Back then reinstall without formatting the drive felt like resetting system to defaults and was practised by almost everyone. I'm pretty sure W10 and W11 has similar feature nowadays by default.

When I had chance to grab 180-days trial of W2000 I was shocked how stable it was - not seeing blue screen every few mins but modals with errors instead was... an amazing experience. The store where I've got my Celeron-based machine was installing 98 for everyone, not looking at licenses, all the legal stuff at all and when I ask guys there if they could drop W2000 they said that "it's a bad idea - many games won't work".

I still consider Windows 2000 the best Windows ever made. NT under the hood, slim, up-to-date, extremely stable, it ran all the games I wanted. I managed to grab a burned CD with a full version somewhere, the keys were not yet checked online for multiple installs. For a long time, all software and every driver for XP also worked for 2000. I think I should find an old retro PC and install W2000 on it, just for fun.

Agree, W2k was peak Windows. Even the UI effects, like subtle drop shadows and fade-out animations looked tasteful, and were smooth on pretty average HW.

Speaking of "workstation grade" Windows, you can still approximate this kind of experience by using "deshittification" scripts from around the Internet. IIRC I've used <https://github.com/Raphire/Win11Debloat>. There are also enterprise-oriented release channels that keep some of the new bloat away, I think you can convince your existing installation.

Personally I'm more offended by recent macOS updates - probably since it's my daily driver, so I notice it more. I had to resort to things like MDM profiles to keep it in check.

Modern software just feels worse. I don't think it's nostalgia. A few years ago I've had my first experience with OS X 10.5 on a PowerBook. The system looked and worked better than modern macOS, even while the hardware was hot and somewhat struggling. Everything I needed from the OS was there (except for a performant web browser and less heat/noise). I'd switch.

I really liked both stability and that subtle change from dark grey GUI colour to gray with a really subtle yellow hint that made it more pleasant to my eyes. So was the default blue background colour instead of teal green more appealing.

> I think I should find an old retro PC and install W2000 on it, just for fun.

I made a W2000 install in VirtualBox with most of the old software I was using back then - of course without network connection outside. IMO that's much easier than dusting out old machine and wondering if it'll work at all after so many years but ofc there are people who dig that - I admire their dedication

Or you could just run it in a browser tab:

https://bellard.org/jslinux/vm.html?url=win2k.cfg&mem=192&gr...

This was written 7 years ago, and rather amusingly, part of it is called TEMU.

cool, thanks! :)

I remember things differently. Perhaps it was because I was working with older hardware or something I don't know but Windows 2k felt so slow to boot.

I know it isn't a fair comparison since the computer with windows XP was newer and I don't remember the details but I remember thinking windows XP boots faster than 2k.

IIRC with XP they late loaded a lot of things to get the desktop showing faster than 2000. My experience at the time was that while the desktop might have loaded faster it wasn't actually usable for quite awhile after I was looking at it, but that might have had more to do with all the crapware on many XP machines I used at the time.

XP definitely needed more ram than 2000 to function acceptably. I remember 128mb being slow but tolerable on 2000 and absolutely brutal on XP.

>My experience at the time was that while the desktop might have loaded faster it wasn't actually usable for quite awhile after I was looking at it

This, I think the fastboot stuff probably seemed good on development machines used at microsoft, but on the cheap computers loaded with OEM garbage that they were pushing as being capable of running xp, it mostly loaded the desktop and then locked up for several minutes to finish actually booting.

> IIRC with XP they late loaded a lot of things to get the desktop showing faster than 2000

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prefetcher - that's the thing they introduced in XP to speed up loading the system and programs

Interesting. I have the opposite recollection. Perhaps it has more to do with the hardware I was using.

NT5 beta 2, before 2000 was enshittified.

I would have stayed on it, but my video drivers (Rendition Vérité 2200) at the time were time limit locked and the next set of drivers released didn't support the betas anymore.

2000 was the next best thing, but it was definitely a step backwards from beta 2.

Windows 9x suffered from DLL hell. So every time a program was installed it potentially overwrote dlls with a different version often older or incompatible. Windows 2000/XP just redirected the installer's dlls into a per program location preventing this which is a large reason those versions were so much more stable.

Most people recommended a complete reinstall every 6 months well through the XP era but I found this was hardly ever necessary after I switched to 2000. Conversely, during my 98 days I never had to schedule reinstalls, Windows had rotted apart by then forcing me to do it!

I definitely remember the DLL hell experience that manifested as an older 2d game overwriting some DirectX dlls in the OS with older versions, and suddenly all my FPS games stopped working.

That was a fun one to troubleshoot as a 12 year old kid.

It did.

Or perhaps it was because I dualbooted 98 and 2k.

All my warez were on a fat32 to be accessible from both. Somehow the audio in my mp3 collection got replaced with audio from my movies.