chinny22 wrote on 2024-01-29, 04:45:
You missed the OS between 98 and XP.
Win2k actually makes a real good alternative to Win98 and alot less hanging, blue screens, etc.
I loved Win2000 back in the day, and I probably would even go as far as to label it the greatest version of Windows I've ever used (7 would be a close second, pre-SP1 XP was not that great). But... what is the appeal of Win2000 from a retro perspective? Is there any software that runs on it that won't run on XP? Especially if your focus is games... there were still a lot of developers who were like "I'm not touching this weird NT thing" at the time of Win2000...
It's funny, I've now been hanging around here long enough that, despite my dreadful memories of 98SE, I've warmed up to it as a retro OS. 98SE's strength was compatibility for games, DOS things, etc; its weakness was reliability, the pesky system resources limitations, etc, basically just a dreadful OS for multitasking with always-on Internet around 2000. But for a retro system, I don't think you need to run an email client + ICQ + AIM + Winamp + a web browser + a productivity app + 2 IRC clients at the same time... in fact, you probably don't want to have it online in the first place, so 98SE's limitations don't really matter anymore, while it opens the door to a wide range of games from the pre-NT era. And Win2000's strengths and weaknesses are exactly the opposite of 98SE's...
Also, one last thought - the OP has a more than capable XP machine. If the OP was running a <700MHz machine with <512 megs of RAM, then there are obvious performance benefits to Win2000 over XP. Last (and worst) machine I ran Win2000 on was a lousy IBM-nee-Acer K6 266 with... I forget how much RAM at the end... that my family gave to my aunt circa 2002 and she kept it around two years, now that machine wouldn't have gotten anywhere near XP, but Win2000 delivered decent results. But a 3GHz P4 is plenty for XP, maybe not for late-XP-era software, but certainly plenty for the OS itself.
(But hey, if your objective is to show your kids the greatest OS to ever come out of Redmond, then... yes... Win2000 wins.)