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Remembering Windows 2000
31–40 of 243 posts
Re: Remembering Windows 2000
#32Windows 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.
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 system performance for those visual effects is negligible, and sometimes turning off the effect actually makes your system run slower because you disabled hardware acceleration, forcing operations to be performed in software.
Re: Remembering Windows 2000
#33Recommended for admin systems class, ended up using it as personal OS for much longer. It was a beast of stability! (Although win98 rev2 was a quite good ironed out OS before win2000 and with less requirements, given you didn’t install/uninstall a lot of apps, prob windows registry messing up)
Re: Remembering Windows 2000
#34Windows 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 never got to the level of Win2k.
I didn't care for skinz in the 90's and instead of going away, every app now is a unpredictable skinned mess.
Re: Remembering Windows 2000
#35Windows 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…
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 Office 2007. I've since gotten used to the ribbon (which has spread to Mac versions of Office, albeit with traditional menus still existing), but I still prefer toolbars and traditional menus. Finally, Windows 10's interface is just gaudy to me, with its oversized title bars and its liberal use of whitespace. It's acceptable on a high-resolution display, but on a 1366x768 display (common on corporate laptops) Windows 10 just looks downright ugly to me.
I find it interesting that during the past 15 years the industry has switched away from 4:3 displays to 16:9 displays (which seem to provide more horizontal space at the expense of vertical space), yet Microsoft's designs seem to consume more vertical space as opposed to horizontal space. Instead of ribbons, I prefer the horizontal inspectors that are found in macOS applications.
On Hacker News I'm seeing more interest lately in the desktop UIs from the 1990s and 2000s. For example, the latest beta release of Haiku, an operating system inspired by BeOS, garnered a lot of attention. What I like about Windows 2000, macOS (both the classic Mac OS and Mac OS X), BeOS, GNOME 2, and other classic desktops is their utilitarian focus on design, where form and function are intertwined. UI design isn't about "the bling"; it's about providing a good experience to the user. Mac OS X's Aqua interface did a good job providing a compelling interface to users that was also beautiful. Unfortunately, some people only saw the "bling" and not the functionality behind the Aqua theming, and thus we've been suffering from fashion-driven UIs for nearly 20 years, a trend that has been made worse by the advent of mobile computing. Hopefully the pendulum will swing back to how things were in the 1990s; we can learn a lot from the human interface guidelines Microsoft and Apple published in that era.
Re: Remembering Windows 2000
#36Windows 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'm still rather baffled about how people look back fondly on XP, it looked like a toy for toddlers
Agreed, yet somehow its Start menu is still better than what you get on Windows 10 these days: https://i.stack.imgur.com/rwZqf.jpg
> ...installing the Zune theme was the first thing I did after a fresh install to try and tone it down.
Everyone knows the best XP theme was Royale Noir! https://www.istartedsomething.com/20061029/royale-noir/
Re: Remembering Windows 2000
#37The 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,…
It might be nostalgia talking, but those years felt like the end of a golden age.
I went to university at 17 in 2001 with a Dell notebook and a self built Duron (IIRC) tower. Instead of partying, I used my new found freedom (and decent internet connection) to try every OS and piece of software I could get my hands on (though I never stumbled across BeOS). I spent the most time with Windows 2000 Server on the notebook (as a "client") and Redhat on the tower (as a "server").
It was a different time then. Lot's of free time, huge explosion in open source software, basically no network security or limitations.
Re: Remembering Windows 2000
#38Windows 2000 was great and really reduced bluescreen frequency compared to Windows 95 and 98.
It was mainly because Win2k was basically the next version of WinNT which had nothing in common with Win95/98 under the hood.
Re: Remembering Windows 2000
#39[deleted]
Re: Remembering Windows 2000
#40Microsoft'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.
Really? My experience was driver nightmares and having to reinstall the OS every 6 months with XP. It wasn't til 7 that most of that went away.