Win2K is useful for D3D8 and D3D9 games, where it tends to deliver better performance than Vista or 7. The main reason to choose it over XP for those kinds of games is that it doesn't do any of the phone home/activation crap that XP does, so that you can just load it onto any machine and get right to playing.

If you have XP, I think there is no reason for using 2K. It is indeed very similar. The reason for XP was replacing ME and get rid of old 16 bit DOS after all. In order to do that, they basically took 2K, beefed it up with some new and unnecessary wizards, some optical knick knack, and call it XP.

I used 2K quite some time. Pretty much every software for NT and XP used to work just fine, until Microsoft discontinued 2K support.
Especially software compiled with later Microsoft compilers refuse to work, while software from competing compilers continue to work, unless they depend on other Microsoft libraries released after the 2k discontinuation that is. Sadly enough, those incompatibilities seem to be pure marketing decisions rather than technical reasons, ie. planned obsolescence.

And about the phone home/activation issue: AfaIk, 2k did this already, but didn't inform the user about it. After complains from privacy advocators, they introduced the activation wizard in XP and other software.

I have a dual PPro 200 workstation with 2k. The XP installer won't work because the minimum supported CPU is 233mhz. I know there's probably workarounds out there for this, but that's an example of where you would use 2k is on hardware officially unsupported under XP. If your hardware is supported by XP, though, I'd use that because it will have more recent security updates and better compatibility with newer technologies and software.

just use winflp if XP won't run good or install
not easy to get though...

Marek wrote:

And about the phone home/activation issue: AfaIk, 2k did this already, but didn't inform the user about it. After complains from privacy advocators, they introduced the activation wizard in XP and other software.

Any extra info about this?
It seems highly unlikely to me.

I reinstalled my genuine full version of 2000 many times due to h/d and mobo upgrades, never saw any sign of on-line activation.

ratfink wrote:

I reinstalled my genuine full version of 2000 many times due to h/d and mobo upgrades, never saw any sign of on-line activation.

It doesn't de-activate when you never go online. No need to do the phone activation thingy, so imo it doesn't exist for 2k, nor have I heard any (other) indications that this might be the case. Also I've heard many indications that 2k does not require activation.

The only thing 2k is restricted in is moving a full install to a completely different computer. Often this ends up ina BSoD.
9x simply works (almost all of the times at least).

Tetrium wrote:

It doesn't de-activate when you never go online. No need to do the phone activation thingy, so imo it doesn't exist for 2k, nor […]
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ratfink wrote:

I reinstalled my genuine full version of 2000 many times due to h/d and mobo upgrades, never saw any sign of on-line activation.

It doesn't de-activate when you never go online. No need to do the phone activation thingy, so imo it doesn't exist for 2k, nor have I heard any (other) indications that this might be the case. Also I've heard many indications that 2k does not require activation.

The only thing 2k is restricted in is moving a full install to a completely different computer. Often this ends up ina BSoD.
9x simply works (almost all of the times at least).

I think the thing that might have been referred to as activation in 2k, was the automatic registration that sometimes happens there is a RegDone value in the registry for this but this isn't activation in that it doesnt prevent you from installing the same copy of the OS on 50,000 computers or something.

9x simply works when moving it to other hardware except when I decided knowing this that I wanted to have 4 identical installs of 95B so i thought I'll just make a ghost image and then all of them will be the same without me having to do 3 installs. Unfortunately it didn't quite work out for me because I think of hdd controllers or something but I'm not sure if any of the computer could boot or if they did it was as much effort finding drivers as if I'd installed from scratch I think.
Oh well it usually works, anyone ever used the 9x version of sysprep?

I never used the sysprep thingy, but have moved 9x installs around many times, and it failed only once. XP (which is similar to 2k in that respect) never worked except for once, which quite surprised me!
Hardware was totally different also?

The secret is the harddisk interface. NT/W2k/XP have a fixed primary chipset-specific driver which must recognize the ATA device.

http://alter.org.ua/en/soft/win/uni_ata/

Leolo wrote:

Windows 2000 lost its main selling point (less hardware requirements, which made it ideal for older computers) when Microsoft re […]
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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 just looked up the system requirements and it still requires a P233 or better just the same as XP does. The only advantage it has over XP is that it's lighter, not that it runs on even older hardware than XP does although I did once see an article where someone installed it to a P166MMX laptop and it seemed to work fine.

the system requirements for winflp maybe the same as XP, but because it is stripped down, I feel it is either more properly stated or overstated compared to the normal XP
in otherwords, what I'm saying is, if you put winflp on a P200, it'll probably run OK

I ran NT4 on a P75 back in the 90s, and sadly it was faster than win95 (OSR1) once booted up... I can't imagine winflp being any worse as far as "how it feels" during use on a P200

one thing is for sure, the performance is phenomenally astonishing running winflp under virtualbox compared to 98SE... and it totally blows XP mode out of the water, even when running it through vmware player (which performs way better than virtualpc).... this is on my machine which has NO CPU virtualization whatsover!

h-a-l-9000 wrote:

The secret is the harddisk interface. NT/W2k/XP have a fixed primary chipset-specific driver which must recognize the ATA device.

Yep. HAL.DLL is a jerk. It's not 'activation'.

TheMAN wrote:

the system requirements for winflp maybe the same as XP, but because it is stripped down, I feel it is either more properly stat […]
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the system requirements for winflp maybe the same as XP, but because it is stripped down, I feel it is either more properly stated or overstated compared to the normal XP
in otherwords, what I'm saying is, if you put winflp on a P200, it'll probably run OK

I ran NT4 on a P75 back in the 90s, and sadly it was faster than win95 (OSR1) once booted up... I can't imagine winflp being any worse as far as "how it feels" during use on a P200

one thing is for sure, the performance is phenomenally astonishing running winflp under virtualbox compared to 98SE... and it totally blows XP mode out of the water, even when running it through vmware player (which performs way better than virtualpc).... this is on my machine which has NO CPU virtualization whatsover!

can you run anything that runs under XP with WinFLP or do they strip out too much and break XP compatibility for some apps?

if you don't install media player, you don't have directx... I saw on other forums that people have played games with it fine... which is the idea of a retro box isn't it? 😉

Yup 😉

Btw, I just remembered 2k can do one other thing that XP can't:
XP needs a Pentium to install and afaik, 2k doesn't.

So basically if you want an OS based on NT5 and want to use any pre-Pentium1 or some other older hardware like the LS-120, then 2k is the way to go instead of XP.

Well, at least 2k seems to still have a use these days 😉