Twenty years ago, Microsoft released Windows 2000. A rock-solid, 32-bit business-oriented alternative to Windows 98 and Windows Millennium Edition, it paved the way for future consumer versions, including Windows 10. Here’s why we remember it so fondly.
Windows 2000 was definitely an important release, and many people seem to have good memories of it. I personally never used it back when it was new, and I never liked Windows XP. The only Windows release I truly have fond memories of – other than 95 and 3.11, which I used as a kid and can be attributed to pure nostalgia – is Windows Server 2003. I used it as my regular desktop operating system, and it always felt more stable, safer, and faster than XP.
Regardless, like Server 2003, Windows 2000 defaulted to the utilitarian beauty that is the Windows Classic theme, something Microsoft really ought to bring back to modern releases of Windows.
This was the Windows that brought me back to Windows for a few years. It was stable and the interface was mostly consistent. There were some games that wouldn’t run in the beginning, but after XP came out, they were suddenly compatible.
Mine was the RM233-2PRQQ version. In my country, Microsoft did not have a presence, so that was the only one you could buy. It did what it was supposed to do, and stayed out of the way the rest of the time, which is really all that I want my operating system to do. The interface got wildly inconsistent starting with Windows XP.
“Forgotten”?
It has not been forgotten in the security circles. It was known also for its horrendous low level network apis which enabled so many exploits.
Still, I loved it and Windows XP was serious downgrade for end users.
loic,
Damn! You just got painful memories of networks with Win Server 2003 + Win 2000 Pro, zombiefied by virus, I had to clean.
Thank you very much to ruin my day! 😉
I really liked Win 2000 Pro. Win 7 and 2000 Pro were the best OS MS products ever.
loic,
Can you refresh my memory what you are referring to specifically? Are you positive it was the “API”? Or was it really the implementation?
I could not find any journalistic pointer about this, but it was a non privileged access to raw ip sockets. Combined with a ton of available exploits and no default firewall integrated in the OS, it was among others a paradise for DDoS botnet builders,
I used it for a decade. In the end I had to trick DirectX to install the necessary versions for gaming, as newer DirectX claimed it didn’t support Win2k, but since the win2k kernel was identical to WinXP, the limitations were purely artificial.
Not quite “identical”. Windows XP was a reskinned Windows 2000 in the same way Windows 7 was a reskinned Vista.
Sure, the fundamentals are pretty similar, but there’s still a few tweaks and changes that make them slightly incompatible. you can’t just load anything from XP into 2000 and expect it to work out of the box.
There was some tracing functions missing. They had to be patched out. Everything else just worked. I did just that for years..
And Vista and Windows 7 had more significantly different kernels. XP and 2K were originally same, only the user libraries differed, though the patched versions separated as more was added to XP than to 2K.
I’ve used Windows 2000, however much later than it was intended to.
Windows 2000 was the last Windows version to ship without any licensing mechanism, meaning you could install it with nothing but the disk (image), making it a wonderful system for those less inclined to purchase a legitimate copy.
As a BeOS refugee, I tried using Mandrake Linux as my desktop, and wow was that painful in 2000-ish. At some point I got fed up with OS updates breaking grub (seriously?! wtf) and gave Windows 2000 a try. It was actually not awful to use, and it was rock solid. It also managed to play all the PC games I’d been dual-booting for.
Now I’m barely tolerating Windows 10’s awful UI and considering a move back to Linux (probably Mint). I’ve got a fairly short list of things that are keeping me from switching (no proper Backblaze client, no Sync.com client, games, OneNote, ToDo) but everything else I usually use already supports Linux.
chrish,
Grub’s given me a lot of problems too. I have a bad taste for it, by contrast syslinux always remained rock solid for me. I don’t like that grub won over syslinux, not only did syslinux have better compatibility, but it was much simpler. It’s days are numbered unfortunately and it hasn’t been supported for years. Now I use grub like everyone else but I still feel it’s a missed opportunity to keep things simple.
Alfman: Now I use grub like everyone else.
Lilo user here.
syslinux user here…
Windows 2000 was straight forward Windows with classic themes and no fancy background processes.
Used it as a desktop at work for many years, less work than Windows XP, just like Windows 7 is less work than running Windows 8 or 10 in my opinion.
These days you can even run it in a browser (your browser acts like a VM in Javascript):
https://bellard.org/jslinux/
It was visually boring, consistent and thus perfect to me. It was before the playskool era.
I enjoyed the jumbled metaphor of an ecosystem that was a house of cards built on top of a patchwork. I suppose it could be an ecosystem of booklice. Maybe the house of cards is built on someone’s bed.
Bah Win 2K isn’t forgotten, it was used in the SMB circles for many MANY years. If you want a forgotten Windows I’d say XP X64 (which was just Win 2K3 with an easy to remove XP skin) would be more obscure but it was a DAMN fine OS. Great performance, little to no bloat, solid as a rock, just turn off the Fisher Price UI and you had a really good workstation OS that could handle oodles of RAM and cores, it was just lovely and after trying the train wreck that wwas Vista I stuck with XP X64 until Win 7 RTM.
I’m wondering why Windows 10 has to be so ugly. Windows used to look so much better in the past.
They had to redo the display part of the OS for high pixel density screens, then they also had to passively aggressively force failed Metro/Windows 8 designs on us.
“then they also had to passively aggressively force failed Metro/Windows 8 designs on us.”
But it’s nigh on unusable. EVERYTHING they made beforehand was orders of magnitudes more clear, and much more usable. This move to flat UI’s with transparency and few shadows and no distinctive borders often leaves users in the situation where the start of one windows and the end of another is barely distinguishable, if at all.
If someone offered the Windows 1.0 UI in place of the Windows 10 one, i’d jump at it in a heartbeat. That’s how bad the Windows 10 UI is…
I bought a boxed copy of Windows 2000 after the XP release, and it sold for roughly twice the price, probably because of product activation in XP. One of the reasons it might be remembered so fondly is because even at the time it was a good product and was priced accordingly.
Although the classic theme existed after 2000, it wasn’t the development focus and wasn’t quite as clean. 2000 was the last release where it looked like developers considered the “correct” value of each pixel. As screen resolutions increased, this gave way to UIs that are algorithmic but approximate. After 2000, we saw things like Cleartype, window shadows, and ultimately DWM and scaled PNG icons, where precision is just not possible. I really miss the concept of a deliberate and precise UI.
I used 2000 as my main OS until the Windows 7 release in 2009. It worked quite well for most of that time. Today it’s much more challenging to use, because XP was supported for so long and there’s a lot more software available for it than 2000. Many development tools today still support targeting XP, which is why things like Putty can still support it. Targeting 2000 requires either very old tools or a willingness to work around tools.
XP is the perfect balance of simplicity, resource efficiency, and compatibility. It’s lightweight, meaning it will run well on ANYTHING made in the last 10 years. It’s simple to work, and there’s masses of software out there for it, much still being supported.
Yes, using it as a daily OS is a dumb idea. But for things like a PuTTY terminal, or running oscilloscope software, or other standalone specialist software, i’d choose XP over 7/8/10 in a heartbeat.
Just don’t plug it into the internet!
My favorite was Windows XP. I didn’t care for the fisher price look, but I made it look like the classic Windows. It was great, I used it from the time it was released till 2006, that’s when I moved over to Ubuntu and did not dual boot.
“I assumed the weird lockups, or freezes, or erratic error messages were to be expected from any platform. But I’m encouraged to hear there is a more stable platform than Win98.”
This comment in the article is very telling… What keeps people on windows is a lack of awareness that anything else exists.
Back when people were struggling with regular crashes on windows, there were plenty of highly stable platforms available. SunOS, IRIX, HPUX, Tru64 etc not to mention Linux.
Software is the only thing keeping people running away to other platforms. Give me native Adobe applications, Autocad, Line of Business, device drivers, etc. and I’ll switch every business to Linux in less than a year. But you can’t do that, so you are stuck with what gets the work done.
Win2K was one of my favorites.
Windows 2000 was fantastic. I hung onto that OS for as long as I could.. I eventually jumped directly to Windows 7, which was another great OS and unfortunately (or fortunately) the last Microsoft OS I’ll ever use on bare metal. I keep a Win 7, WinXP, and Win2000 around in a VM, but they seem to get used less and less as time goes by.