I used win2k for like 10 years and continued to play games it as well. I was able to ride on the XP coat tails because between the two, there were only a handful of win32 APIs that were not implemented in 2000. I ended up having to patch a few DLLs to ignore these missing endpoints, but it meant I could use legitimately the best windows there ever was for a few more years. Eventually I "upgraded" to windows 7 to get reasonable driver support because manufacturers finally stopped shipping 2k compatible drivers.. what a sad day that was.

PC Magazine had the weird idea of shipping a CD-ROM of the Beta release. Having an obsession to try anything I decided to replace win98 with this thing (I had no idea what NT was).

It was so lean, fast and stable that I never used anything else until the day XP had some drivers that were absolutely necessary to use my desktop. 99% of low level crashes would just pop up a notification and nothing more, it was insane.