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I remember preferring Windows 2000 but can’t remember exactly why. Very similar to 98 but felt more refined somehow.

Windows 2000 was based on NT. While it had the Windows 98 interface it was very different underneath. It's a bit bonkers, but MS sold two superficially-identical operating systems for five plus years, that were in reality, about as different as two OSes could be; different histories, different underlying architecture, little code shared between the kernels and only part of the userland. And yet the two OS families had almost exactly the same UI and API.

it made sense at the time, pcs had limited ram and win98 ran much better.

With a decent amount of RAM, though, 2000 was far more stable.

I think you need to understand that most people maybe had 16~32MB of system RAM on average circa 1999, while Windows 2000 ideally wanted at least a staggering 128MB as just a sysreq recommendation. Windows 98 was fine with 16MB minimum or even 8MB with some wizardry.

How much did 128MB of RAM cost in 1999? According to a Reddit thread that Copilot found, about $370 in 2020 dollars[1]. Copilot also dug up another thread[2] where people reminisced about RAM capacity and pricing in the 90s.

So in very basic terms, 128MB of RAM (let alone more!) back then would be like buying 128GB of RAM today. Most people simply aren't going to buy ~$400 of RAM just like that, especially when upgrade cycles were also much shorter than today.

There was a very practical reason Windows 9x existed alongside Windows NT until XP merged the lines in 2001 when 256~512MB of RAM and more became much more affordable.

[1]: https://www.reddit.com/r/mac/comments/finsjm/how_much_did_12...

[2]: https://www.vogons.org/viewtopic.php?t=62239

Indeed. I remember running Windows 95 on a 32MB machine and stayed on Windows 95 even after 98, 98SE, ME, 2000 were released simply because that's what worked well on the machines I had at the time. IRRC I had a P166MMX with 32MB of RAM from 1997 which remained my main machine for some years. Win95 only needed the correct drivers for the newer post-1995 hardware. I ended up skipping 98, 98SE, ME, 2000 and going straight to XP for my next upgrade at some point in the early 2000's as I had acquired a new machine which couldn't run Windows 95 without a whole lot of patches and Firefox eventually dropped support for Windows 95. By then the hardware I had was good enough that XP worked fine.

> I think you need to understand that most people maybe had 16~32MB of system RAM on average circa 1999, while Windows 2000 ideally wanted at least a staggering 128MB as just a sysreq recommendation.

I do understand. I was there. My personal PCs from that time had 16MB (a getting old AMD 5x86 133) and 32MB (Celeron 300A w/ the 450Mhz "mod"), and I ran Linux and Windows 95/98 on them. I didn't get W2K at home until late 2001 and that was only because I splurged.

Windows 2000 was a ridiculous luxury item for home users at the time, but for business PCs it was a real winner. It was so much more stable than Windows 95/98. The "we build PCs" shop I worked at did a good job of convincing business Customers to spend the extra money for stability. Only a minority bit on the idea, but people definitely talked about seeing fewer reboots and better multitasking w/ the W2K machines. It helped sell itself.

(We also did least-privilege user accounts all the way back in the NT 4.0 days. "Cleaning up" the malware of the day was so easy because, by and large, you could just blow away the user's profile and start with a fresh registry. Since the user didn't have Administrator rights making machine-wide changes was "off limits" for most malware of the time.)

Indeed. When Microsoft called them Windows NT 4.0 Workstation and Windows 2000 Professional, they damn well meant it.

You said "decent amount of RAM" in a very nonchalant fashion, so I felt that maybe a reorienting of the focal lens was necessary. RAM today is so mundane everyone wastes it without a care in the world[1], but it wasn't always this way.

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39920226

IIRC one of 2000s main design advantages is that when a installer tried to crap various dlls into the windows directory it redirected them back to their own install and only used them for that program. This basically solved the dll hell problem that tended to rot 9x installs after 6 months.

I was a cheap ass but I remember ponying up for extra ram and switching to 2000 quite early which is something I never do these days.

> Windows 98 was fine with 16MB minimum or even 8MB with some wizardry.

I ran Win95 in 1995 for a few months on 4MB of RAM.

> most people maybe had 16~32MB of system RAM on average circa 1999

For old computers maybe. I never actually heard of anyone doing an upgrade-install of Windows though.

I had 64MB in ... probably 1998 and we weren't even a computer-focused household. And your second link seems to back that up ("early 1999"), and that was a major improvement that basically obsoleted our old '95 computer but managed to last until well into the XP era ... huh, which is actually only the same 3 years apart, though we got SP1 which was a year after that.

It's kind of weird how Microsoft released a different OS each year for 4 years in a row.

98 to XP was 3 years.

98 to 98 SE to 2000 to XP and back to 2000 was all in A short time.

> I never actually heard of anyone doing an upgrade-install of Windows though.

You should read the whole thread, then.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39986341

Some users had to install DOS, then Win3, then Win9x, just to get to (say) Win98SE.

It was a thing.

IBM sold an entire edition of OS/2 Warp that required you to already have Windows 3.1 installed in order to use Windows compatibility. It was called the "Red Spine" edition:

https://www.os2museum.com/wp/os2-history/os2-warp/

2000 is what you ran if you were hosting your lan party. 98 is what you had if you were invited to your friends lan party.

Driver support was also terrible for a long time.

It was an interesting time. Until NT4.0, NT supported intel, Power PC, Alpha and MIPS architectures. And until Windows 2000, NT could run OS/2 apps.

NT kernel with it's related stability, true-color interface, no XP "fisher price" UI. 2000 was probably the pinnacle of that era's design language. Ironically, XP made it more feasible to use 2000 day to day as drivers for XP worked on the earlier 2000.

Re: XP UI — did you ever try Windows Server 2003?

Server 2003 was my daily driver on a laptop for a few years. Most XP software ran fine but it had none of the XP visual cruft. Until Windows 7 it was peak Windows for me.

I ran that rare beast, Windows XP64. It was basically Server2003 x64 with the XP UI.

Driver compatibility was terrible, as you might expect, but it could support a vast amount of memory (relative to XP). I used the base O/S only to run VMware Workstation, and then ran small instances of XP, each dedicated to a task like audio, video, etc, on top of that. Along with FreeBSD and various flavors of Linux.

That was my daily driver until late 2010. Solid as a rock.

XP64 was an odd animal.

I had a Customer who usd it to run Unigraphics CAD. The Dell Precision machines they had with factory-loaded XP64 were fine. Trying to get their random other machines to run it w/ working audio, video, and chipset drivers was a pain.

I never ran it as a desktop OS myself. I installed plenty of the server version it was based on (W2K3 x64) but those boxes always had standard VGA drivers, no audio, and sometimes a RAID controller driver, but that was usually it.

I adopted XP64 kind of late IIRC (after Vista introduction) so the driver situation seemed fine to me. I had a cheap USB 56K modem I had to replace but otherwise all my hardware worked.

Was that XP for x86-64 or XP for Itanium? I'd imagine both were pretty rare.

IIRC you could actually run XP themes on 2k3 if you started the theme service. Under the hood they were almost the same exact same kernel (I think server / 5.2 had a slightly different IP stack and some server tweaks for task scheduling, shadow volumes and memory caching).

Likewise if you wanted the non XP (Luna I think it was called?) styles you could just stop the theme service and it was effectively win2k style.

> Under the hood they were almost the same exact same kernel

Literally the exact same kernel if you count XP x64 Edition. Even the exact same Windows Updates apply to both. :)

But yeah, Windows XP (32-bit; NT 5.1) and Server 2003 (NT 5.2) were pretty close. The latter was pretty much "XP Server Edition", albeit some significant kernel changes were made, especially to improve network performance.

It was the only time that the client and server versions of NT had diverged. Granted, the Windows Server team didn't feel like NT 6.0 was ready for the primetime when Vista launched, but instead of having two branches of the operating system again, Windows Server 2008 was launched identifying as "Service Pack 1" from the get-go, with Windows Vista's SP1 updating the OS to include all of the underlying improvements made for Server 2008. From that point forward, they were the same, including the same Windows Updates. It's also the point that Windows Vista got all of its technical flaws fixed. (Reputation flaws not withstanding, it wouldn't be until Windows Vista SP3 aka Windows 7, that the reputation would get reset...)

XP "fisher price" UI was trivial to disable in settings, giving you that same slate gray look of 98/2K, but with 24-bit color icons.

This was actually possible to do all the way up to and including Win7, which even had the icon taskbar working in that "Windows Classic" theme. And it was very good design - pretty easy on the eyes and not distracting, but you could also tell which element is which easily at a glance (unlike these days, when everything is flat).

I know this sounds petty but the XP’s Classic’s task bar gray was ever slightly off from Windows 2000 and it drove me nuts. I think Windows 2000 was visually the best.

Once you were back to the 9x/2k style chrome, I'm fairly sure you also had access to the older style of color/size customization for it as well. On a minor tangent, I miss how well the high contrast theme used to display on windows itself and the majority of applications that were still made within that standard toolkit, using it now seems to lack polish and most applications are doing their own thing within their window.

It was slightly warmer than 2K (which itself was noticeably warmer than 98).

However, the nice thing about the Windows Classic theme is that you could change all of the colors arbitrarily, including the bezels.

While you could disable the fisher price theme in XP (and Vista and 7), even in classic theme you still had the "plastic" icons.

Yup, but this was all customizable. In fact it even included the old icons in the box - they were used if you ever set it to use 8-bit color mode - so you just needed to point the shell at the right DLLs in the registry (for which there were third-party utilities).

It's so sad to look back and remember how insanely customizable desktop UI was back then, compared to what we have now. In Win11, you can't even have a vertical taskbar anymore.

I always thought that the Windows XP color theme was vastly over hated. I thought it looked nice, but even if one didn't enjoy it, I cannot understand why people acted like it killed their dog.

It was grating. If XP had worked on release as well as it did three years later there would have been little complaining.

But having that UI show up in 640 VGA because it couldn’t find drivers would make you angry, and you’d take it out on it.

I hated the blue and red default but was fine with the two other alternatives.

USB flash drives worked out of box without drivers? Maybe that was just me...

The gradient on the "My Computer" icon was also very satisfying: https://www.howtogeek.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/windows...

In general I’m a fan of the aesthetic of Win2K’s icons. Strikes a nice middleground between old and new, and as you’ve described it’s just satisfying somehow.

IIRC, Windows 2000 had an overall bluer theme that reduced the green background and orange-tinged 3D colors of 98, and brought in a new set of icons. Also, it added alpha blending to GDI and started using it in Explorer.

It also used a lighter base gray than 95/98 did, which contributed to it feeling significantly less dreary. This is why for me, the canonical “classic Windows” theme is the 2k version.

The base color also had an off-white beige tone to it. To this day I'm curious if this was made as an attempt to counter balance the usual white balance of pc monitors at the time, which where set at or above 9300K, producing a blue-ish tint.

When win2000 was still in testing (was this called Memphis, can't remember) the UI elements like the X to close the window would light up in blue. Never made it to release.

I ran Windows 2000 from the last beta until they stopped supporting it. The only thing I ever loved more were my Commodore 64, my Amiga 500 and Blue/White G3 tower running Mac OS and Mac OS X. It was extremely consistent in terms of UX, more so than Windows 98 that had all kinds of 16-bit cruft left in it.

It did not use a lot of resources, I was a bit of a tweaker back then and I just shut down any services I didn't need for home use and it was absolutely fine on 64MB.

It ran all games and applications that I tried to run.

I HATED the Windows XP UI, never installed it. Why install something slower and uglier? 2000 was way better out of the box without ever experiencing issues in terms of compatibility.

It's true Vista had a ton of nice new features under the hood, but the inconsistency in terms of UX of every Windows version after 2000 felt extremely off-putting.

I remember editing driver INI files to get newer video cards to install on 2000. They’d ship with XP drivers but you just needed to modify the INI to let them show up and work in 2K.

For me it was the top window gradient. I think in win98 it was 256 colors and in windows 2000 it was 16-bit

Win 2000 is the first MS Windows that did not crash very often. I used it as my primary desktop OS for as long as I could until I switched to XP. The best Windows IMHO.

I agree. I still feel deeply nostalgic for Windows 2000. Everything was instant. And almost every program did more than what Slack does today and yet Slack is sluggishly slow. We went wrong somewhere.

100%. And the UI is intuitive. If it looks like a button, it is. The scrollbar doesn't disappear randomly and actually is wide enough to grab easily.

Everything deteriorated once they went to the flat design. I need to find out which consultancy made the recommendation and everyone followed.

Flat design was welcomed by a lot of designers as it required far lesser skill compared to designers before the flat era. As a result it spread rapidly.

Thanks for the explanation, but why? Is drawing a proper button that hard comparing to a rectangle?

This might be a bit disingenuous. Another slightly less insulting yet equally valid interpretation is that design as a whole has shifted over the last decade plus to value form over function. The current unbridled minimalist aesthetic has a futuristic look attracts companies that want to look futuristic (Apple, Tesla, Microsoft…)

And for companies that aren’t leaders? Many of them want to be seen as such anyway, or at least not seen as irrelevant. (We might remember how X started popping up in all manner of names when XP came out.)

To some degree there is room for this as long as function remains a primary goal, however we might reasonably argue that the current competition in technology is to look sleek, not to actually empower end users, leading to a design language that’s main purpose is to look nice but not be ultimately useful.

It was, but before it, NT 3.51 was both very fast and very stable... if you could tolerate the Program Manager/File Manager UI.

NT 4 reorganised the kernel and that badly impacted stability. Win2K fixed that.

I didn't get the chance to use NT 3/4 but maybe that's for another day!

I still remember the day my father installed Windows 3.1, pure magic. I have never used any GUI OS before that (that was DOS and then we went straight for Win 3.1).

I did set up one NT4 box in the 21st century.

I was building a PC for a broke mate of mine, and all I had to spare was about 40MB of RAM. The choice was either Windows ME, which didn't run great in that little, or NT4, for which it was quite generous.

NT4 looked like Win95 and it was quite solid. No power management, no USB support, not FAT32, but it didn't crash. WinME did all them but was not very stable.

NT changed significantly over its lifetime. I deployed and supported all versions in production.

NT 3.1: first release. Big, slow, no long filenames on FAT, needed a crazy 32MB of RAM in 1993, meaning a £5000+ PC. But very solid, and great networking.

NT 3.5: LFNs on FAT. Bit smaller and faster and more stable.

NT 3.51: a classic release. Smaller and faster still. I ran my home fileserver on NT 3.51 for years, in 8MB of RAM. Slow on the console, fine over a 10Mb/sec LAN. Absolutely rock solid, very quick.

NT 4: finally you get Explorer and the Win95 desktop, but bigger, slower, less stable. No plug'n'play, only very rudimentary power management, little to no useful 3D support. Not much use on laptops. But looked as good as Win95/98 and was as easy to use.

NT 5, AKA "Windows 2000": finally, full power management, full PnP, hotplug, USB, FAT32. All the good stuff that NT4 couldn't do. Bigger, slower, but very solid and worked well.

NT 5.1, AKA "Windows XP": Win2K plus themes, some bundled junk you can't uninstall like Movie Maker. Boots faster, much quicker hibernation/resume... and that is all. Bigger, slower, looks cheap and plastic.

I preferred W2K.

> NT 5, AKA "Windows 2000"

First (and so far last) OS I bought with my own money. Well, as a separate purchase -- have bought a couple of laptops since then. So probably the last OS I'll ever pay for as a purchase of its own.

> NT 5.1, AKA "Windows XP": ... looks cheap and plastic.

There was a "Use Classic look" (or theme, whatever) check-box in the Control Panel that made it look like W95 / NT4 / W2K. Check, problem fixed. That hung around in Vista / W7 too.

> I preferred W2K.

I preferred W7 -- the early variants (but after that essential Service pack, 3 was it?), because after a while they started disabling some of the above-mentioned stuff in the Control Panel. And towards the end not even doing those changes directly in the Registry kept its effect after a reboot. :-(

> First OS I bought with my own money.

OS/2 2.0 for me.

> There was a "Use Classic look" (or theme, whatever) check-box

Not exactly, but you could select the unthemed theme, effectively turning themes off, then go into the Services management console and disable the Theming service.

But it was extra work, and most people didn't do it.

In a world where people curate collections of classic icons, e.g.

https://alexmeub.com/projects/windows-98-icons/

... and discuss looks and themes, and GNOME >=40 tries to disable theming, I think it's relevant and legitimate to point the finger at the point the rot set in to the extent that Windows itself adopted themes as standard. As well as them not being very good themes.

(Come back NeXTstep, all is forgiven. NeXT was right: greyscale is adequate for classic beauty.)

> I preferred W7

A different thing, I think.

XP is what drove me off Windows. (I should be grateful for that.) But I tried it last year and to my shock I liked it:

https://www.theregister.com/2023/07/24/dangerous_pleasures_w...

Since Vista, the resource footprint of Windows hasn't changed massively. Win7 is Vista point one. Win8 is Vista point two, which makes 7.1 either Vista point 2.1 or point 3.

10 is a bit bigger but it's really 8.1 cleaned up. Call it NT 6.4 or 6.5.

I haven't dug deep into 11 -- I detest it -- but it's only a .1 really.

> the early variants (but after that essential Service pack, 3 was it?)

No idea what this means.

Win7 never even got to SP2.

> Not exactly, but you could select the unthemed theme, effectively turning themes off, then go into the Services management console and disable the Theming service.

Is that what I did? Maybe. If that whole "Theming" thing arrived in XP or Vista, I must have been disabling that as just a one-click preliminary to going into the basic "Appearance" Control Panel item -- the same dialog where you'd set border widths, background colours, and menu fonts since Windows 95 (or possibly a sub-dialog thereof, "Advanced" or something) -- to click "use [Classic | Windows 2000 | NT4 | Windows 95 | whatever] look", and then customise it from there, just like in W95. This latter is the only bit I recall with any certainty.

> > the early variants (but after that essential Service pack, 3 was it?)

> No idea what this means. Win7 never even got to SP2.

No, duh, you're right -- I must have gotten it mixed up with XP; that only really stabilised after SP3, didn't it?

So there was no such cut-off for 7; that was functionally fine from the start -- but then after some diffuse amount of time got progressively worse in terms of UI backward compatibility. Which is why I prefer some unspecified "early" iteration of it.

So far, fortunately, I've managed to avoid W11, except for a couple of months at the job I had in the end of 2022. But, sigh, I suppose it can't be avoided forever... :-(

> Is that what I did? Maybe.

I don't know! The 2 part thing is necessary if you want the performance back. If you only care about it looking like older versions, and don't object to wasting a few hundred MB and a few % of CPU, you don't need to disable the service.

My guide on this is a blind friend of mine, and he is super extra fussy plus plus about system responsiveness and wants the maximum possible performance. :-)

> If that whole "Theming" thing arrived in XP or Vista

There are 2 different things.

XP introduced themes, but they are effectively 2D textures on the old GDI display server.

Vista replaced the GDI with Aero, a compositing window manager that uses a 3D card to render textures onto flat window objects -- a method taken from Apple's Quartz Extreme display server, and also now used in most Linuxes as well. That's how come Vista brought transparency effects in: it's the GPU compositor doing that.

Side-effect: console windows can no longer be toggled to/from full-screen with Alt+Enter. Which was very useful for cleaning up screen corruption, but is rarely needed any more.

> I must have been disabling that as just a one-click preliminary to going into the basic "Appearance" Control Panel item

[Nod]

> No idea what this means. Win7 never even got to SP2.

No, duh, you're right -- I must have gotten it mixed up with XP; that only really stabilised after SP3, didn't it?

[Wiggles head]

SP3 was a big one and the OS at least got a fair bit less insecure after it. That's when the Windows Firewall appeared, IIRC.

> So there was no such cut-off for 7; that was functionally fine from the start

Yeah, but it was just a point-release of Vista, really.

There isn't a lot of difference between Vista + SP1 and Win7. But it had its bad reputation before the SP and never lost it.

> got progressively worse in terms of UI backward compatibility

Oh, my, yes, agreed.

> Which is why I prefer some unspecified "early" iteration of it.

Fair.

> So far, fortunately, I've managed to avoid W11, except for a couple of months at the job I had in the end of 2022. But, sigh, I suppose it can't be avoided forever... :-(

Nope. But I think a community will try to keep 10 alive as long as it can.

W11 feels to me like "Windows for people who don't really know how to use Windows", but then, Office 2007 and all successive versions felt the same: Office for people who don't know how to use Office.

I do know Office. Especially Word, to a less extent Excel. 2007 broke it and it's never got any better.

So I stopped using Office, except for old versions of Word, because LibreOffice doesn't have an outliner.

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