mikeymike wrote:
NoFastMem wrote:
Windows 2000 was the closest thing to a truly decent Windows. Come to think of it, releasing it was probably a mistake. ;-)
Personally, I'm wondering how long I will be able to practically use it for. I was forced off NT4 by hardware changes, I wonder what it'll be this time. Though it seems that with every MS OS release, the more configuring that needs to be done to make it a responsive OS with a reasonably small memory footprint (for Windows).
I hated NT4, it was always wonky setting those damned things up.
Soundcards were hit or miss, same for video cards, service packs had to be constantly reinstalled everytime you make a slight configuration change that pulled an original file off the install CD, USB was ignored, CPU cache size had to be manually set. No device manager. Ugh, no fond memories of Nt4 here. :lol:
(Running it wasn't bad, but if anything "Murphy Lawish" happened to the machine it was a PITA to work on)
2000 and XP seemed exactly the same to me, I keep hearing people say they liked 2000 but hated XP, but most of the reasons are down to default settings that can be changed to accomodate the preference for 2000's defaults.
2003 is identical to XP, but with default options similar to 2000. Microsoft has been throwing free 2003sbs Server DVD's around like candy, so that's all I've been running lately, set up as a workstation.
XP-64 is Win2003, the version reports as 5.2.3790, which is the same as this Win2003sbs I'm running now. I wonder why they didn't update XP-32 to the same kernel, it's a bit faster and has a smaller footprint. it's wierd that Xp32 and 64 would be left at different revisions.
One thing I *DO* miss from Nt4 is support for IBM's HPFS filesystem, I used to use that instead of NTFS as it seemed to perform better on servers. Rumor has it 2000-XP-2003+ can be hacked into supporting HPFS by copying some files off the NT4 CD, but I haven't messed around with that, and by now the benefit probably isn't there any longer. Even Nt4 had to be tricked into installing into an HPFS partition, you'd have to create the partitions with an OS2 Warp CD, then abort the install and fire up NT and tell it to ignore the errors(NT4 had no HPFS utilities, even though it advertised compatibility) Ugh, Nt4 flashbacks :-P
