screen.

Re: Remembering Windows 2000

#120

Post by jarjoura »

Call me cynical, but Win2k was probably developed by a small and tight-knit group of engineers, PMs and designers. It felt focused and ran most software well.

I think if I remember correctly, Win2k was meant to replace the Windows 98/DOS kernel but they couldn't get it to work in time. That's when WinXP came out instead. WinXP felt like the result of a much bigger org. Am I correct to speculate that in Microsoft, the NT teams and the DOS teams merged to create WinXP?

If so, that would explain XP and that probably created all kind of tonal and structural shifts, a result that was a massive eyesore of an OS. Plus their attempt to come up with a cute theme-able UI like OS X's Aqua was seriously half baked.

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