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Comment by pwned1 | Hacker News Reader

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

Windows XP is Windows 2000 with a theme. Though the difference in resources was Win2k could run on 32MB of ram, and XP ran on 256, despite being the same OS with the same functionality, even the same drivers.

If you had beefy enough hardware, which we all eventually did years after XP came out, it ran as fast and almost as stable as 2000.

If you didn't mind the bland theme, and wanted higher FPS while gaming, with more responsiveness (less of a delay when double clicking on a window, for example) then running Windows 2000 over XP was a no brainer. In competitive first person shooter circles at the time, people preferred Win2k to XP for these reasons.

xp ran under 64 and 128 too. But with 128 was a bit slow.

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.

Yes Win2000 was perfect from the start, xp really was a nightmare until sp2 and got really stable when sp3 came. But W2k is still my favorite windows version.

Interestingly, 'bloated' was exactly the word used most often to describe XP on forums back then.

That Fisher Price colored theme though...

XP's classic mode looked somewhat like Windows 98/2000.

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

I did the same but I recall there was a few elements that remained - the windows logo on the start menu was a bit colourful, and a few other bits couldn’t be changed too

The Windows logo in the Start menu was a bit colorful in Windows 95 and NT 4.0 as well. I'll grant you that the logo itself is slightly different in XP, but it had been colorful for years by that point.

It was also commonplace to use the UXTheme patcher to enable third-party custom window themes. I used the Watercolor theme, which was modeled after the Whistler beta builds before they (bafflingly) switched it out for Luna.

I have a soft spot for Windows 2000 because I was very impressed with it when it first came out (coming from Win9x), but there wasn't much point to using it over XP after XP came out. Windows XP is just an improved version of 2000, and it was updated for much longer. Windows 2000 doesn't even support wi-fi without third-party utilities.

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