Many people using Windows 2000 still?

breadbin

I used Win2K for years and loved the interface and what not and was wondering if I can use it these days on a fairly newish pc? i have a dual core athlon and a nvidia 9800gt and 2gb ram. i have it installed on a spare hd i have lying around and thought i'd give it a go;) just gonna google it and see

PogMoThoin

You can run Xp and Vista with Windows Classic theme and turn off all the bells and whistles, this will look like 2000. Not wise to run Windows 2000 today, its a security risk, Microsoft themselves stopped supporting it in 2006, there are no more updates and You'd find it hard to get an antivirus.

breadbin

i sort of guessed there would be something. It seemed like a good idea at the time but will soon turn into a headache trying to get it to work;) switched to classic theme so might give that a go for a bit til the craving stops.

breadbin

breadbin wrote: »

I used Win2K for years and loved the interface

Now you're talking my language, beats Vista's inconsistent UI by a mile!

PogMoThoin wrote: »

You can run Xp and Vista with Windows Classic theme and turn off all the bells and whistles, this will look like 2000. Not wise to run Windows 2000 today, its a security risk, Microsoft themselves stopped supporting it in 2006, there are no more updates and You'd find it hard to get an antivirus.

Not exactly. It's in the same support phase as XP, extended support, for another year. So there's still security updates being released. The biggest problem is that ATI and NVIDIA gave up on 2000 a long time ago so there'd be no video drivers available for it. I agree that AV might be a problem but some like Avast still run on Windows 95 so they'd be fine.

kleefarr

Been using it for a while and get regular updates and use AVG anti-virus no problem.

enda1

My work laptop is win 2k sp4. Still works grand. They use symantech and I have a quadro fx graphics card so there must be some drivers available!

Capt'n Midnight

if you like the interface don't forget you can still get a 180 day eval version of windows server 2003

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/windowsserver/bb405947.aspx

then tweak it up here
How to convert your Windows Server 2003... to a Workstation! www.msfn.org/win2k3/

Stephen

^ You might as well just use Win XP in classic mode then.

We still have a couple of hundred Win2k machines here in work out of an estate of thousands and we're trying to eradicate them as much as possible.

watty

My XP looks someplace between Win98 & NT4 as I find it cleaner and less distracting.

I mean how many adults use Teletubby themed writing paper?

The striving for "prettyness" IMO wastes screen real-estate and detracts from the contents of applications. A media player I want just simple menus and buttons and the video/MP3 Tags, not something that looks like a toy for 5 year olds out of a pound shop.

Clutter & animation and too much bright colours is tiring, distracting etc from real work.

Functional, not glitter. Ubuntu, Vista, OSX, XP default skins have way to much candy. My desktop is dull neutral slate cyan colour. No photo.

Dartz

watty wrote: »

I mean how many adults use Teletubby themed writing paper?

You'd be surprised.... or probably not

Functional, not glitter. Ubuntu, Vista, OSX, XP default skins have way to much candy. My desktop is dull neutral slate cyan colour. No photo.

One of the reasons I use the Xubuntu/Xfce desktop. Still has a little eye-candy, but no irritating animations that get in the way. It just gets on with it.

I do admit to using XP with the default interface as it doesn't have much of a negative effect, if any, on modern hardware. However I wouldn't touch Aero with a barge pole, I don't see why my laptop's battery should be drained quicker just so I can see through a window.

Then again I still believe an operating system should be just that, a lightweight interface for running applications, not a suite of bundled applications which many people don't use or need.

petronius

I confess I use Win2000 as my windows partition from time to time, ironically to update my iPod mostly, since Linux's are on the other partitions.
I had to do some work round to force google Chrome to work on windows 2000 -

When ever I have to use vista in work etc., I end up switching things off to make it more like XP or win2k.

I think Vista and Windows ME, were MS's worst OS releases.

tpotter

Like others have mentioned, I usually go with the XP theme that look like win2k and disable the themes service/advanced appearance features when installing XP on a low end machine. However, for compatibility reasons, I don't really ever install Win2k anymore.

I still come across it every so often though, but usually only in business settings.