Windows 2000 is now 20 years old

[DVINTHEHOUSEMAN]

December 15, 2019 has marked the 20th anniversary of Windows 2000. IMO it has been sort of overshadowed by XP, but 2K was a reliable and good OS. With Windows ME failing upon release, most people went to 2000, and Microsoft saw the need to create a consumer version of the NT line, Windows XP. 2000 was dropped on July 13, 2010.

[rani.p]

I agree with the sentiment that 2000 was an underrated release for Microsoft, it was certainly a lot more pleasant to work with than Windows XP in many regards.

I'm not sure you can blame ME's failure for the merger, this was clearly already on Microsoft's mind (see NepTune), but I think 2000's success did make them double down for XP. I remember plenty of more technically-minded people preferring to use Windows 2000 over ME, even in a consumer environment.

[xelloss]

December 15, 2019 has marked the 20th anniversary of Windows 2000. IMO it has been sort of overshadowed by XP, but 2K was a reliable and good OS. With Windows ME failing upon release, most people went to 2000, and Microsoft saw the need to create a consumer version of the NT line, Windows XP. 2000 was dropped on July 13, 2010.

Windows XP was a great commercial success, but I never really liked it that much. Compared to 2000 it was just bloatware with annoying colours.
TBH, NT4 was better than 2000 in one particular thing: UI responsiveness. But 2000 did so much more than NT4 that we can forgive it for being a bit less speedy (and it was released 3 years later anyway).

Actually, MS originally planned a consumer version of 2000, but it was scrapped in favour of ME when it was clear that hardware vendors couldn't keep up with the platform change. Driver compatibility was a big issue, despite the Windows Driver Model having being released with Windows 98!

[Digger]

Day to day use, I found 2000 more practical and a lot of features hidden under the bonnet than XP with the introduction of product activation etc that was glitchy to say the least. 2000 being a cleaned up and updated NT was a welcome update.

And ME.... lets just cast that into the fire and wipe it from the face of the earth... But thats for another day!

[AlphaBeta]

I'm not sure you can blame ME's failure for the merger, this was clearly already on Microsoft's mind (see NepTune), but I think 2000's success did make them double down for XP.

Indeed, the whole purpose of Windows 9x was to serve as a stopgap before consumer NT became viable in the early '00s.

[johnleakedfan]

I didn't really grow up using Windows 2000 at all (I used 98 and XP, etc.) until I got really into Virtual Machines and Windows history some years ago, but I had absolutely no problems with it when I actually used it. I've always been rather fond of Windows 2000s development for some reason and just 2000 as a whole, solid OS. It also has one of my favorite Windows startup/shutdown sounds.

I also agree with the fact that it's rather underrated when you got XP around the corner and it getting as big as it ended up being. I think XP is basically a more consumer-friendly and colorful version of 2000 . There's nothing wrong with that but I just can't resist that classic Windows interface although what XP brought to the table was still a nice change of pace.

In the end, I like both OS's and they have their ups.

Offtopic Comment

Merry Christmas!

[julia425646]

That's my fav from WinNT family and shutdown/startup sound. But I think XP was a really first consumer version after flopped ME with a colored interface called Luna. Windows 2000 is so underrated release of Windows from MS.

Offtopic Comment

Merry Christmas to everyone!

[backtofuture]

Windows 2000 died immediately simply because Windows XP had the same reliability (if not higher) and all the gaming part also worked. On Windows 2000 instead the games gave a lot of problems

[win32]

Windows 2000 is the newest Windows OS that 486-class machines, SGI Visual Workstations and PC-98 systems can run.

On the hardware side, the OS, which was built with Pentium II and IIIs in mind, runs on certain X99 boards fashioning an i7-6950X, 32 GB DDR4 (64 GB is possible according to screenshots on BWC's blog), and a GTX 960 (Titan X possible).

The extended kernel adds SSE2 optimizations to the OS and allows for software like Photoshop CS6 and roytam1's browsers to run. Most games officially compatible with XP x86 will run as well. Many actually do not have any XP API dependencies, but rely on three XInput DLLs that are compatible with vanilla win2k but were left out of the DX9 runtime package for the OS.

The photo previews in "My Pictures" (and other folders with its template selected) are easily adjustable and work quite well. XP greatly crippled them.

XP/2003's UI will always seem slower than 2000's UI due to the use of software-accelerated GDI+. I notice this even on my Core Duo T2400 laptop with 120 GB SSD.

Windows compatibility mode was not introduced with XP, contrary to what some MS documentation states. regsvr32 %systemroot%\WINNT\apppatch\slayerui.dll, and you've got compatibility settings for every shortcut, starting with SP2. Stuff like not enabling the aforementioned feature and 48bit LBA by default certainly hurt the OS.

The relatively thin window borders, the clean blue desktop with professional-looking icons and its stability gave it the feel of the Unix-based "workstation" OSes of the 1990s. I certainly appreciate that detail.

I miss being able to use Windows 2000 as my main OS.

[Caveria]

I don't even believe that Windows 2000 turns 20 years old since December 1999 and released to everyone on February 2000, celebrated on February 2020 and don't call this as Windows 2020!

[DVINTHEHOUSEMAN]

Look on Wikipedia, it was released on December 15, 1999.
Oops, looks like I put the wrong date and it made me look stupid. Let me fix that...done.

[Random_User]

It was released to manufacturing on December 15, 1999; it was later released to the general public on February 17, 2000.

[maomaosifangcai]

I think Windows 2000 is a excellent system at that time. It is a NT-based system so it is safer and more stable than 9X system like Win95 and Win98, but its game performance is not very good. And the next system WinXP has both the safety of Win2000 and the game performance of Win98, and the more beautiful user interfase. So I think Win2000 is only overshadowed by XP, but I still think Windows 2000 is a great system, as great as WinXP.

[JennyTheOSCollector]

Congratulations!First,this OS was my earliest OS I have seen from a physical computer,second,I have made a personification picture of this OS a few months ago(its personification is a great and tireless businessman).This OS have been my favourite OS for three months,so when his(Yes,for this OS) birthday comes,I will celebrate his birthday with my friends!
Besides,Win2k's birthday(2/17)was also the day my holiday ends,so that day has a special meaning.

[Gustav Vasa]

What a pity that this OS' support wasn't extended like XP's one, Windows 2000 was so reliable, although as said before overshadowed by XP. I have never tried it on real hardware, but on virtual machines and it is already very stable on these, so it must have been very stable on real computers as well. I wonder that, apart from being NT, why was Windows 2000 so much better than Windows ME (this one was so unreliable)...

[leppy232]

Windows 2000 was my first OS, and in the last 16 or 17 years I've been around it, I've only ever encountered one single bluescreen (compared to probably 5 or 6 for XP), and that was during the text installer for SP0 because I tried to run it off USB so that shouldn't even count. It's definitely informed a lot of my biases and preferences with both later versions of Windows NT and my choice in Linux, probably being the reason why I prefer Slackware over Ubuntu and Window Maker (when it works) over KDE. It was just rock solid and looked very slick, and to this day I still like playing around in it, it's kinda fun to use in a way that Windows 10, 8, and even 7 just aren't.

I believe my earliest computing and gaming memory was powered by NT 5.0, so that soft spot might never toughen up.

Also, Windowblinds. Windowblinds rocks, XP Corona (small titlebar) is what I'm using at the moment, but I like to change it up sometimes. A massive thanks goes to blackwingcat for keeping it as alive as possible, I plan on trying out the modern drivers sometime.