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Comment by rayiner | Hacker News Reader

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rayiner·

How was it better than Win2K?

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Better hardware support.

Taskbar grouping.

ClearType.

Remote Desktop.

More games ran on it (mostly thanks to higher DirectX version).

From developer perspective, XP was the first version of Windows with registration-free COM and side-by-side assemblies, which (if used properly by app devs) fully solved the "DLL hell" problem.

A huge percentage of XP drivers worked just fine in w2k - sometimes you had to edit the ini or inf file or whatever it was.

They often just shipped the same driver for both.

IIRC it was almost always the video card driver; I ran W2K for quite a few years into the XP era before moving to XP with 2K theme. Everything was happy except the video card drivers, which were often "XP-only" but actually worked fine with 2k.

It had Pinball, Solitaire and other games we never really understood.

Lots of relatively small UI improvements that all added up. I honestly never noticed them until years later when I had to use a slightly older machine and had an "oh wow" moment.

Win2k Pro was peak Windows.

For me the look and feel of Win XP was breath of fresh air compared to Windows 98. WinXP was more user friendly and I was not a power user back then.

Vectored Exception Handlers.

Better support for dealing with "we never tested outside of windows 98" apps.

early version of SxS.

Various small enhancements.

Multiple users on a same machine out of the box and way faster boot time.

Didn't care for the UI, though - looked childish...

Win2K did multiple users more or less the same, the only difference I remember from XP is the login screen that would list all accounts so you didn't have to type the username.

As for UI, it was very easy to switch to classic mode.

> Win2K did multiple users more or less the same

No, it didn't. You had to use some 3rd party software for that.

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