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Remembering Windows 2000

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Re: Remembering Windows 2000

#41

Post by anthony_barker »

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…

NT 3.5.1 SP3 had all the internals - 2000 just added a new UI.

Best if run on a DEC Alpha chip

Re: Remembering Windows 2000

#42

Post by TheRealSteel »

2bitencryption wrote: post #6
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…

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.

Re: Remembering Windows 2000

#43

Post by ogre_codes »

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.

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 still rather baffled about how people look back fondly on XP

XP was the first consumer version of adult (non-w95 based) Windows. Relatively few people used Windows NT or Windows 2000. If you are one of the many people who's Windows use either started with XP or you went from W95 to XP, then XP was clearly the best Windows you've ever seen.

Re: Remembering Windows 2000

#44

Post by Sohcahtoa82 »

ianlevesque wrote: post #18
pwned1 wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

That Fisher Price colored theme though...

Not sure why so many people complain about it when it was trivial to enable a classic theme to make it look like Win2K.

Re: Remembering Windows 2000

#45

Post by sergeykish »

gruez wrote: post #32
zozbot234 wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Windows 10 is full of distractions, one time I thought my display was broken - transparency on title bar. And animations just add latency.

Disable transparency and windows animations (Settings > Display > Show transparency on Windows, Show animations in windows). Also disable "Fade or slide menus into view". Much better experience and not much to offload.

Re: Remembering Windows 2000

#46

Post by EvanAnderson »

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 agree with the Windows 2000 UI being great, but Windows XP ran better for me.

To get the best of both worlds I ran a spare copy of Windows Server 2003 as my "daily driver" on a Thinkpad back in the early 2000's. It had the Windows 2000 UI with the behind-the-scenes updates that came with Windows XP. Most software that installed on XP installed fine on Server 2003. It was nice.

Re: Remembering Windows 2000

#47

Post by derefr »

gruez wrote: post #32
zozbot234 wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

There's no real way to translate the classic theme "as designed" to hi-DPI systems, AFAIK; let alone to allow it to freely morph between desktop and tablet interaction paradigms when you dock/undock a two-in-one.

You could in theory design a modern UI that resembles the classic UI, but it wouldn't really be "the classic UI". A large part of what makes the classic UI have the particular look it does is that it has custom constraint-layout logic for each control, the outputs of which are fed as parameters into the arbitrary hand-written GDI draw-call logic used to draw each control.

Some of the more interesting controls have Turing-hard constraint logic, which just can't be replicated in non-Turing-complete constraint-layout systems like XAML or CSS. (You can get close, but it requires using huge hierarchies of layout nodes with tons of overhead, where the Windows UI actually got by with very few.)

Re: Remembering Windows 2000

#48

Post by zozbot234 »

ogre_codes wrote: post #43
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. 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.

Re: Remembering Windows 2000

#49

Post by T-A »

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...

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