Comment by sjsdaiuasgdia
9 days ago
IIRC, Win2K would wait for most / all service startups to complete before showing the login prompt. XP and later would allow login to occur while many services were still starting up.
It's a tradeoff. A Win2K system was pretty responsive when you log in after a reboot/startup, but you've got to wait for that experience. In the days of spinning disks and single core CPUs, you had to fight those still-starting services for resources, making the first several minutes of XP usage painful.
Win2k also had the smoothest mouse movements that I had ever seen. If you had a PS/2 Mouse, you could turn up the sample rate up to the max. Dragging windows looked incredible. Even my Mac to this day with a fancy brand new 4k display can't match it. My mouse still looks blurry as it moves across the screen.
I remember using the BootVis tool (IIRC was an early part of what would be the performance toolkit) to profile the startup process, and then you could it to optimize the location of data loaded from HDDs to reduce the seeking required. Also back when PATA was still in use depending on your motherboard I seem to remember making sure windows wouldn't try to autodetect link speed on unused attachments as that could take ages trying to find something that wasn't there.