Windows 2000 compared with 98 and ME or When things go wrong

[@honkhonkler7732]

We had a local Windows 2000 print server at work until about 2 years ago. It sat plugging away with around 10 consecutive years of uptime. (The last time it was shut down, it was to replace a nearly dead hard drive back in 2005). The hard drive from 2005 finally failed in 2015. We finally took Windows 2000 out of service (but not the machine it ran on).... What a great OS! We added a spare SATA controller we had on hand, bought a new 32GB SSD for 20 bucks and put FreeBSD on it. That 17 year old dual P3-Xeon server with 1GB of RAM continues to handle our printers to this day.

[@ShinobiDiabolik]

The best and only proper OS microsoft have ever done.

[@Lofote]

@@ShinobiDiabolik Hm, why are other OSes not proper in your opinion? For example Windows Server 2003? or Windows NT 4.0?

[@ShinobiDiabolik]

@@Lofote there is nothing wrong with the other OS, simply, windows 2000 fitted the task of sound recording and editing workstation best, considering the hardware i had to work with, in the radio station, back in the day.

[@realslimsh8y]

​​@@Lofotewindows 2003 feels like a succesor to 2000 in an alternate universe where windows ME and XP never existed.

[@Lofote]

@@realslimsh8y why do you think so? What news from xp do you miss in the server 2003 release?

[@-Rook-]

Win2K was in my experience far more robust, in particular when I was developing software and having regular crashes through the development cycle Win2K just kept on chugging. Every crash in 95 or Me was a good chance to take the OS down too.

[@vvbee]

used w2k daily for eight years, can't remember having issues with the voodoo 3, geforce 2, geforce fx, or radeon 9800 i used during that time.

[@Trikipum]

Same, my favourite OS of all time. Super robust, never BSOED and games ran just as good as in windows 98.

[@gex581990]

Yeah same here. We had issues with ME and switched to 2000 and had no issues with that

[@ShinobiDiabolik]

@@Trikipum With Windows 2000, i have seen BSOD only once, reason: Failing ram stick.

[@EweToobUsername]

Your experience on Win2k was far different than mine. I ran it on a K6-2/400 OC'd to 485 mhz and a TNT2 PCI video card. No issues at all, no matter what I threw at it, and frame rates in pretty much every game were better under 2k than they were in 98SE and ME.

[@m9078jk3]

From 2001 to 2003 My main PC system used a 1 Ghz Athlon Thunderbird CPU and I was running Windows 2000.I went through several graphics cards like the ATI All in Wonder 128 Pro,then the ATI Radeon 8500 and finally the ATI All in Wonder 9700 Pro graphics card on that system.I loved the stability of Windows 2000 on my system too (never had any lockups or blue screens). I had 640 MB of RAM in it (which was a lot for January 2001). I preferred it at the time to Windows XP because it didn't have activation ( a worse form of DRM) and just the product key code.The system works great to this day and is operational though obsolete.

[@IronicTonic8]

I had a lot of experience with Windows 98 / ME / 2000 back in the day. I was dual booting 98 / 2000 for a while and then booted ME / 2000 for a period of time too. I never had any issues with ME, so I'm not sure where the hate comes from. Most of my issues came from Windows 2000 back in the day because the architecture was newer and most games/apps/drivers weren't optimized for the NT kernel. Windows ME is merely 98 with a face-lift and a few additional features integrated. Great video, glad you took the time to outline some of the issues you had.

[@xXRenaxChanXx]

Truth. For me Windows ME felt better though. Easier to use. Less issues with USB support among other things. It just worked. Honestly the smoothest performance I ever had was on a 1.2ghz Tueleron in Windows98 and ME. With less than 512mb ram. (256-384mb).

[@HorrorUberAlles]

Glad to see I'm not alone. I remember sticking to WinME for the longest time before making the jump to XP... IIRC I tried XP once SP2 rolled out, then I never looked back.

[@IronicTonic8]

I recall getting my hands on an early beta for Windows XP in December of 2000. It had an earlier version of Windows Media Player, and all videos played upside down. I'm fairly certain I still have the beta CD laying around somewhere.

[@VarietyGamerChannel]

The disdain toward ME has something to do with OEM installs of winMe and stupid custom drivers and bloatware they would bundle their build with. I had nothing but problems with an Athlon 850 winMe retail desktop. Crippled on arrival. I averaged 1-2 blue screens per day.

[@redavatar]

The reason Windows ME got a lot of flack is very obvious: it barely made any improvements over WIndows 98 and yet added a lot of annoying features. The thing is, the people who generally preferred Windows ME over Windows 98, were those who hadn't installed the updates for Win98 because those updates pretty much added all the important improvements that were found in Windows ME so basically, you paid full price for a very light update that actually broke compatibility with certain games and software. On top of that, everyone knew Windows XP was coming - it had the shortest life-span of any Windows consumer OS as a result (just a little over a year). On top of that, ME was quite unstable compared to a patched Windows 98 since it was a new OS and with Microsoft focusing on Windows XP, it never really got any better.

[@robwebnoid5763]

Apart from 98SE, I still use Windows 2000 on one of my rigs. You have to be sure you install SP4 on top of it. There are also 1 or 2 unofficial SP's on top of that. My Win 2000 rig was specifically designed to be a Home Theater PC, connected to a surround sound system & a projector. There is also a fan-made hybrid O/S called 98SE2ME, which combines the best of those 2 systems, which I have also used awhile ago but do not have a current installation presently.

[@winj3r]

I remember trying out Windows 2000 back in the day. Although it was a very stable OS, thanks to the NT kernell, it was also somewhat heavier on system resources. At the time my machine was not very powerful, so going from ME to 2000 took a significant impact on performance. Asides from that, I don't remember having trouble with drivers, the installation or anything like that.

[@ShinobiDiabolik]

It was memory hungry, because it used meaningful memory management and memory separation nor itself and every application. Basically everything is in its own memory area inaccessible for other apps. This is the reason for stability and being heavy or resources.

[@trikki69]

Windows XP was essentially Windows 2000 dressed up like a clown and a service pack. You are completely correct, sometimes hardware just doesn't work well together. Great video, Phil!! :)

[@WolfenSG]

Windows 2000 was most stable Windows I've ever seen. And to be honest you're the first person I see that can actualy show it bisbehaving. Funny experience despite the fact that most issues you've encountered seem to be related to hardware prepared for (most popular at the time) Win 9X branch.

[@FaSMaN]

The irony is that most of the people who disliked WinMe on your previous video recommended Win2k as a replacement , while Win2k on your configuration was troublesome, and WinMe was more or less fine.

[@GdotWdot]

This was really surprising to me because back in the day I've never had a single issue with Windows 2000, not even on a machine with ISA bus which barely met the minimum requirements, while ME was the bane of my existence constantly crashing with severe data corruption, especially on my gaming computer. But this just proves that you have to be ready for anything working with PCs, it's very complex stuff which demands some humility and respect.

[@DialM4Microcontrollr]

HPZeta Regarding the two comments above. Neither of you mention the purpose of the machines you were using at the time. Gaming or productivity? When I used 2000, it was for productivity, and all we're solid on 2000. The OS was not built for games

[@GdotWdot]

DialM4Microcontrollr I was building home office PCs back so they were meant for productivity, but people still gamed on them. I'll concede we didn't have any cutting-edge 3D titles, the guys were more into older strategy games which happened to run fine, especially since W2K had decent drivers for the hardware.

[@classicmacintosh]

Until you start trying to use Millennium for actual work at which point it falls flat on it's arse. If you never do heavy multitasking ME works acceptably well.

[@Captain.Scarlet]

Win2k was rock solid for me on the same machine ME was unstable until it had max ram. However I put this down to anti virus, Win 9x just doesn't multi task as well as Win NT

[@GendoPrime]

What most people don't understand is that 2000 and ME were meant to be for two different consumers, ME was for the everyday home consumer (much like XP Home), and 2000 was intended to be a workstation OS for professionals and most businesses (More so than XP Pro was). In my experience with 2000 I've found that it tends to favor Intel platforms over AMD ones.

[@feiticeirafatale561]

Exactly. It was supposed to be NT5 for years but then came all that mania about "year 2000", so Microsoft switched it for marketing purposes.

[@EweToobUsername]

Microsoft would have been far better served to have released a Windows 2000 "Home Edition" than they were with Windows ME. While ME did a decent job on clean installs, it really wasn't all that great. 2000, otoh, was pure greatness and never needed to be futzed with once you got accounts locked down and certain services (Messenger) disabled. I remember 2000 being usable for more than just Microsoft Word on a Pentium 133 with 128MB of RAM, while ME was merely okay on the same system. Even after finding an AMD K6-2/400 that could run on a 66 MHz bus, that was still the case - 2000 was faster than ME on that hardware.

[@darabbit333]

@@EweToobUsername Exactly. Windows98/98 ME was a sure format every now and then. It would slow down. 2000 on the other hand, would run much longer without format.

[@cyberp0et]

I liked Windows 98 the most and I still use it on an older PC. If only it hadn't those nasty "illegal operations" and BSODs...

[@Lofote]

Compared to Win2000? But Win98 was only a weak DOS add-on with no secrutiy system or stable kernel :-o What did you like better than Win2000?

[@Laykun9000]

thanks so much for this video, it's very interesting to see where 2000 really stands compared to the older operating systems. also interesting seeing what kind of support the kyro 2 driver for the nt kernel had and where they focused their efforts.

[@lightdark28]

Win2K is great but as you found, it can have some driver issues with some older hardware, where the devs focused more on WIn9x (3DFX drivers for instance are missing a couple of options, but otherwise work perfectly fine). also SP4 is very much necessary because vanilla Win2K was known to have compatibility issues with games in particular , issues which were addressed with the later service packs. where Win2K really shines is stability, its certainly more stable than Win9x , and even more than WinXP due to being a more no-nonsense OS, it also will generally run better on older hardware when fully updated (SP4 will run great on a PIII, XP SP3 not so much). I suppose I have a bit of nostalgia for WIn2K as I used it quite a bit on my dad's work PC (which also had a Geforce2 in it) and found it to be better than my own Win98 machine.

[@feiticeirafatale561]

Actually, the chipset hes using here is fairly modern (KT600 I believe) and it came out almost three years after Win2000. It was also a big failure, causing problems all over the place, it was a far cry from KT133/266 which were really good. Its a software problem.

[@lightdark28]

yeah the KT600 isnt great (I prefer the Nforce2).

[@vascomanteigas9433]

Probably, Glide DOS games on Windows 2000 was probably one of main missing functionalities of Voodoo cards... It could be fixed if a VDD was provided for NTVDM, like the first version of dgVoodoo1 but it was a wrapper for generic GPU, and another VDD for Sound Blaster (SoundVDM). However it was a very low Propriety, and by the time XP was launched 3dfx ended.

[@isgoed81]

Win2k was a stable badass! I ran it for years!

[@Mmmm_tea]

"windows 2000 is built on NT Technology" ... on New Technology Technology but seriously it was my favorite version of windows, it was based on the same code as current iterations of windows but without the bloat or the mistrust in its users that XP activation introduced

[@PaulMetalhero]

w2k was very robust... I used it for video editing back in the day

[@EweToobUsername]

I put it on the machine my parents and sister used after getting tired of Virus of the Week. Having the ability to lock down what they could do through user roles and privileges was epic. Plus I could lock my sister out when she either pissed me off or tried to download virus-laden crap.

[@theobserver4214]

The problem with W2K was that it was fairly new (It used NT instead of DOS/Semi DOS like Win9x), and some programs had issues running on it. But once they DID run, it was epic. W2K was more of a work based OS, while Win9x was more for gaming (till XP came out

[@thelegogunner4747]

EweToobUsername also on Windows Neptune

[@thelegogunner4747]

5111

[@Oxron206]

windows 2000 was the peak of my entire life. I miss those days

[@mparagames]

Thumbnail: “Windows 2000 Built on new technology technology” Microsoft seems to be the god of pleonasm.

[@JeordieEH]

I loved windows 2000, I never recall having any major issues in gaming and all the other computer tasks I did from programming to graphic editing, it ran it all well. Windows 2000 beta was the first beta version of windows I ever tried. It worked great. I had many people tell me windows 2000 is for businesses and I shouldn't use it, but I refused to listen as I found it worked great and it spawned a great line of nt based operating systems like xp up to windows 10, yay stability!. I guess they wanted me to go back to windows 98? I dumped windows 98 se a long time ago. Never wanted to go back to rebooting just to change tcp/ip, plus the instability. I had 512MB-768 MB of memory around the time. So memory footprint wasn't an issue. I would try out windows xp until windows would slow down and drag and eventually I wanted to reinstall, I kept going back to windows 2000 pro. I had it quad booting I guess you could call it, so things got complicated. Windows 2000/xp for microsoft, redhat and suse for linux, i tried others on older systems when i'd have enough parts to make a secondary computer after upgrading. I had promise raid controller and sata controller, so I had many hard drives in my system. I can't really bring myself to go back and do that anymore with having 6-8 hard drives in a system at any given point and all that multi-booting. I rarely reinstall anymore(typically if a hard drive failure or computer upgrade occurs) and will use virtual machine if I ever want to use other operating systems on my main machine.

[@yckongful]

Win 2k was my favorite OS during my younger days of assembling my gaming PCs, it was robust, lots less of BSOD, less maintenance, more gaming time.

[@philscomputerlab]

I somehow skipped that OS totally. 98 and XP was my history...

[@Storm_.]

I absolutely adore Windows 2000. I even found a brand new copy on ebay to own. I remember when I was about 16 going through the beta testing of this OS, I had every version. Windows 2000 was an absolute game changer for microsoft and the Windows OS. The OS is absolute LEAGUES ahead technology wise than the old 9x versions which were iterations of kernals spanning all the way to 386 hardware. The fact that they created a full 32bit OS with an entirely new driver model, doing away with old VXD drivers for the new WDM model without many issues is absolutely astounding. Windows 2000 is the the true OS that launched us into the new century. I loved it back then and still swear by it for my retro machines today. It is basically XP without the fisherprice bloatware.

[@vine00]

i love your comparison, and yeah it's essentially as important as windows 95 in my opinion because of how revolutionary yet quickly overshadowed it was by windows xp

[@MarkHyde]

Looking forward to you next videos. Windows 2000 really only became usable with much later service packs that's for sure in terms of it being a general OS away from being used in enterprise and client settings. It's a real shame OpenGL couldn't work on the Kyro2 II card. :( Great content as usual. The Win XP video and your next projects will be interesting.

[@sundeviltech]

What I have found, from installing Windows 2000 about 500 times, back when XP was new, W2K loves Intel platform's. I don't know why this is so but trust me, I had way less hardware compatibility with the driver's and endless patches on the Intel platform's, CPU's, chip sets, network cards.

[@Mikeywil0003]

Windows XP is very similar to 2000. Some say it is 2000 with a new coat of paint. Back in the day, I ran an Adobe Premiere 6.0 editing machine (Compaq Deskpro EN, P3 933mhz, 512mb of ram, two 60gb hard drives, and a Pinnacle DV500+ PCI analog capture/firewire card.) I ran into TONS of compatibility problems with drivers and software with Windows 2000, so much that I was forced to use Windows 98. It seemed like the capture card and software was designed for a Windows 9x environment and nothing else. I think that is the case with a lot of hardware and drivers, that there is major incompatibility between 9x and 2k/XP.

[@kennyj4366]

Oh yes, Win 2000 was a HUGE change for Microsoft. It introduced the Snapin tools and a list of things I'm sure you know about. Compared to Win95/98 and DOS, Win 2000 for me at least gave me a headache lol, but I got through it and looking back it seems sort silly. I don't think Microsoft went forward with it either, they turned 2000 into a Server OS I think. Thank you for the video Phil, I enjoyed it. 👍

[@rhuwyn]

With Windows NT and 2000 that wasn't the case. SP4 for Windows 2000 and SP6 for NT is pretty much the only way to go. There is no reason to do any less. Windows XP on the other hand there were measurable increases of overhead on SP1 and SP2 so for lower end systems SP1 or no service pack could function better. Windows 2000 was great for business applications and for some games it worked fine. But honestly developers never targeted Windows 2000 as a gaming platform like they did 9x/ME.

[@nemthefearless]

Back in the day was dual booting 2k and ME on a Super 7 system (ALi chipset, Voodoo 3 GPU). Had a lot of issues trying to get non-office related stuff to work on 2k, after installing a service pack, it would no longer see any gameport joystick, even swapping the sound card that provided the game port interface didn't help. Many games would hang, there was a large decrease in FPS, but game timing was messed up - the clock would run fast in games. The ALI chipset drivers were perhaps mostly responsible, also SP4 wasn't out yet.

[@bradtech519]

2000 Pro had such a clean UI. I stuck with it for a long time even while XP was out and mostly adopted. I'd turn off all the UI shadows, and add-ons for XP later on after SP3. 2000 Pro with SP4 will always be my favorite Windows OS.

[@harryshuman9637]

For me, here's another reason for Windows 2000 over anything else: The Win2K Quadro drivers provided support for output image scaling all the way up to version 261, when support was discontinued. In XP they removed support for scaling way a few years prior, so technically while XP had support until version 301, it is useless for retro gaming.

[@Storm_.]

Phil did you quit gaming when Win2k came out? I can see you are very 9x dominant, so this is my theory :) 'Back in the day' most of the worst aspects for me about computing were caused by the hodge-podge 9x versions of Windows, when 2000 came out I swapped over and never looked back. The technology under the hood is so much better.

[@philscomputerlab]

I didn't do anything with Computers for around 4 to 5 years around that time. Last PC was a P II 300 and Voodoo II, and I picked up the hobby again with a P4 2.6 GHz and Radeon 9800 :)

[@theobserver4214]

Win2K was in reality a workstation os like NT5. But since the hype about a totally new millennial came, Microsoft changed it for marketing purposes. Some programs didn't work on NT since it was completely different. I believe DOS programs couldn't run at all

[@JUSXTREME96]

Blank Blank Some DOS Programs do run, though without sound, some newer games like Doom, Duke 3D, etc. go slower.

[@Shmbler]

Win2k was the revolutionary OS step, not WinXP or Win7. I don't remember having had any major issues when running the Win2k beta on my "gaming" PC in 1999. You basically got NT4's stability paired with Win98's more modern desktop and multimedia features. XP did not really add anything useful for me. Usually, I configured its look and feel to match what I was used to on 2k and it got pretty close.

[@retro-computing-gaming]

I used Windows 2000 as my main OS from 2002 all the way until sometime in 2017 when web browser support just wasn't good enough any more for the modern internet. It certainly has its quirks and optimally setting it up does require a lot of work and you have to know what you're doing, but once all that is done, it is just a stable, barebones OS - just how I like it.

[@microsoftafu]

2000 requires SP4 for USB 2.0 and XP requires SP1 (SiS USB 2 drivers will work on RTM)

[@mattafaak]

It's a shame your Win2K experience didn't go so well. I had great experiences with it using P3 and Athlon systems with Voodoo3 and early GeForce cards.

[@smallmj2886]

The great thing about Win2k is that it works well with VirtualBox, unlike Win9X. I do my retro-gaming on a Linux machine and Win2k on a VM lets me play 2D Windows games like Diablo and Civilization II.

[@JosepsGSX]

I deeply loved Win2k and used it as my main os for ages. It sure was harder to setup for gaming than 95/98/meh , but in return it was rock solid, and capable of run 24/7 for serious periods. 9x kernel based os were plainly unable to do that. I have terrible memory but still remember the Kyro cards... what a beautiful piece of hardware, with that electric blue heatshink. What a nightmare to live with. They had terrible compatibility and were a constant source of missery and frustration. I still have one in my drawer, probably returned from a friend I gifted to (a very poisoned gift). I wouldn´t suggest starting with one of those for a retro setup involving gaming at all. Commenting 5 years later, I know.

[@dwarfman78]

As a gamer in late 90's to the early 2000's i went from win 98 to win 2000 even though XP was out there because i didn't like the loading time of XP and the heavy load (at that time) brought by the new GUI. I stayed with win2000 as long as i could and was satisfied by its stability and lighter GUI, eventually i had to stop using it and switched to XP when new games stopped working under it and drivers support stopped.

[@toastymuffin4153]

I used Windows 2000 for years and never recall ever having any major issues with it. Most solid windows release ive ever used

[@survivalistboards]

I am not surprised Win2k was a litter slower, The OS was built for business applications and probably has more services running in the background

[@harryshuman9637]

I had to use Windows 2000 on my Intel 915 build last week. The build was borderline experimental as far as Windows 98 is concerned, with Sata and PCI-E, and the installation would go to black screen. I believe the issue could be the PCI-E card, because I was able to use the Sata drive with 98's DOS mode just fine. I might try to use my PCI card just to install 98 before getting all the chipset drivers up and going for the PCI-E card, but Windows 2000 is incredible, very smooth installation and operation, complete driver support, not a single blue screen of death, supports older D3D titles as well as more modern ones. Even runs a ton of GOG games. After I got DOS box going, I started to question why people even go for Windows 98 in the first place, Windows 2000 is just all around better.

[@GGigabiteM]

The STMicro Kyro II was released just a few months before STMicro closed its PC graphics division, so it never received much driver support. The NT drivers for 2000/XP were at most beta, but feel like alpha quality. The card works best under Windows 9x, where the drivers are just a bit more mature. The Kyro II was a departure from other graphics vendors of the time where it used weird rendering techniques like tile deferred rendering and aggressive hidden surface removal to try and offset its weak rendering capabilities. These features proved to be the downfall of the Kyro because they were buggy, slow and often caused rendering problems in games. I have a Kyro II myself and I've never been able to get it running on anything other than Windows 9x.

[@philscomputerlab]

Yea 98 is the way to go for this card.

[@datajake1999]

I installed Win 2K on a Pentium II with 64 MB of RAM and a 16 GB SD card in an SD to IDE adaptor, and It works for the most part. The only problem I have is that the system sometimes doesn't detect the "hard drive" on startup, but restarting the machine usually fixes the problem.

[@tim6803]

I have fond memories of Win2k. It was my only OS from 2000-2007. I have vague memories of some compatibility issues back in the day, but for me, what I remember more was in 2007, so many programs stopped working properly due to its planned obsolescence. Which is ironic because right now, I'm typing this in WinXP.

[@luis-ranma]

Windows XP was bassed in Windows 2000, this last personally was the best os, I had w2k sp4 on my old computer "2004", And I could play all games like on windows xp and more stable, maybe this game didn't was designed for a NT kernel . Btw Windows 98 like Millennium were a wonderful os for play games and multimedia, but win98 was more stable than millennium edition.

[@benjib2691]

Yep, technically 2000 is NT 5.0 and XP is NT 5.1, so there are very close one another at a kernel level.

[@TheDman216]

I had WinME and ill say it now i had no memorable issues with it..i did have to replace some older cards from thelate 95 early win98 era and used it for about a year before i jumped to 2k on a AMD socket A Thunderbird..Ahh the good old days😄

[@magisterxmilitum]

Do a Vista SP2 retro gaming review with decade old 2007 hardware which was available at its launch.

[@farisamriaznorsuandi3915]

i have windows 98 in 2004-2008. i have windows 2000 in 2009-2010. i have windows me in 2010. i have windows xp in 2010-2011. i have windows vista in 2009-2017. i have windows 7 in 2017-2021. i don't have windows 8. i have windows 8.1 in 2014-2019. i have windows 10 in 2017-present.

[@supergoofy123]

For Windows 2000 I would recommend: Windows 2000 Professional SP4 Rollup Integrated November 2014 by Sagittarius. Alternatively, you can search for Microsoft Windows 2000 Collection by DocRetro (this one also includes many other apps, tools etc.). It includes all available Windows 2000 updates integrated (including last DirectX 9 for Windows 2000). It's the best way to install Windows 2000 on a retro machine or through VMware or VirtualBox.

[@philscomputerlab]

I think I'll just use XP.

[@supergoofy123]

That's better :)

[@matcarfer]

Link? Can't find it.

[@MegaSmarthead]

On Windows 2000 I was never able to put my Sound Blaster PCI128 to work due to ACPI. When I changed it to "Standard PC" mode I got blue screen and was unable to boot... That was the end of 2000 for me

[@druout1944]

Great video; very interesting. Looking at doing an W2K Athlon 3200+ and Voodoo 5 5500 build myself in the near future.

[@VictorNelvanaShows]

I wish you can find drivers for the HP Thin Client T5710 for Windows 2000 and XP.

[@perkyzombie]

I used NT4 and 2000 extensively in the 90s and moved to a Athlon and XP for games probably like 20001. Prior to that I always ran a dual boot. The reason for running a NT based OS was hardware and software. I had dual Pentium Pro 200 cpus on an Intel PR440FX (not the PD!) which I used to run Softimage 3D and Alias|Wavefront software. I wish I still had that system, boy is that expensive and rare today. Also my video card, I can't remember the model, but it was a Dynamic Pictures card. -I've never seen a DP card come up on ebay. The Pentium Pro ran pretty good in 98 but only with one CPU, so that was another big reason for NT, multi processor support. As cool as my system was, my friend had a DEC Alpha, which was a mid-90s 64bit based system running NT. That said, the SGI Indy and Onyx were still way better workstations for the software. I recently obtained a dual cpu P3 system and was thinking of making a windows 2000 machine to install those two software package. Incidentally, both were used in the making of the original Jurassic Park and many other 90s movies and games. Softimage was discontinued, I know Microsoft bought it, kind of destroy the user base if I recall and then sold it, but the damage had been done. Too bad as it was very unique style of modeler and animation package. Mind you that free-form aspect is well represented these days in say like Mudbox. Alias|Wavefront is probably my favorite all time 3D software, even modern CAD packages don't have the technically modelling tools it had in the mid 90s. Maya came out in the late 90s and eventually replaced Wavefront, but it's DNA can still be seen in the present day release. Wavefront was that ahead of it's time.

[@msthalamus2172]

All of these things you ran into explain why there was still a bifurcation between the consumer and professional versions of Windows. Microsoft spent the next ~18 months addressing these kinds of issues to get a unified version within XP. The NT line had just *tons* of serious compatibility issues, because it was an entirely different architecture. I remember my first week working professionally in the tech industry, right out of college. I had to install NT 4.0 on a Compaq Deskpro 6000. It kept hard locking while installing the NIC drivers. I tried everything for three days. I thought they were going to fire me! Eventually, I sent it onto Help Desk, where they also took three days. Their solution was finally just to install a new NIC into the machine. Sometimes that was all you could do.

[@TableWolfMusic]

Would be interested to see you make another cool video like this but for server2003 because it can use vista drivers for many things (graphics etc.,.... and yes I know for some cards those vista drivers also work in windows7 or windows8.1 like for the nvidia fx5200).

[@Erik.Lundberg]

I used Windows 2000 on my Athlon Thunderbird and Athlon XP systems. Worked very well and felt a lot more stable compared to Windows 98/ME.

[@obsessivesoundz]

Hello. Thank you for the nostalgia of comparing these Windows versions. I was just wondering what is the game you're showcasting in this video?

[@titotech]

I never will miss when i was an kid like 13 age and was using windows 98/me with Duron 950Mhz + Riva TNT2 with LOW fps on Counter-Strike 1.5, BUUUT when i install XP and enter on the game, the fps was most of time in 100, a HUGE boost by kernel i think.

[@Dadhole]

I vastly preferred Win2000 despite the DOS incompatibilities. Something about having a computer you didn't have to reboot 6 times a day...

[@infamousacidrain]

Great OS and one of its biggest unmentioned pluses is that it uses the Nt kernel and supports dual processors. Windows 9x/ME were single core only. The drawback vs XP is that it doesn’t support as much software. For example, I was trying to install PlugY for diablo 2 the other day. Wouldn’t work in 98 for me, almost worked in 2000 but it wanted an updated Microsoft something package, which Microsoft says is supported on windows 2000 sp4, but it would not install. Worked fine in XP.

[@gex581990]

My dad was tech savvy back then and I remember when ME came out it was so bad we went to Windows 2000 and was surprised how well it actually worked beside the obvious DOS compatibility. As an OS it was superior to ME, for gaming if you were strictly playing “newer” games at the time it was great too but it did a good enough job to get us to the XP release and obviously XP was awesome, we were already used to the lack of DOS cause 2000 so that wasn’t a big deal. NT is great and it’s no wonder it’s still used today. DOS was definitely a thing of it’s time as much as I miss it sometimes it’s just nostalgia.

[@vascomanteigas9433]

It was the main reason that Dosbox was created

[@rodneydawn4134]

2k really had little to offer the home user. It didnt even have directx out of the box. It was more suited to the corporate environment in which it excelled. 98 and ME were better for home users. XP bridged the gap being the first nt os with native directx our of the box and designed to be usable for offices and home users alike. 2k only got dirextx as an afterthought. A tack on update for home users who mistakedly bought the corporate win2k instead of the home user winME by mistake.

[@bradleybrand0]

What game are you playing in the video, pal? Looks good for it's time.

[@ControlAllDa1337]

I think it's expendable maybe?

[@nickwallette6201]

2K was a decent OS, having a lot in common with XP. It was more stable than 9x, but a little more heavy. Driver support was the biggest problem though. I remember getting a copy shortly after release and reverting to ME because of so many driver-related issues. It was the first mainstream NT release, and that meant vendors weren't very familiar with the driver API yet. At least for consumer-oriented hardware. Professional systems had been living on NT for years, so SCSI and workstation graphics cards all worked fine. But 3D accelerators and DirectX drivers weren't the focus until after 2K came along and made clear MS's strategy for merging the home and business product portfolio. We would see the same shaky period when XP-64 came out. It took until halfway through Vista's tenure before 64-bit drivers could be taken seriously. Interestingly, the 3.1-to-95 jump seems to me to be the biggest paradigm shift in PC OSes, and I don't remember having many issues with drivers on 95. I think that's just because MS made such a big deal out of its launch. Vendors knew it was going to be big, and were ready. Plus, MS had a substantial driver pool out of the box, which definitely helped cover any gaps while vendors caught up.

[@Lofote]

Actually the driver model for both ME and 2000 was WDDM so nearly all drivers should work on 2000. I remember having no driver issues at all back then unlike NT 4.0, which was a nightmare for multimedia cards like sound cards. Do you have any example which drivers did not work on your WIndows 2000 installation? By the way I remember WIndows 95 having huge issues with drivers back then, letting the "search for hardware" crash on many systems I knew incl. many of my friends back then :-D On Win2000 everything just worked that was out back then. Strange, that we had the opposite experience here :)

[@nickwallette6201]

@@Lofote I had a friend whose husband worked at Microsoft, so I got a copy of Win2K Pro just after release from the MS Employee Store. I tried to get my SB Live! working and either Creative had no drivers listed, or the ones they had didn’t work on my card. There were a bunch of different card versions, and I had the original retail version, so maybe they were meant for a later revision. It’s been 20 years and I don’t remember exactly what the issue was. But the gist is, it didn’t work, or didn’t fully work, and that was a deal breaker for me. Not sure if I ended up using generic “9x” drivers on ME, or if they had some that were listed as compatible. Assuming the latter, i also don’t know if they were VXD or WDM. Probably the former, since they would have been an easy port from Win98 drivers. I’m sure they worked all of that out pretty soon after, and it was just early adoption growing pains. But, I didn’t really have the RAM to run 2K very well anyway, and I mostly lived in BeOS R5 Pro at the time and just used Windows for games and audio editing stuff. (Ergo, working sound card drivers, with SoundFont and EAX support, were important to me.) Funny how things work out. I downloaded a beta of Win95 from a BBS (shhh - don’t tell) and it worked absolutely great on my 486 at the time. It was an AST Advantage PC, which would’ve been fairly important to have on the HCL. It had onboard video, so that would’ve been a given (and it was a bog standard Cirrus chip anyway), and sound would’ve been a PAS16 at the time, so again, no issue there. Maybe not everybody was good to go on day one, but I remember it being smooth sailing for me!

[@Lofote]

@@nickwallette6201 SB LIve? That is interesting, because one would assume that at that time CREATIVE LABS was the leading sound card manufacturer so that that support should be a no-brainer 😲 I back then had Terratec cards, which were far more uncommon, but they were detected automatically, however they used standard chips by... I think Ensoniq? .. so thats why they where still recognized. Still I would have thought that Creative Labs sound cards should be definitely automatically supported. Strange :-o

[@NightSprinter]

Am sad that even 2000 is no longer enough to run Diablo II and StarCraft 1. Latest patch (and the latter now being free) requires XP. There is a function in a certain DLL file exclusive to XP.

[@j7ndominica051]

I would format a spacious HDD with another tool, and limit the size of the system partition to avoid potential problems with LBA28 and make imaging easier. The disk controllers were a major pain when they appeared on the actual motherboards. First time I got an intel 9xx express board, I left the HDD hanging off one side on the same cable as the CD-ROM, before installing the controller drivers. Windows 2000 is a great professional system in function and appearance that doesn't attempt to hold the user's hand like WinXP or Me does, and with excellent stability in longer uptimes. GoG repacks unfortunately bump system requirements... A genius feature playing CD music off the HDD. But the installer should be as minimal as possible, and not impose additional restrictions to avoid case where it doesn't run on either very old or very new systems (like InstallShield).

[@ShinobiDiabolik]

Hello Phil, always a pleasure to watch a video. As you asked in the video, i would like to share my personal experience with Windows 2000. To me Windows 2000 was as sweet as candy. Installed once, setup once, never had issues for years of use and abuse. Windows 2000 does not play as nice with AMD, it wants Intel CPU, Intel chipset and Nvidia video card. Windows 2000 is picky and difficult on drivers. What i did was to make sure i use WHQL signed drivers for my hardware, taken from Hardware manufacturer. to make it perform you need to install in following order: 1. motherboard/chipset driver first, 2. reboot, 3. install sound driver, video driver, USB driver, IDE/SATA driver. 4. Reboot, 5. Install OpenGL - Open GL is additionally installed, 6. Install Direct X - DirectX is Additionally installed, Pleas note: Direct X and OpenGL are installed after you are done with all the drivers. Then you install SP4 and SP4SRP1 for SP4. It is then you will see Windows 2000 shine in its full glory. allow Windows 2000 to use 3 gb RAM maximum.

[@philscomputerlab]

Great information, thank you!

[@ShinobiDiabolik]

@@philscomputerlab I Hope it serves you well. May i ask you if it is possible, some time is foreseeable future, to revisit Windows 2000, but this time on Intel based system? Intel CPU wit hIntel chipset and Nvidia Geforce 2 GPU? Basically my idea is what i shared as personal experience to be your guideline for the video? I know you cannot fully follow it up, it is all a matter of hardware and revisions. Proper OpenGL setup will allow Quake, GL Quake and Quake 2 to show their good side. To be on the Safe side, Geforce 2 video card will do nicely. Please note: There is the hidden gem. Installing OpenAL, after setting up sound blaster Live or Audigy, it will bring some improvements in games, which are not built around Creative's EAX. OpenAL stands for Open AudioLanguage/Open AudioLibrary and it is the same for the sound as OpenGL for the graphics.

[@jangelelcangry]

It seems that 2000 is more of a workstation/server OS.

[@marcello4258]

it is based on NT which was back in the days only running on those.. and win2k (afaik) came only in the professional edition ..but yea also worked fine for gaming on my amd k6 ;)

[@CLS2086]

I used Win2K until 2014. The key to get a little more FPS is to install it on a SCSI host adapter (Adaptec 2940). 2nd Choice is to use HighPoint IDE Raid adapter if your motherboard got it. But the worth is to use the internal VIA chipset ! It uses more CPU ressources, and it killed some of my HDD too.

[@natedunn51]

My dad loves to rant about ribbion cables, he hates them for those weird wire glitches they would have. It was a common topic when I opened up the old xp machine, 17 years of dust and it looked better than the only 10 years on the vista machine (now running linux os's) which we for some reason had kept (and I now use like this)

[@philscomputerlab]

Yea my next build will likely be purely using SATA.

[@Hairy_Lee]

Windows 2000 was what I turned to after Windows ME took a dislike to my RAM upgrades. Many happy years of gaming on this before I took the odd decision to move to Windows XP 64

[@darabbit333]

Windows 2000 might have been underperforming slightly in games, but it made up for that in stability. Win98 and especially ME, you would have to format almost every LAN. Windows 2000 ran smooth and never crashed it seemed to slow down, unlike the other systems.

[@bastianfromkwhbsn8498]

It's a pity you ran in that much trouble with Win2000. I love that OS and used it well into the life of Win XP. And even today I use the classic Windows theme on Win 7 because I am so familiar with the Win 2000 look

Matches my experience with the Kyro II. It was a great performing card when it (or rather the driver) decided to work, but compatibility was tough sometimes...

[@smallmoneysalvia]

I suggest trying the windows XP drivers when you have issues with the 2000-specific drivers. A lot of the time using XP drivers will work (manually searching for the .inf if the install fails due to the version) since most home users and consumer devices just leapfrogged windows 2000 altogether.

[@johnkristian]

the drivers are not identical, they are COMPLETELY different since they are for NT kernel.

[@philscomputerlab]

Well of course it is. I hope it's clear what I meant, in that I downloaded one driver, which works with 98, ME, 2000 and XP. You can call it driver package if you like. I did explain this to avoid confusion. Whereas with the PowerVR they have three distinct drivers, for each OS.

[@pvc988]

And I haven't really used XP at all. I went straight from 2000 to Vista and 7. It didn't have to reinstall it from 2002 up to 2007 even once. Machine it was runing on was 2GHz Pentium 4 on Jetway P4XFB board with 512MB of RAM, 64 MB GeForce 4 MX 440 and 80 GB Seagate HDD. For me Win2k was super stable and robust.

[@Seth22087]

I had all three OSes and all were working just fine for me. I can't really remember any complaints on performance. Windows 2000 was best at stability and multitasking and wasn't best in compatibility with older stuff. Also service packs fixed a lot of issues, so SP4 is a way to go. As far as Win98 vs ME goes, both had their own set of problems, but nothing too terrible. So my guess would just be as in the video, it all depends on drivers and hardware you use it with.

[@marcello4258]

win2000 was the best windows imo ..i really loved it, since it was based on the NT Kernel it was much more stable than 98se and was highly compatible (what xp was not - it took long until games were actually playable on xp especially those using open gl [i guess that was the main issue])

[@Lofote]

Hm, interesting. XP actually for me could play any game from day #1, that could be played on Windows 2000, and I actually can't even think of a reason, where XP would have been less compatible from a technical standpoint. Do you have any examples that did run on 2000 but not on XP at first?

[@johnrickard8512]

Windows NT does inherently have a bit more overhead than Windows 9x/ME(there was such a discrepancy between Windows 95 and NT 4.0 that NT mostly ran on high-end workstations). That disadvantage disappears if you have a dual-cpu/dual-core cpu, which Windows NT supported at least sense 4.0, while Windows 9x/ME didn't support it(I think...someone correct me if I'm wrong).

[@thepatriotsfan7127]

Used Windows 2000 from when I got my first PC (Idk, probably 2004 or 2005) up until 2010

[@WaybackTECH]

I've had problems with GOG games on true hardware as well. Some of them you can strip the gog stuff out of and it will work, others they fiddle with stuff to run in their virtual box on modern hardware. I can say if you use the pure original Quake 2 form the cd or an iso of the original cd, you won't have any issues with it under Windows 2000.

[@philscomputerlab]

I mostly use GOG releases because they are very quick to install. I have these running straight from a folder, so it's up and running in no time.

[@malrofo]

I grew up on windows ME. Never had real issues with it

[@metalschnulli]

Ich weiß ja, das du eher so PC affin bist und nicht so Laptop mäßig, aber weißt du zufällig wo man für alte Sony Vaio Laptops Treiber herbekommen kann? Weil Sony ja anscheind seine Treiber Platform abgeschaltet hat. Und Vaio selbst natürlich die alten Geräte vor 2014 nicht supportet. Bei mir geht es ganz speziell um den Sony Vaio PCG-F808K. Danke

[@Ampera_]

Hi Phil. I want to apologize for being a bit rude with you on VOGONS. It is good to see you have taken my advice though. Windows 2000 is shit without sp4. I normally have to deal with all kinds of shit on the internet, with everybody having more lead than brains, so I am normally a bit abrasive, but it's never personal. I am also German, so I do tend to be very frank a lot of the time. Sorry again, TwoOfFive/Ampera

[@philscomputerlab]

Thanks, all good :)

[@NLuKa420]

Just a thought but Windows 2000 was the first true 32-bit consumer Windows, all 9x versions being a 16/32-bit hybrid based on DOS. I feel like a lot of your issues arose because of this. It would probably be more willing to play nice with XP drivers or drivers built for NT 4.0 than with anything built for 9x.

[@rarapas]

Vanilla 2k had many many issues. Also The manufacturers at the time didn't have proper drivers, especially for gaming. Kinda like the first x64 XP or Vista time. You were stuck with chips/cards that had no drivers except 9x. Service packs also increased compatibility of games, there was a list back in the day of what you could play or not and it was rather limited. I'd only use 2k for a short while as a secondary OS. My main was 98SE GR at the time, and I had a secondary ME installation. The Greek winME was actually a bit more updated than the EN one straight off the CD, as it was released some time later and they fixed a few stuff already. 9x had no service packs, everything was updated by IE and common controls and visual C/basic runtimes. If you installed all the updates 98 and ME were pretty close, with the new features of ME being helpful (system restore, mass usb etc). So for the greater part 2000 wasn't for games at all, they shyly were more and more games that could run on 2k. That changed after XP. Also XP came out when 2k was only at service pack 2 with still many things not working, while everything was way better on XP already. Sp3 was released about a month before XP got sp1 . By that time anyone who wanted to go NT core had already moved to XP. In 2003 came 2k sp4 that added usb2 and wireless. In general, USB 2 drivers were quite buggy early on, especially those for via chipsets. I recall trying several before getting one that was the most stable. Fun times :)

[@arranmc182]

The base NT kernels that 2000 & XP shipped with lack support for true UISB 2.0 support, my understanding is the service packs add this function in to the kernel, also on your USB keyboard issue try an add in card or an external USB hub with its own power as had issues with some older onboard USB chipsets and wireless devices.

[@sburton015]

I remember when I made that video I have of a mermaid show, I was able to get it off of my camcorder tape and record it onto my computer which was back in September 4th, 2000 which back then, I remember using Windows 98se, then Windows Me was released that same week. I remember Windows 2000 was more stable than Windows Me, but Windows Me had more multimedia features than Windows 2000 for the home user.

[@georgez8859]

Great video, Thanks phil. A fellow KZbinr named Terabyte Coyote did a video on setting up 2000 on older hardware. it worked on my dell 4100 with a pentium 3 too bad about the kyro i thought that was a cool card

[@stevwillsable]

windows xp is essentially 2000 re-release a few years later, even xp drivers work on win 2000

[@lordsnowy4638]

I can't ger Direct 3d to work in win2000. I tried geforce 2 and geforce 4 cards and none of them had direct3d working , in the direct setup it says Direct 3d not available. Can someone help?

[@darkwaterblue]

Big thing for me is I can log straight into my network shares with 2000 where as windows 98 takes fiddling on the host and the serving machines to get them to talk.

[@Blurredman]

I have a soft spot for Win2k. My current server which is very similar specs to this PC (albeit with only 512mb RAM) is using 2k and I host FTP and HTTP as well as CODUO and Quake III servers on it. Mainly for the ISS implementation for the above. I used (and still do) have a couple of Dell Latitude D266XT laptops. One had Windows 2k and the other 98. When playing games such as Desperados the performance on 98 was extremely choppy for whatever reason- Not on the 2K.

[@3800S1]

See if win7 will run on it. Thats what I ended up using for me reto PC after trying 2k, and XP. 2k worked perfect for me but I couldn't update any of the games to community created patches and updates. XP also didn't allow the patches to work despite allowing me to install them where 2k failed at that point. Also XP like your PC didn't want to play ball, things just kept crashing and errors, games and general windows explorer crashes. Struggled to get win 7 to initially install but once I got past that I found everything worked great and I got most of my games updated and like magic I also got my audigy 2 zs to work with the creative drivers which 2k and xp didn't want to work. Its actually quite awesome running an early 2000s PC on win7. Runs reasonably quick too.

[@gamecomparisons]

I see online recommendations to use Windows 2000 as a typical know-it-all Internet thing. To me actually using Windows 2000, from set up to getting every individual game and benchmark and device working optimally is just more work than it is worth. Similarly I set up WinXP x64 on my first HTPC just to get the extra performance out of my Athlon 64 3200+. Once Windows 7 64-bit was around I would NEVER do that again. Such a pain. That said, SATA drivers for the Promise 150 or 300 give me issues in one of my Win98SE boxes too. But I think I tracked that down to video drivers needing to be completely cleared and the Geforce 256 prefering one PSU over another. I can only imagine troubleshooting all of that AND Windows 2000's quirks just because the Internet says so.

[@henrychinaski39]

Still remember using it on Celeron 400a@450 on ZX chipset with 64MB if RAM and S3 Trio32 VGA. Best times. Windows 2000 UI is the best Microsoft created so far. Since then each releass is getting worse. Especially rounded corners on Windows 11.

[@overclockeverything2310]

I miss my old A Open socket A motherboard. Had the 900 MHz AMD Thunderbird in it, overclocked to 1.1 GHz with the pencil mod.

[@fairyball3929]

Weird, I used one of my grandmother's older computers, which was a Compaq. No idea what specific computer it was, but I think it ran Windows 2000. Guess at age 5 years which was back in the year 2008, I wasn't into trying anything big on her computer, except for the internet through a dial-up modem. :/