Comment by mixmastamyk

9 days ago

I preferred XP/2003 in classic UI mode. Lots of little improvements.

If you could get winterm on it and recent Firefox it’d be quite usable. Perhaps ReactOS one day.

and 64-bit (x86_64 not IA64), which no version Windows 2000 was AFAIK

Windows 7 with classic UI is probably the most-recent decent version.

  • There were pre-release 64 bit alpha versions of win2k, but otherwise you needed XP/2k3 for 64 bit. XP for amd64 was a bit of a shitshow with drivers (especially on consumer-grade computers), though. It wasn’t until vista that it ironically got better on that front, though people held out upgrading because of how terrible it was…

yeah while 2K was their best ever single breakthrough improvement, it was a v1 and XP/2003 in classic mode was a more refined 2K eg more drivers and better plug and play, more graphics compatibility. And 2003 Active Directory had a number of quality of life improvements.

  • NT3.5 was perhaps the most stable version I ever used. NT4 brought the new UI, making NT5 aka 2k not the first version of the 95+ UI.