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Comment by thought_alarm | Hacker News Reader

I actually hated Win2K when it came out and tried to hold to NT 4.0 as long as I could, although I'm sure some of that was just youthful arrogance.

If I recall correctly, Win2K was a lot slower than NT 4.0 on the same hardware, and it featured some really bad UI ideas, like menus that auto-hide advanced menu items.

By the time XP was released I gave up the fight.

The initial XP theme was just awful; clearly a knee-jerk reaction to the OS X Aqua. It's too bad. The MS Whistler prototype screenshots looked great.

https://guidebookgallery.org/screenshots/whistler2257

The later XP theme (Powerpack?) was half decent.

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Some would say even today that it was NT4 that was the pinnacle. There are many things that can be said, but indeed Win2k was a hog compared to NT4 while being a fairly modest improvement (despite all the new features like Active Directory).

I'm sympathetic to that point of view, I loved NT4 too. I really liked the warmer shade of gray in W2K, but to me the biggest improvement W2K had over NT4 was the ability to revert to the previous display setting if you didn't confirm the new setting. I remember one time setting the refresh rate higher than my CRT monitor could handle on NT4, leaving me with a blank display. I had to borrow the better CRT monitor from my boss's office so that I could go back to a lower refresh rate.

Nowadays I only run Windows 2000 in a VM, and CRT refresh rate is no longer a concern, it may be worth considering going backing to NT4, as I'm pretty sure I can set the background to the warmer W2K gray in NT4. Thanks for the idea!

I remember those menus. Office 2000 had them as well. You had a menu with the options, but there was also an option to expand the menu, which revealed more options, with a lighter gray background than the main options.

It was an interesting idea about how to combat the problem of having too many menu items, but it wasn't great for discoverability. I can understand why it faded out.

Nice theme, never saw it. Tabs, dropdowns and scrollbar slightly off, title bar decoration quickly becomes invasive, otherwise - super.

Title bar, menubar and toolbar nicely muted down on background windows. Very professional look. And taskbar - so clean. Thank you, I like it even more than Classic theme.

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