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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roadbuster 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> 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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gosub100 an hour ago | parent [-]

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)

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sjsdaiuasgdia 37 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

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.

	▲	toast0 5 minutes ago \| parent \| next [-]
		> 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.
	▲	classichasclass 15 minutes ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		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.

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doublerabbit an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

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

Windows ME on the other hand...

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Borg3 an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

[dead]

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jeffbee 31 minutes ago | parent | prev [-]

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.