The Windows 2000 Page.

Welcome to the Windows 2000 Page. A lot of the images can be viewed larger, so stick your mouse cursor on each one, and you’ll see which ones can be viewed at full size.

These are Windows 2000 Professional’s minimum system requirements:
• 133 MHz Intel Pentium class (or better) CPU. Up to 2 CPUs are supported on one computer.
• 32 MB of RAM. 4 GB is the maximum.
• A 2 GB hard drive.
• A monitor capable of the standard VGA resolution.
• A CD / DVD drive.
• A keyboard.
• A compatible pointing device is optional.
(• You may also need to boot from a floppy disk if your computer can’t boot from a CD.)

After having used Windows 3.11 For Workgroups, then Windows ’95, Windows ’98, Windows ME and then Windows XP, Windows 2000 was the one of interest that I missed out on. I got along pretty well with the interface in Windows ME, from what I can recall, but the OS could be terribly unstable at times. Windows XP is very stable, but there are so many things about the interface that irk me, that it made me wonder if Windows 2000 was more of an ideal balance. So, that’s why I decided to get it, and then find an old, cheapo computer to run it on.
Like the other Microsoft operating systems prior to Windows XP, Windows 2000 has no normal support for icons with alpha channels, but there is a mouse cursor shadow. The interface look is quite a bit like Windows ME as well. The square-ish design on the loading screen is quite reminiscent of this, as are the top left corners of the Explorer windows. Unlike the odd looking resolution that Windows ’95 through to Windows ME used for their startup screens, Windows 2000 sticks to the regular VGA resolution of 640 × 480 pixels, although with less colours. This is also the last version of Windows NT to not require activation. Just install and go!
I was pleased to see file sorting options in Explorer are limited to name, size, type and modification date. Windows XP can often have ridiculously long lists, which were inconsistently chosen based on what most of the files were in a directory. This made it a right pain to change every time you wanted to sort something. Windows 2000 doesn’t treat zip files as folders either, which was a bit of an oddity in Windows XP, and another thing I had to disable. It could be quite annoying during file searches, and discovering that some of the results were actually archived.
Like Windows XP, there’s file protection — another entire copy of all the operating system files, which is compressed. So if you want to clear up a bit more room by buzzing off a couple of programs you can’t normally uninstall, such as Outlook and NetMeeting, you have to manually go through the dllcache directory to find all the 2nd copies of the files. Otherwise, they’ll just pop back again. Of course, the idea of this extra directory is one of good intention; it’s just with no way to remove the stuff from the system you don’t use, in a normal fashion, it makes it a bit more long winded.
Like everything from the later revisions of Windows ’95, good old Internet Explorer is stuck in the works like a brain tumour that you can’t seem to get rid of. Thankfully, better browsers such as Opera and Firefox work just nicely. Firefox 12 is apparently as far as you can go though with Windows 2000, but that’s a lot better than on PowerPC Macs, even with operating systems that are about 6 years more recent.
As you can see, the basics of the interface are very much like Windows ’95, and unlike Windows XP, there don’t seem to be any other themes, although some 3rd party programs have been made to get around this.

Initial setup begins in a text mode display.	Media Player is the simple, but effective version 6.4. Notice how zip files are associated with nothing.
There was even this CD player, which seems to be absent from Windows XP. It does actually work in Windows XP and Windows 7 as well.	• If you get fed up with programs like Outlook and Internet Explorer and buzz ’em off, Windows will give you a notice about it, if you try to start the program from such places like the links in help topics. • Note the cop-out, mystical system administrator message as well, as if this person actually exists.

• Here’s a tip to remove unwanted icons from the Control Panel. In your Run box, type in mmc to start the Microsoft Management Console. Then press Control + M to add a snap-in. Click on Add… and then choose the Group Policy Object Editor from the list. Click on Add, and then Finish, when the dialogue box pops up. Next click on close on the Window that says Add Standalone Snap-in. Then click “OK” and you should be back at the main Console window. Expand the Local Computer Policy tree and go into User Configuration. Next, choose Administrative Templates and then Control Panel. Double-click on Hide specified Control Panel applets. Set the radio button to Enabled, then click on Show… Next click on Add… Type the name of the .CPL file you want to hide. If for instance, you want to hide the Windows Update icon, add wuaucpl.cpl to the list. You do not have to save when you quit. The change will take effect immediately, and when you next go into Control Panel, the items you chose to hide will be gone. This is pretty much the same procedure in Windows XP and Windows 7 as well.
• Get yourself TweakUI. This will work from Windows ’95 through to Windows 2000, but probably not XP. This is no longer available from Microsoft, it seems, so you can get it here.
• This is an old one, but to customise your Send To context menu thing, go to C:\Documents And Settings\UserName\SendTo, and you can add or delete shortcuts. (Or in your Run box, you can type: Shell:SendTo.) Notepad and WordPad are 2 programs you will always want to have in this. Well, I do. :-)

As you can see, if you change the wvleft.bmp file in this directory, you can customise your Explorer windows just that little bit more at the top left. Something other than my writing would probably be a better choice, but this was just to see if it worked. You can use 24 bit colour images as well as 8 bit ones. (Click on the image to see it bigger.)	The Task Manager is slightly different to the one in Windows XP, with a different font for the usage displays, and memory usage seemingly in KB, rather than MB.
Windows 2000 starts up with this welcome program, which gives you some tips. As you can see, you can use the check box to disable it.	Pressing Ctrl + Alt + Del, brings up this box, rather than the Task Manager directly, as in Windows XP. Windows 7 seems to have reverted back to this method as well.

You can set Windows 2000 to log you in automatically, without requiring you to type your password every time the OS starts up. This is handy if you only use the computer yourself, but in a multi-user environment, it would be advisable to have everyone log-in.
As with earlier versions of Windows NT, the default install directory is C:\WINNT, and not C:\WINDOWS, like the other versions of Windows I’ve used.
Installing this on my HP laptop computer was a bit tricky at 1st. I discovered I had to disable native SATA support for the hard drive, or Windows wouldn’t find it. Afterwards, I was able to install the driver, and re-enable it. Also, Windows 2000 doesn’t have 48 bit LBA (Logical Block Addressing) enabled by default, so you need to install to a partition of 256 GB or less, and then enable it for the rest of the drive later, in the registry. Probably. As my drive is only 55 GB or so, this isn’t presently an issue for me.

Ejecting flash memory devices seems to cause more trouble than in Windows XP. At least for me personally. Usually killing Explorer and then restarting it, fixes the problem.	Like Windows XP, Windows 2000 (left) allows you to set processes to processors and shows a huge list of possible CPUs, where as Windows 7 (right) only shows the amount you have. In reality, Windows 2000 Professional only supports 2 processors, apparently. The DataCentre version will support up to 32 though.
The Control Panel.	Windows 2000 also comes with this simple DVD player. Although you need to have a decoder already installed, or you will get a message about it, saying a DVD drive is not enough!

All in all, the OS is pretty decent for Windows. It does seem to be pretty stable, yet avoids some of Windows XP’s unnecessary extras. Although there are a few extra things in Windows XP which would have been beneficial here too.
I’m running the operating system on a 1.66 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo CPU with 2 GB of RAM, so it doesn’t have any issues with chunking up.
Seeing as the operating system is getting on a bit for 2015, it probably wouldn’t be the best choice for most users. Firstly, getting drivers for new hardware would be quite difficult. Secondly, the availability and choices of new software that would run on it are getting a lot slimmer. Thirdly, support from Microsoft was dropped in 2010. So, unless you’re doing research, have an interest in this OS for particular reasons, like me, and understand what hardware it will work on, it probably wouldn’t really be something to go back to, despite any of the interface advantages.