Windows 2000 was the best windows

[oali24]

I swear to god guys, since getting my new laptop with windows 11 I realise how far microsoft have strayed from the light, I have used windows 2000 on some retro PCs I have had and seen the beauty, the elegance, the simplicity, the efficiency of windows 2000, no crashes, no nagging updates and antivirus things that cover the entire screen. fast loading even on a slow as shit 20 year old hard drive, what more could someone ask for? Also, the settings, oh the settings, actually having them all in one place (the control panel) and putting them in my computer instead of the clusterfuck of control panel and stupid slow settings app that everyone despises. and no stupidly long animations that make  the computerr look more fancy and smarter while just adding extra time to do things, back with those older operating system they only put animations when they actually made bloody sense at giving the user a feeling of where windows went and where desktop elements where and hinted at what to click. This sort of shit is why I like using Linux Desktop environments that are no frills because they are just so much better and you don't need to faff about. I would like to hear from anyone else who lived in the early windows NT glory age if they miss the operating systems of that era.

[Holmes108]

I haven't had any real performance or crash issues since before Windows 7. I even liked Vista more than most people. Maybe I'm just lucky with my rather boring, everyday use cases. I've absolutely loved Windows 7, 10 and even now 11. 

 

My only complaint is the newer settings screens do kinda suck. I'm a control panel guy, so thankfully that's still available.... for now. 

 

Oh, also I like to just hit the windows key, and type "update" to get to windows updates. That worked forever, and now for the longest time, it doesn't. Which kinda grinds my gears. But Windows search is a whole topic on it's own, that I guess I should've added to my "one" complaint above. But still all minor stuff in my mind.

[heimdali]

2000 is the first version that half-way worked.  It would have been nice if they had improved it instead of cancelling it.

 

It also crashed and didn't boot fast, that's why they should have improved it ...

 

[oali24]

6 minutes ago, heimdali said:

2000 is the first version that half-way worked.  It would have been nice if they had improved it instead of cancelling it.

 

It also crashed and didn't boot fast, that's why they should have improved it ...

 

I thought windows 2000 was the stable one?

[Needfuldoer]

35 minutes ago, oali24 said:

the early windows NT glory age

You're running it. 2000 was the first good version of NT. XP was the first great version of NT.

[porina]

For those who may not be so familiar with older OSes like this, Windows 2000 was part of the NT line which is carried on to this day. It was the basis for Windows XP, Vista, 7, 8, 10, 11... of note, it should not be confused with Windows Millennium Edition (ME) which was based on the Windows 95 branch. The 9x branch was the much less stable one, and also suffered badly from resource limitations. NT branch was generally solid, at least before they started adding a ton of baggage to it.

 

I've also long thought that Windows 2000 was peak Windows. Of course, it is missing a ton of stuff, both good and bad, compared to more modern Windows. But for its time, it was really great. It was so responsive. If you want to do something, it did it. None of the laaaaaaag of modern OSes, where the OS decides to spend many seconds just to display a folder listing that should be instant. It was mostly also before the nag era. Are you really sure you want to do that? I think that infection set in the later patches of Win2k, so it isn't all roses. Earlier SP were fine. 

[heimdali]

37 minutes ago, oali24 said:

I thought windows 2000 was the stable one?

It wasn't really stable, we still had to reboot every day or two, sometimes more often --- and that was with computers being turned off during non-working hours, so I wouldn't even really count it.  Back then, the Debian server I had put together from some old computer parts that were left behind made it to over 750 days uptime, until around that time, the counter ran over.  IIRC, it kept running until the power was switched off over a weekend when they needed to overhaul one of the transformers they had on the premises ...  When were done, it turned it back and it kept running as before.  Novell Netware was stable, too.

 

[heimdali]

12 minutes ago, porina said:

 None of the laaaaaaag of modern OSes, where the OS decides to spend many seconds just to display a folder listing that should be instant.

I don't have that and it would be an issue that needs fixing.  My computers are old and only the software and only the graphics card is up to date.

 

Or is it the newer, faster computers that do such things?

 

[Vishera]

From my experience using it the past month with modernish hardware i had a good experience.

- The shell environment is extremely responsive, perhaps the fastest shell experience in the history of Windows with XP as a close 2nd.

- The scheduler is awful for modern hardware, Windows 2000 just shoves most of the work unto 2 cores even if you have more than that.

- Extremely low RAM utilization, 300MB on idle

- 3.5GB RAM limit

- Installing HDMI drivers completely nuking audio across all devices, requiring you to reinstall the OS.

- Can natively run DOS apps and games, I enjoyed playing Duke Nukem 3D and Shadow Warrior.

- Can't run 64-bit application

- DirectX 9.0C Support, I enjoyed playing Tomb Raider Underworld, Devil May Cry 4, Max Payne 2, Call of Duty 4 - Modern Warfare and Age of Empires II

- Searching files is extremely quick, even on the 18 years old hard drive i use for this endeavor.

Spoiler

The motherboard i use for it has a lot of compatibility features, to the point where Windows 2000 just detected and found all of the drivers i need except for the drivers for the GPU.

In fact the installation was easier on this configuration than it was on a virtual machine.

 

Just now, porina said:

of note, it should not be confused with Windows Millennium Edition (ME) which was based on the Windows 95 branch. The 9x branch was the much less stable one, and also suffered badly from resource limitations.

The 9x branch was running on top of DOS, Using DOS as a kernel.

[porina]

22 minutes ago, heimdali said:

It wasn't really stable, we still had to reboot every day or two, sometimes more often --- and that was with computers being turned off during non-working hours, so I wouldn't even really count it.  Back then, the Debian server I had put together from some old computer parts that were left behind made it to over 750 days uptime

Were they being used for the same thing? I'm going to guess not. Win2k was solid for me. The only times it crashed were if I was doing something stupid with the hardware. 

 

14 minutes ago, heimdali said:

I don't have that and it would be an issue that needs fixing.  My computers are old and only the software and only the graphics card is up to date.

Small folders are fine, but try doing that on one with a LOT of files in it. It seems worse since Win10, and is independent of hardware. And this is with previews off, so it isn't generating thumbnails or other nonsense. Never bothered to look into it.

[Thomas4]

The best Windows was when it was still a GUI that installed over DOS and before they stole Dr. DOS and basterdized it into the Windows OS's

[heimdali]

27 minutes ago, porina said:

Were they being used for the same thing? I'm going to guess not. Win2k was solid for me. The only times it crashed were if I was doing something stupid with the hardware. 

Kinda, the Linux server was mainly used as a file server for w2k clients.  At home, Linux has always been way more stable than Windows since I switched from OS/2 to Linux instead of Windows when I tried out 95 and it didn't even take a day before it completely messed up itself.  Before that, 3.1 would crash every 2 to 15 minutes, and it might run for half an hour when you had unaffordable hardware with 8MB (not GB), or when you got it to run under OS/2.  3.1 on itself has never been usable.

27 minutes ago, porina said:

Small folders are fine, but try doing that on one with a LOT of files in it. It seems worse since Win10, and is independent of hardware. And this is with previews off, so it isn't generating thumbnails or other nonsense. Never bothered to look into it.

How many is "a lot"?  I've seen the so-called Finder on a Mac totally crash with only about 100k files in a directory.  As far as I can tell, they never fixed that bug.  Don't try ex2fs with 100k files, that does take while ...

[porina]

3 minutes ago, heimdali said:

Before that, 3.1 would crash every 2 to 15 minutes, and it might run for half an hour when you had unaffordable hardware with 8MB (not GB), or when you got it to run under OS/2.

3.x era? My memory is a bit fuzzy on exact timing but I'm thinking 386-486 timeframe? I recall 2 to 4 MB was typical around then, perhaps moving up to 8MB towards the end of 3.x. I don't know what you were doing but that didn't seem like the typical experience of the era.

 

I don't recall my attempts to run OS/2 with 8MB to be a great experience.

 

3 minutes ago, heimdali said:

How many is "a lot"?  I've seen the so-called Finder on a Mac totally crash with only about 100k files in a directory.  As far as I can tell, they never fixed that bug.

Never counted, but maybe many hundreds to thousands. I only really notice this when I'm moving data off local systems to my file server, and the network connection is the limit anyway so the display delay isn't so significant, hence never spending time looking into it. But this is just one of many examples of lack of responsiveness in modern OSes. 

[heimdali]

28 minutes ago, porina said:

3.x era? My memory is a bit fuzzy on exact timing but I'm thinking 386-486 timeframe? I recall 2 to 4 MB was typical around then, perhaps moving up to 8MB towards the end of 3.x. I don't know what you were doing but that didn't seem like the typical experience of the era.

Yes, 4MB were really expensive already and most ppl have didn't have that much.  Pentiums replaced the 3/486s and those didn't get 8MB either; they were more than sufficiently expensive already.  I have a theory that with more RAM, Windows took longer to realize that it was overwriting RAM it shouldn't, or took longer to crash before it realized.  On the expensive hardware, I resorted to reboot every half hour while I was working, and that made things easier.  Most of the time, it crashed before that.  But rebooting 4 times an hour would mean that I would get about only half as much work done.

28 minutes ago, porina said:

I don't recall my attempts to run OS/2 with 8MB to be a great experience.

Linux was much better.

28 minutes ago, porina said:

Never counted, but maybe many hundreds to thousands. I only really notice this when I'm moving data off local systems to my file server, and the network connection is the limit anyway so the display delay isn't so significant, hence never spending time looking into it. But this is just one of many examples of lack of responsiveness in modern OSes. 

Perhaps the disks of your server need to wake up first, causing the delay.  In that case, it becomes a question whether you want to have that much latency and save energy, wearing out your drives from all the parking --- or if you don't want delays, don't save energy and have your disks maybe last longer, perhaps until their bearings go.  It's an interesting topic and I don't have good answers for it.

 

[porina]

33 minutes ago, heimdali said:

I have a theory that with more RAM, Windows took longer to realize that it was overwriting RAM it shouldn't, or took longer to crash before it realized.

Win9x had a specific pool of ram shared between 3 resources. I don't recall what they were. And it also had memory leaks. When a resource runs out, Windows crashes. WinNT line at the least had separate pools for each of those resources, and not sure but I think it might even be per-app. So it basically didn't run out. If it was this, more total ram didn't impact it since it was fixed size.

 

Edit: had to look it up, it was this on 9x: https://www.techrepublic.com/article/monitor-windows-9x-me-system-resources-with-the-resource-meter/

 

33 minutes ago, heimdali said:

Perhaps the disks of your server need to wake up first, causing the delay. 

Nope, just browsing locally to get to what I need to move. 

[Ydfhlx]

Having used Windows XP, 7, 8, 8.1, 10, 11 and a few Linux distros - I must say that 10 is my favourite. Stable unlike Linux/7 (in my experience), customizable unlike 8/11, and the bloatware can be turned off/uninstalled.

[heimdali]

37 minutes ago, porina said:

Win9x had a specific pool of ram shared between 3 resources. I don't recall what they were. And it also had memory leaks. When a resource runs out, Windows crashes. WinNT line at the least had separate pools for each of those resources, and not sure but I think it might even be per-app. So it basically didn't run out. If it was this, more total ram didn't impact it since it was fixed size.

 

Edit: had to look it up, it was this on 9x: https://www.techrepublic.com/article/monitor-windows-9x-me-system-resources-with-the-resource-meter/

Other than testing 95 for maybe a quarter day before it failed and maybe half a day with someone who knew Windows better than I did trying to fix it together, I never did anything with 95.  It turned out to not to be fixable, so deleted it and installed Linux instead.  I only know that it kept crashing and not working all the time, and that 98 was even worse.  Then Vista made that even more worse.  Considering that, 2k was quite an improvement, like I said the first half-way usable version.

37 minutes ago, porina said:

Nope, just browsing locally to get to what I need to move. 

Maybe the disks in your client need to wake up first ...

 

[heimdali]

39 minutes ago, Ydfhlx said:

Having used Windows XP, 7, 8, 8.1, 10, 11 and a few Linux distros - I must say that 10 is my favourite. Stable unlike Linux/7 (in my experience), customizable unlike 8/11, and the bloatware can be turned off/uninstalled.

I basically have it only in VMs and on some touchscreen devices and basically do nothing with it other than installing it and fixing issues.  Almost all of them have no internet access, and the software running on them is limited to 3 different programs.  Even the touchscreens don't work right.  Fortunately, it doesn't crash often but needs to be restarted every now and then, so it's not really stable, either.  It sucks because since 10, every user needs their own VM.

 

What about all the spyware that comes with it, can that be deinstalled?

 

[Rex Hite]

I still use W2000 daily running one of my printers. Completely stable system with two decades of service on the same hardware except for an  SSD replacing the original HDD.

 

My best NT system was NT4.0 RISC 64 bit version on my DEC Alpha workstations. That remains the most snappy, quick and stable systems I have run. I was very disappointed when Microsoft discontinued support for the ALPHA processors for Windows 2000.

[wseaton]

Windows 2000 workstation was ok, but 2000 Server was utterly amazing on a desktop or laptop. It was also the last version of windows with static activation. 

 

I deployed thousands of 2000 servers, and Win2k was also the beginning of Active Directory. Watching Netware admins nearly poop their pants when you fired up some GPOs or in place shadow copy was highly amusing. Buh bye NDS and Rconsole. Win2k Server was rock solid without patching out of the box. I abused the hell out of it in Citrix farms, and unlike NT4 it was tough to kill. Microsoft, unlike today was really looking downstream with 2000 server. 

 

NT4 wasnt nearly as polished as Win2k, but it got the job done. Win2k server was replaced by Server 2003, and 2003 was iconic in the enterprise space.

 

Win2k workstation evolved into XP, but there was functionally not much difference in the kernels. Virtually everything in XP you could bolt into Win2k workstation. Server 2000 was vastly superior than both though. XP really needed a pentium 4 to be productive, and this explains why Win2k workstation was such an odd intermediate step. 

 

Biggest gripe I had with Win2k was its annoying habit of enabling IIS by default, which was a massive security issue . Whoever came up with that idea at Microsoft wears a helmet while riding a short bus to work. He must work in the cube next to the moron who designed early versions of IE to cache all temp files by default until they filled and crashed small HDs 

 

More good news is Win2k didn't install Net BEUI by default like NT4 did. If you haven't seen what NetBEUI does to a fast ethernet network just wait for the fans to kick on in your swiches.

 

 

 

 

[wseaton]

1 hour ago, Rex Hite said:

I still use W2000 daily running one of my printers. Completely stable system with two decades of service on the same hardware except for an  SSD replacing the original HDD.

 

My best NT system was NT4.0 RISC 64 bit version on my DEC Alpha workstations. That remains the most snappy, quick and stable systems I have run. I was very disappointed when Microsoft discontinued support for the ALPHA processors for Windows 2000.

I ran Nt351 and 4 on the DEC Alpha as servers. You aren't kidding - that platform hauled balz in low thread applications.  NT 3.51 on quad pentium pros was a multi tasking beast if you needed massive app stacking like Citrix boxes or Domino servers.

 

Microsoft had some really progressive ideas, a lot of which came from their involvement with IBM. Microsoft then went stupid listening to the carnival barkers at Intel about Itanium. They were then locked into the atrocious Netburst pipeline, which was adequate for desktops but garbage for servers.  MS should have kept MIPS/RISC support vs having to support trash tech like hyperthreading. 

[cretsiah]

i didnt get to play with windows 2000 so i cant comment specifically bout win 2000..... we went from

 

98SE to win XP then Win7

 

and i still think win XP AND win 7 run rings around win10

 

my daughter loves the fact that we were able to put win 7 back on her Ryzen 5 3600 with Asus B450m-a motherboard been running buttery smooth for the last 2 months, no crashes, no boot loops, no driver file errors,  just get things done attitude

 

on the other hand though .... my system has died 

[Gorden]

I want to install Windows 2000 on my Lenovo l520 but it gives a bluescreen
I tried to integrate drivers into the dist
using nlight but didn't work and I can't install uniATA because OS still has not been installed but the laptop is fully compatible with Windows XP and drivers 
the setup starts without any errors with orginal cd in xp so what to do for windows 2000  Please HELP ME GUYS

[Mark Kaine]

On 11/3/2022 at 8:40 PM, heimdali said:

2000 is the first version that half-way worked. 

excuse me?? 3.1 95 etc all worked just fine lol... still have a win 98 install on an old pentium... nothing wrong with it,  it actually still feels snappy (for the most part lol)