When I did some MS certificates I always got the impression that 2k was corporate and XP consumer. Still I managed to completely avoid 2k. Haven't used it once 🤣

*not sure if this helps you at all* 🤣

in my view there is no reason to rin 2K at all if you have the hardware...
2k won't give you better 9x compatibility and it's DOS own is similar to that of XP ... I see no room for it.

I've got win2k running on my Pentium 2, 200mhz, but thinking of replacing it with 98se

I used Windows 2000 on my main PC rig, a HP Vectra XU 6/200, for close to three years. It was setup with dual Pentium Pro 256k, 128meg of ECC ram, a 4 gig SCSI boot drive and two IDE storage disks. I never saw it crash, and it one point at had gone over a year with a reboot, using pretty much everyday. I was never really on the internet with it, but I did listen and burn a lot of music, picture editing, and tons Civilization 3. I'm pretty sure at some point then I traded my dual PPro's out for dual Pentium II Overdrives.

I think it was in 2004, and I had to start using Office 2003 for college, and then I had to upgrade it XP. That machine was never really setup or used for "gaming", but until that point I did everything I needed it to.

I'd just dual-boot Windows 2000 just to run slightly more modern things at least. I even use it on my 486 (with the service packs even) now how's that for insane computing?

leileilol wrote:

I'd just dual-boot Windows 2000 just to run slightly more modern things at least. I even use it on my 486 (with the service packs even) now how's that for insane computing?

Very Nice indeed 😉

Maybe this can settle the argument then, I dual-boot on a box using a P4, S478, 3GHz CPU with 1GB of RAM installed. It's running on a Intel D865GBF Motherboard using an older ATi 9550 AGP card.

It co-habitates just fine with Windows ME with all the patches for both OS's and ME had never run so damn fast...

Win2k may run slightly better/faster on older systems. On the other hand, XP can be tuned down to to display win9x GUI to free the resources. Win2k has dedicated compatibility site for games. But then again, the workarounds may apply to XP too.

Thanks for the replies 😀
I like reading other people's experiences 😁

I've used 2k on 2 rigs myself. One was just a test rig (I barely touched it after seeing the desktop for the 1st time) and the other was my main rig for a short time, maybe only a year or 6 months even!
It did have BSoD problems but I believe that had more to do with the way that PC came to existance then with 2k itself.
Back then my fastest system was a Celeron 400 with 192MB RAM and a smallish harddrive (less then 10GB iirc).
I build a 'new' system, an Athlon XP it was I think, but only had 2k at the time (no XP back then yet).
However, the disk wasn't bootable and as I couldn't boot it from ME (because ME uses DOS to boot, something like that) I decided to just use some random drive which already had 98SE installed and do an upgrade (yup, thats a bad omen alright! 😜 )
I ran it until the system finally wouldn't boot anymore. I did a virus scan and found thousands of infections!
I was surprised the system had actually run with so many infections!
Apparently the previous owner of that 98SE (who was someone who happened to know my mother and passed his old broken computer to me) had been visiting 'sites containing erotic art 😁'.

That said, I have an interest in running older OS-es. Heck, I've even run neptune(!!) and a tweaked Windows 2003 Evaluation (made it run as a gaming rig).
Btw, I was very much impressed with 2003, it seemed to run even better then XP!
It ran quite fast on a P3-800 I had at the time and seemed to boot faster too.

I'd still like to put 2k to good use though.

There is one thing 2k can do that XP can't, at least not out of the box.
When XP arrived, it would not work anymore with some particular older hardware, for instance 1x speed LS-120 drives (IDE), floptical drives and floppy drives that weren't 1.44MB.
I later found you can still get 2.88MB floppydrives to work on XP with the use of WinImage but LS-120 drives supposedly would only work in XP with the 1.44MB floppies.

leileilol wrote:

I'd just dual-boot Windows 2000 just to run slightly more modern things at least. I even use it on my 486 (with the service packs even) now how's that for insane computing?

leileilol...I love you haha!!!11 😜

Still used Win2K til roughly 18 months ago. Still worked as good as Windows XP back then, even tho software devs were stopping to support it ... unless you're planning to play recent games on the PC you're gonna use, both 2k and XP are pretty much on par, even tho 2k has a slightly longer boot up time ... but less gimmicky controls (grouped sys-control, retarded welcome screen, themes, etc.) by default.

Used Win2K for 9/10 years. Never, ever had problems with BSOD, rarely was there any other kind of instablity. Switched to XP only to get quicker boot times and be able to use Office 2010.

Ahh, Win2k, I used it alot back in the day, great OS. It was mainly meant for business and networking. No frills but did the job great while using the NT kernel. It was my OS of choice before SP2 for XP. While it was a SMP aware OS it wasn't optimized for HyperThreading (like XP) and would loose performance when enabling HT on my P4 3.0E even doing a clean install. That was my breaking point before moving to XP around 2004/5 I believe.

Like others are saying, XP can do 2k's job and then some.

I usually just use Windows 2000 whenever I either need to run something modern on a PC with less than 512MB of RAM, or when I'm testing a newly-found computer and I don't want to waste one of my XP keys on it.

After the Win9xes Windows 2000 was a welcome, stable OS. But has nothing over XP if you have the right hardware.
I'd use it for hardware that doesn't run XP AND ONLY if that hardware is not connected to the Internet at all. W2k is really really old now and from a security point it doesn't perform too well anymore.

I could never really see a use for 2000 either to me it could be used instead of XP but nlite XP seems fine to me. If I don't want 9x which I would want for dos compatability then I would just use NT4. NT4 seems fine its NT and its fast, ok maybe compatability is a little bit of an issue since DirectX5 is the maximum but if I want more then that I can use XP. Maybe I shouldn't discount 2000 as on a PII it would probably be fine but NT4 would be faster 😀, maybe I do have a slight NT4 obsession nah can't possibly be true.

I also think a network is no fun untill it has a domain or 2, domains always make life more exciting 😀, thats one advantage that NT4 has over 9x. NT4 can be used as a full domain client whereas 9x can't quite be used as well particularly since 95 doesn't come with Grouped based support for System Policies, but policies can seem to somehow kill 98SE installs not quite sure how it just sortof happens sometimes.

I think NT4 gets forgotten by people sometimes, probably because everyone else was in 9x land at the time.

NT4's always captured my imagination for some reason, even though I never had it on one of my own rigs.

One of the things I like about NT4 is it's much lower hardware footprint 😀
Btw, what can NT4 be used for? I reckon it can be quite a quest to get games working on it.

mr_bigmouth_502 wrote:

I usually just use Windows 2000 whenever I either need to run something modern on a PC with less than 512MB of RAM, or when I'm testing a newly-found computer and I don't want to waste one of my XP keys on it.

This is actually a good reason 🤣!
Though if you wanted to, you could use XP anyway and simply not activate it, if you won't be testing that PC for longer then a month anyway.

I mostly have early windows games installed on it, those seem to be the easiest things to get working much older and you run into DirectX problems. It would be good to make a software compatibility list for NT4 but I've never been bothered. NT4 also suits my liking for domains better then 9x does a bit.

I do have NT4 on my compatibility list.

Back in the day I used a NT4/9x dual-boot and used NT4 mostly for browsing/work and for the games that worked on it. (Diablo, etc). Internet was alot faster on dial-up on NT4 and also more secure.
Used 9x just for DOS/gaming

I think the latest game that works on NT4 is Serious Sam but I'd have to check my list.

Windows 2000 lost its main selling point (less hardware requirements, which made it ideal for older computers) when Microsoft released WinFLP.

Here are the details of the official ISO if you want to try it (Google is your friend):

SW_CD_SA_Win_Fundamentals_LPC_2006_English_MultiLang_WinFLP_Core_CD_MLF_X12-27765.iso Size: 602793984 MD5: 3F2F4BA0B29B12B3D09AB […]
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SW_CD_SA_Win_Fundamentals_LPC_2006_English_MultiLang_WinFLP_Core_CD_MLF_X12-27765.iso
Size: 602793984
MD5: 3F2F4BA0B29B12B3D09ABB741E52733D
SHA1: 816237A22C9F1A7B388C34F584E95A1C66ED6C61
CRC32: 7D7215C2

Regards.

I've never been particularly fussed about WinFLP maybe its cause I've never tried it on real hardware and so never given it a proper chance either way NT4 is much more fun to me then 2000.