11 votes

Remembering Windows 2000, Microsoft’s forgotten masterpiece

7 comments

  1. [7]
    MintyFresh
    Link
    Gone, but not forgotten.

    Gone, but not forgotten.

    3 votes
    1. [6]
      vord
      (edited )
      Link Parent
      Certainly not for those of us who started from the DOS era. 2000 paved the way for XP, which was the first remotely stable consumer OS (from Microsoft). And that eventually led to Windows 7, which...

      Certainly not for those of us who started from the DOS era.

      2000 paved the way for XP, which was the first remotely stable consumer OS (from Microsoft).

      And that eventually led to Windows 7, which TBH was the last genuinely good Microsoft OS for consumers.

      The changes introduce in 8, and carried to 10 just turned them into a giant mess, even if you discount all the huge privacy problems with 10.

      3 votes
      1. [4]
        Akir
        Link Parent
        I remember differently. Commercial Linux distributions were fairly stable before then, as was BeOS. That's assuming you had well supported hardware though. I also seem to remember that XP was not...

        2000 paved the way for XP, which was the first remotely stable consumer OS.

        I remember differently. Commercial Linux distributions were fairly stable before then, as was BeOS. That's assuming you had well supported hardware though.

        I also seem to remember that XP was not very stable on launch; it had issues with a lot of the older hardware that was still on the market. I remember when XP came around I switched to an older pre-built computer running ME because it was more reliable (yeah, seriously) than XP was at the time. That, and there were plenty of existing software packages that wouldn't work on XP.

        That being said, it got much better as time went on, especially after SP1 was released.

        2 votes
        1. [2]
          MintyFresh
          Link Parent
          I remember this too. Though, I also got lucky and never really had any major issues with ME.

          running ME because it was more reliable (yeah, seriously) than XP was at the time

          I remember this too. Though, I also got lucky and never really had any major issues with ME.

          1 vote
          1. Akir
            Link Parent
            I seem to remember someone saying that the big problem with ME was that poorly written drivers was the reason why it was so unstable most of the time. So tech-minded people who customized their...

            I seem to remember someone saying that the big problem with ME was that poorly written drivers was the reason why it was so unstable most of the time. So tech-minded people who customized their PCs were going to have a hard time, but people who purchased PCs designed specifically for ME - you know, your average non-techie - would actually have a pretty stress-free experience.

            Personally, I was dirt poor at the time and was lucky to have a lightly-used all-in-one gateway given to me. It was pretty lucky at the time because ME had better DOS support - so I could play all of my old games - but could still run modern-at-the-time software. It wasn't terribly fast, but it really didn't need to be.

            2 votes
        2. vord
          Link Parent
          I was mostly just referring to Microsoft there, yea. Edited to be more clear. This is broadly true for most other Windows releases...they tend to be based on current mid-high end hardware as the...

          I was mostly just referring to Microsoft there, yea. Edited to be more clear.

          This is broadly true for most other Windows releases...they tend to be based on current mid-high end hardware as the bare minimum, so they suffer on older or lower-end hardware.

          There was a saying to never upgrade to a new MS product until SP1 was out.

          1 vote
      2. MintyFresh
        Link Parent
        I will admit though, it took me a while to get used to Windows not running on DOS. Where is my autoexec.bat?!

        I will admit though, it took me a while to get used to Windows not running on DOS. Where is my autoexec.bat?!

        2 votes