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Comment by LooseMarmoset | Hacker News Reader

I would argue that Windows 2000 was the last decent version of Windows. Fast, non-bloated, ran DirectX and games better than Windows 98 ever did, and as stable an operating system as I'd ever run.

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Quite a few games originally written for Win9x didn't work on 2K. I remember XP being an improvement in that regard.

win2k was my favorite. had a slipstream install with games i grinded and nothing else and it was the fastest desktop experience i've ever experienced to this day

And yet, Win98 (or ME if you consider that a working OS) was the last OS where there was no "system" account with higher privileges than the user. Win2000 was the first OS that gave me the "access denied" message.

I'm still looking for a desktop OS where user logs in as root/system and all the programs and services run as limited accounts.

IMHO XP and 7 were the pinnacles.

With Windows Classic theme... ;)

windows 7 on classic theme, with the drag able taskbar is peak windows desktop, true

Someone forgets how long Windows 2000 took to boot ;-)

I recall it booting more slowly than 98 or ME, but I don't recall it being obnoxiously bad. I do remember disabling a lot of services I didn't think I needed, though.

The serialized service startup is what caused the slowness. Disabling services would have improved boot times.

well it has been a couple years since I've used it ;)

Sometimes I question why I remember this stuff.

A heck of a lot faster than Windows XP or newer versions, that's for sure.

It was much slower than current OSes. Windows 2000 initialized Windows Services in a serialized order which caused lengthy boot times, even for an OOTB copy.

XP changes this to a parallel + delayed service start up, but 7 and 8 really focused on boot times.

given the current state of things, I'd take that slow boot over anything else ;)

Back then (probably xp era) I remember quirks like needing to configure the IDE controllers so if you didn't have both connectors on the PATA cable used it would spend a ton of time trying to detect a device where there wasn't one. You needed to go into device manager and disable that connector (unless you added a drive)

If you turned off a PC booting Windows 2000, you'd have an unbootable install of Windows 2000.

Source: I did that. Twice.

I recall it getting a BSOD fairly often.

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