> 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.)