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Comment by roadbuster | Hacker News Reader

> 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.

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> 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.

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.

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