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Comment by spyrja | Hacker News Reader

It really wasn't a bad operating system. In fact it kind of blew its (lame) Win9X predecessors out of the water! I ran on Win2000 for years before finally switching to Linux. Of course Microsoft ended up going a different course with its newer "offerings" and I have nothing but pity for those who still have to use their products on a day-to-day basis.

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> It really wasn't a bad operating system

It was a wonderful operating system. It provided consumer desktop essentials (Plug & Play, DirectX 7, ACPI power management, Windows Driver Model (WDM), and support for consumer I/O interfaces like USB and Firewire) alongside a modernized UI, all running atop the NT kernel. I was extremely lucky to receive a free copy of Windows 2000 Pro as a student, because I rode that horse for years.

Then Microsoft added a green start button and dark blue backgrounds and packaged Win2k for home users as Windows XP.

the drawback for me was the startup time. it really seemed to hang out on the splash screen for quite a while (just as NT4 did, and ofc they were from the same core)

Windows 2000 was the first release of NT5. That's what made it 2000.

Windows ME on the other hand...

IIRC, Win2000 would wait for most/all services to complete startup before showing the login UI. XP would allow login as soon as enough of the system was started to support it. The tradeoff is that you might have slow performance from HDD thrashing while everything else finishes starting up.

It's been 20+ years so it's possible I had it wrong then, or remember it wrong now.

No, that's pretty accurate as I recall. Windows 2000 took a bit, but when it was up, it was up. Windows XP would pop you into what appeared to be a functional desktop quickly, but it was still loading in the background, and some things just sort of sat there for awhile. Win2K was much more predictable. When I wasn't on a Mac during my consultant days, it was on Windows 2000, because it was much more stable than the 98 clients.

> The tradeoff is that you might have slow performance from HDD thrashing while everything else finishes starting up.

You would often get audio buffer underuns on the startup sound, if enabled, especially if you had auto login.

XP started drivers and services in parallel. 2000 started them serially. That was the difference in startup speed.

I no longer remember when we could configure services as delay loading, most likely around XP timeframe.

> Then Microsoft added a green start button and dark blue backgrounds and packaged Win2k for home users as Windows XP.

XP contained a lot more than just theme changes. XP solved a lot of compatibility issues that Win2k still had at the time. Running 2000 applications on XP would be nearly guaranteed to work, but Microsoft needed to also get Windows Me/98/95 games and applications to run for consumers.

XP brought a few general improvements such as ClearType and the ability to revert driver updates (which Windows users are still unable to find these days, leading to the "I have to uninstall updates every week or my weird USB keyboard breaks" rants online).

Everything Windows 2000 did good, XP did as good or better. The biggest difference was the UI, but the "classic" theme stuck around until at least Windows 7.

Wasn’t also the graphics driver moved to kernel space in XP? A good performance boost at the cost of unrecoverable crashes if the driver failed.

That was moved in NT 4 actually.

Windows 2000 had a compat mode too and it was to run w9x stuff better than XP itself.

I personally think the hypervisor architecture of 9x and its predecessors (starting at Windows/386) was far more interesting and innovative; while Win2k and the NT line are "traditional" OSes, 9x and 3.x are effectively VM hypervisors that have default hardware pass-through. DOS applications had dismal performance on NT, if they even ran at all.

The pre-NT Windows architecture was interesting for its "hack value" (remember that expression?), but as a user, even a technically minded one, reliability and absence of arbitrary limitations was more important.

DOS-based Windows had two main things going for it at the time, for users: It could run on average computers, and as you mentioned it could run most DOS software - most worked from Windows and all by simply stopping at DOS in the boot process (I almost always did the latter, I had no excess performance to give away).

Your comment reminds me (no insult intended) of the old adage that every doctor has a favourite disease.

Win9X wasn't Win2k's ancestor. Win2k was from the house of Windows NT. WinXP was the merger of the two lines.

Probably very few people switched from Windows 98 to Windows 2000. That wasn't considered an upgrade path. That was installing a different operating system.

Technically Windows ME existed, I guess.

I got curious and I had a windows xp ISO lying around, apparently it does support migrating from win98 onwards which surprised me a bit, win95 has to do a fresh install. From looking at the various .inf files it seems to pull a lot more information from a NT based starting point than 9x. I'm not sure if I'm curious enough to try a 98 to NT5 upgrade in a VM though.

Whether or not many people would want to do that upgrade/migration is another question, but similar to you I doubt the number was high.

> very few people switched from Windows 98 to Windows 2000

I was one of them. I went from ME to 2k and it was definitely a big step up.

Me too. Went from 98SE on a P133 to 2000 on an Athlon XP 1600 in 2001, will never have an upgrade like that again...

I did, but I was already trying to use Windows NT at home as well. At work Windows 2000 was quite common, however I actually used the server SKU as workstation OS.

As I used to be big into UNIX in the early 2000's, I used to dual boot between it and Red-Hat, eventually I got fed up dual booting all the time depending on the project work, or client support, and ended up using Windows, alongside Humming Bird X Server to connect to our development servers (yep back when we were still time-sharing UNIX servers for coding tasks).

Yeah I used it as well, in fact I kept using it pretty much forever because I had a comfortable VMWare image with all my apps installed and wiping out your Windows system back to a known-good checkpoint is the only reasonable way to use Windows. Unfortunately this retro scheme fell apart after they stopped developing Intel Macs.

I'm pretty sure you could upgrade from Win2k as you could with Win XP.

Windows 9x and Me weren’t really the predecessors of Windows 2000; it’s real predecessor was Windows ant 4.0. They are very different lineages, with the former descending from 16 bit MS-DOS and Windows until version 3.11 and arguably being rooted in a copy of 1970s’ CP/M whereas the NT lineage was a clean implementation of a modern OS by David Cutler of VMS fame.

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