Windows 2000 Server named peak Microsoft. Readers say it's all been downhill since Clippy The results are in, and it appears that – at least as far as The Register's most loquacious commenters are concerned – Windows Server 2000 was Microsoft's peak. The tech giant is celebrating its 50th birthday, and we asked Register readers for their thoughts on the company's milestones and missteps over the years. Many of you …
Windows 7 isn't the best overall OS. It's 2nd best. 1st best is XP.
XP you could do you anything on it. Stick a DVD in and let it autorun. Great!
Windows 7? You try to do anything with that and all you get is "Are you sure you wanted to install this?". Every time. Every damn time. Fuck off with the nagging already.
I can respect XP as a #1 choice, given its essentially zero telemetry and its hyper-user-focused design. I was an XP holdout until 2015, in fact.
However, Windows 7 did objectively represent an actual upgrade in several significant ways: Practically unlimited RAM support being the biggest upgrade, proper support for SSDs instead of just hard drives, practically unlimited disk partition sizes, and proper implementation of video acceleration at the OS rendering level (Aero theme implementation in particular). Also, I think it's fair to say that the core OS stability of Windows 7 was superior as well. I've run my Windows 7 desktop for the better part of a year without having to reboot or getting a BSOD; I don't think I can say the same for XP.
As for being nagged about "Are you sure you want to install this?" I guess I never really noticed this, given that only install some new program maybe once a month on average.
>However, Windows 7 did objectively represent an actual upgrade in several significant ways:
Agree and that W10, ignoring the telemetry and UI is an under-the-hood functional improvement again on W7.
I suspect if MS had not effectively corrupted the Windows code base when it created W8, it might have been possible to have forked and recreated a W2K look and feel UI/UX with all the under-the-hood functional enhancements of W7 and W10.
>given that only install some new program maybe once a month on average.
Many users probably only install the forced updates to applications installed when they first purchased their system.
> Windows 7? ... ... ... ... Fuck off with the nagging already.
My Win7 doesn't nag. Took a day to run into and turn-off the more common nag-points, maybe a year until I found and killed the last one worth fighting. Only a couple had to be sought in Google. You have to be stern with your GUI.
I only ever had slow booting 2k if the DNS was misconfigured. That was in the order of half an hour before the domain server brought up the desktop. Corrected the DNS and rebooted, back up in under 2 minutes. My HP DL-380 (and relations) spend longer in the pre-boot stage.
Sure Bills successors will milk all the money they can from OS sales, but Office365, Teams, Azure (which supports Linux and other OS's on IaaS as well as providing it's own PaaS products) these subscription models are how the firm sees the future. According to SEC filings only 16% of Microsoft income is from Windows.
They have basically given up on desktop computing even as the corporate world firmly has not. Office 365 free works on Firefox or opera on some truly obscure Linux distributions. Yes if you have decades old processes using excel vba macros migrating would be a challenge, and even if you had better alternatives for everything the culture shift would be huge to move a corporations desktop off of windows, but at this point Microsoft isn't the biggest blocker, and would not be materially harmed if it gradually lost the top spot to apple on the desktop, and Linux in the data centre. At some Microsoft acquired outfits in the intel mac era (with macs usually dual booted for windows only stuff) this was the way and the monthly bill to Redmond before acquisition was still massive with office and Azure.
Its a shame because with windows server core and nano, cumulative patches, a willingness to make some of the marmite UI changes optional, and refraining from making peanuts on ads in windows, they could be great even now, and that would be good for Mac/Linux too, the evolutionary pressure would fuel innovation. Its just not a priority as far as I can see.
It’s been true for a long time that MS makes its reputation on Windows, but its money with Office. (And now, Azure, etc.) This goes back to at least Office 2003. Possibly to 2000. It has been noted on El Reg that Peak MS OS was Windows 2000 Server. This is not a co-incidence.
MS is not alone in having peaked years ago; Peak MacOS was Snow Leopard; starting with Spastic House Cat, err, that is, ‘Lion’, it was a long slide downhill. (Who, me, hate Lion? Whatever gave you that idea?b Just because I was on AppleSeed while Lion was in beta and I spotted and reported several serious problems which were not fixed prior to release. Indeed, some of the problems weren’t fixed until much later; High Sierra for one particularly noxious example. There is one error still listed from Mountain Lion, where they fixed a lot of what was wrong in House Cat, in the little app Apple uses to send in bug reports as not having been fixed. I suspect that it will never be addressed. Every now and again I report it again because it’s till there in current versions of the OS. They’ve stopped acknowledging the reports, not even sending out the infamous ‘working as designed/intended’ reply, possibly because when they send that I reply “This is a piss-poor design and the intent is clearly to annoy users”, but then I have a bad attitude. I suspect “Won’t Fix” is in effect. Bah, humbug. I’ll report it again with the next version of the OS if it’s still there, which it will be.) Peak Linux depends on the distro; Ubuntu is well past its peak, to name one.
Systemd is definiteley their most effective tactic against Linux.
Also thank you M$ for Poettering, de Icaza and your (probably) other infiltrators and disruptors.
Oh, and the $50M donation to SCO(Caldera).
And the "cancer" slurs.
Just to scrape the surface . . .
While I like Snow Leopard, 10.5.8 Leopard, last PPC release was solid. I have two PPCs G5's one iMac, and one G5 tower, the ones that look like MacPros.
I had Win2000 as my work desktop for a while, it I don't remember ever having to ask Jeeves where a setting was... Most users went from 98 to XP. We pretty much missed out on Win2000 server, we went from NT4 to 2003. I do remember my boss at the time was running Win2000 advanced server as his desktop!
"They have basically given up on desktop computing even as the corporate world firmly has not."
I doubt it. It's the teat through which users are expected to suck all those expensive services. What's more, they're not prepared to give it away which is why the 10->11 upgrade is restricted. Those who expect it on old H/W are looking at it from the wrong ange. The only reason it was allowed on recent H/W would have been to block class actions.
The problem in Nadella. He's the kind of CEO who want to make very easy money - and that means smaller investments, less skilled workers, and exploiting someone else's work as much as possibile. So he's cutting Windows development and testing, and killing Office applications as well. He switched to Chrome engine because he didn't want to spend really to develop a Microsoft one. He killed Windows Phone because it would have taken time to get market share, especially because of the previours failure and the bad name MS acquired, so money wouldn't come very soon.
He likes Azure because he can exploit Linux, Kubernetes, Postgres, etc. etc. to make money with little investments. Of course shareholders are pleased with this.
But in doing this, MS loses any advantage it had. The more your software runs outside Windows, the easier to switch to something else. Apple is much more careful about killing the golden eggs duck.
> what Microsoft did with Windows Phone thereafter was most definitely a misstep. A lack of an upgrade path for devices, combined with changing development frameworks, left users cold.
It was also the developer DRM. You couldn't upload code without a special license from Microsoft. Later, similar was done by Windows RT. It kills passion for early adopters and developers knowing their own code will stop working in the near future.
Windows NT 4.0 Terminal Services is still my favourite to emulate. With rdesktop you can get any resolution you need. NT 4 on a 3440×1440 monitor looks great. So much screen real-estate (the whole purpose for getting a large monitor).
Windows NT 4.0 Terminal Services is still my favourite to emulate. With rdesktop you can get any resolution you need. NT 4 on a 3440×1440 monitor looks great. So much screen real-estate (the whole purpose for getting a large monitor).
I found it looked long in the tooth even 10-15 years ago. Modern software started assuming higher colour depths long before at least 1080p resolution. With NT you had 256 colour on terminal services and that was your lot. 2000 upped it to 16 bit colour which while not photorealistic at least always looks usable and gets you off those awful indexed palettes.
Fidelity wise, absolutely. But I like the indexed colors. It feels weirdly "homely".
And its not like modern software is even going to run on NT 4.x (in some ways I want to run the old software anyway because it is fast, light and simple).
i.e Office 97 and Adobe PDF printer driver has never really been improved upon for the last decade for word processing.
Big effing yawn.
You people have been dissing Microsoft and Windows since dinosaurs used slate tablets to send neutrino messages to the moon. Frankly, it's gone way past the point of even being boring anymore. It's become SOP, even for people who don't really understand what all the screaming and crying is about. So very sorry that Linux can't manage to become the Desktop of the Year (because as a desktop it stinks); settle for being the server platform of choice, what's wrong with that? As far as I can tell, there are no men in trench coats holding guns to anyone's head and forcing them to use any Microsoft products, especially not the home user happily tootling away on Windows. All the crap I hear about "problems" with Windows is just that--crap. In over 30 years of using Windows I can count the number of actual issues I have had on the fingers on one hand, and of those 5, 3 were due to faulty hardware and the other 2 were 3rd party failures. I haven't seen a BSOD in so long that I've forgotten what they look like.
It became obvious a long while ago that the main thing driving the hatred from the non-Windows people is envy--they cannot stand that their pride and joy, whatever version of Linux or BSD or who-knows-what they use, does not rule the desktop and does not earn the billions of dollars a year that Microsoft does. Golly gosh, Microsoft isn't perfect? Tell me about a corporation, or company, or developer, or Linux package that is perfect, you liar.
Now of course, I'm going to be downvoted into the quicksands of Hades; I knew that when I started typing this little screed but ya know what? I don't care one bit. I don't care if you want to rebut me and tell me how wrong and wrongheaded I am. If I cared, I wouldn't post such mean commentary that doesn't shower admiration on Linux or whatever isn't Windows.
Your "people complaining about the latest Windows are whiners" tirade might have been valid if we lived in a world where nothing was ever good enough for us, and we were all just complaining about pie-in-the-sky ideas that ought to exist but don't.
But that's not the case. Our pie-in-the-sky ideals have, in fact, already been invented and widely used by a huge portion of the world for many years. Then, those near-perfect implementations have been systematically and forcibly dismantled and replaced over the years by systems that serve the creator rather than the end user, under the guise of "well, you have to use the latest version, it's not safe otherwise".
"It became obvious a long while ago that the main thing driving the hatred from the non-Windows people is envy--they cannot stand that their pride and joy, whatever version of Linux or BSD or who-knows-what they use, does not rule the desktop and does not earn the billions of dollars a year that Microsoft does."
Completely and utterly arse-about face. The reason many of us prefer Linux or BSD as a desktop is that we're not being bled by corporations earning* billions of dollars a year to produce ever crappier versions of opaque S/W.
We feel a need to genuflect whenever Microsoft pulls out another turkey of a UI. We don't fear every patch Tuesday nor wait ages for updates to download and then reboot and wait for an update to complete. We feel no need to have to submit our PCs to whatever inspection Microsoft demands with the next version of its EULA. We are emphatically not gradually boiled frogs.
* I'm repeating your choice of verb but it is open to dispute.
Oops. "we feel no need to genuflect etc.
Reflecting on Muffin's declared 30 years experience. It doesn't really impress anyone who was running real-world applications on Unix systems about the same time as Bill Gates was doing the deals that put PC-DOS on the first PCs, using CP/M on Z80s, also on real-world applications before that and cut their FORTRAN teeth about 25 years before Windows sprouted a Start button. 20 years ago I was developing applications on W2K so it's not as if I don't have a basis for comparison.
Oh, look! Bran Muffin is spouting shit. Tee-hee....
I try not to resort to ad hominem insults, but this one was teed up soooo well, that I couldn't resist. Plus, It's Friday, I've got a head cold, and I can't be arsed to write a point-by-point response right now -- I'll leave that up to the rest of the Reg commentard literati.
I diss m$ because I'm from the era when the OS ran in the background and did its job with little fanfare leaving us mere mortals to get on with creating the latest and greatest software(or crashing hard)
The shame is that m$ could have been saved from being a PITA in 2001 when the US government had the chance to break it up , hopefully into an OS company and an applications company so that the OS company concentrates on making the Windows OS the best they can, while applications creates for the best platform it can, with the chance that other application developers can compete with m$ applications on a level playing field thus forcing m$ applications to make their stuff the best they can.
Instead we still have the monolithic m$ where no one gets fired for buying m$, and pretty much forcing everyone to use m$ win/office because the bar to entry into that market is so high that no one can compete with it. plus m$ can re-design it it and make everyone pay for the update whether they wanted to or not.
The we have the well known security problems (not saying linux does'nt have these, but the OS design of linux can limit the damage)
Finally the infamous BSOD: this morning for me... windows 10 work box, switched on. boots up. BSOD. reboot. whats changed from yesterday afternoon? nothing.
Actually Bran, that's pure bollocks. And irrelevant to this item. This is mostly Windows users' views. Sure we have the usual smug Linux fans joining in, who will comment on the Windows they don't use, whether relevant to the thread or not. But for this item, it's about Windows' various versions. Which most seem to agree was best with Win 7. Win 8 being excrement, 10 being a step back from the abyss and 11 a whole new abyss. Some may genuinely prefer XP and I miss my WinPhone too.
And yes I've used Linux too.Have it on one of my laptops. And for the most part my Ubuntu and Zorin (dual boot) distros do what I want. But for real world everyday purposes I'm a Windows user.. And preferred Win 7 to anything that followed.
For real world uses I use Linux but have a W10 on a laptop. I started this month's updates about an hour & 10 minutes ago. It's only just gone to requiring a restate when it will spend ages finishing off what it couldn't update already. You think this is fit for everyday use?
I hear this so often but I genuinely never experience it. Most of my updates/reboots take around 3-5 minutes. I can count on one hand how often they've broken something and/or taken double-digit minutes to complete.
And that includes on a 5 year old laptop that had Windows 11 in-place upgraded from Windows 10 (which itself I think was was an in-place upgrade from Windows 7) and moved across to the laptop so was over 10 years old with a lot of crap/bloat/installed and uninstalled software over the years.
I am not saying it doesn't happen - I have friends and colleagues who suffer the same issues but I do wonder why it never happens to me.
Windows user for 30 years here. Even a fan of it from about 2000 to 2010. Although I was obviously using it wrong because I ended up having to count the problems I had with it within a week on the fingers of one hand, and then use the other hand if there was a feature update.
Linux user for 5 now. Decided to swap to it on desktop because I was so very very envious of Windows.
Partly agree. Partly disagree.
The problem is that when you take a look at e.g. Windows 11 and compare it to even Windows 2000, it has gone off in completely the wrong direction UI-wise. (But then many people feel that so did many) Linux desktops when they switched to Gnome.
Let's look at some: Moving everything out of the control panel. What was the thinking behind this? Worse, they still haven't moved everything over yet and the way they're going, never will. Add to that, this weird idea of settings take effect immediately with no OK, or Apply buttons. But not for everything.
If I right-click a file, why do I have to then open a sub-menu to find send-to ?
Why, if I open CMD then shift left-click to open another one do I get a PowerShell terminal and not another CMD shell?
I want an OS to get out of my way. I want as few clicks of the mouse/shortcut keys as possible. This constant reinvention of it serves no purpose than to frustrate people.
Then there's the telemetry. I don't massively care about the stuff I currently understand is being sent back but I absolutely do not want any "AI" based screenshots being saved and then...well then what, exactly? We all know the answers and it's nothing to do with out security or helping us to work.
Why don't the Office Web Apps work like the Desktop Apps? Well we know why - it's the last barrier to move away fully from Windows for most people that can and would. Yes, they're great for a quick view or edit of something simple but they are a nightmare with anything complex (looking at you Excel & Word).
For me Windows 7 nailed it - it looked pretty enough without getting in the way. It was, frankly usable and did its job and you could generally forget about it. Win 11 feels like a battle all the time. And one with ever changing, ever moving targets.
I don't think envy is right, either. Yes, I do get frustrated by people who announce on a regular basis "I moved away xx years ago and haven't looked back". Great. Good for you (genuinely) but then also, you cannot comment on things you don't use daily / haven't used in anger for years and years, either and that smug tone helps no one. Though again, I do believe that there is a sense that somehow everything Microsoft does is bad but it's ok when it's anyone else. Especially if it's on *nix and open source.
Apple used to be (still are? Haven't used their stuff for a good while) notorious for blowing away backward compatibility. Google are just an insidious hoover of every bit of personal data that they can get. MS are trying to copy that so they can monetise it but I do wonder why? What are they doing with it, because improving Win11 doesn't seem to be one of the things.
And Windows Phone seemed to be a start of *really* moving away from developers, developers, developers into fuck you, we will do it our way, territory. They could have made a good third option but they chose to throw early adoptors under the buss with Version 8 not being backward compatible with v7 handsets. Fuck me. Kill your early adoptors, kill your early devs. No wonder it went nowhere.
And that final point is key. What MS don't seem to get (or care about) is that all of these little things they do add up to a massive breakdown in users' abilities to fully trust them.
Uh, the Year of The Linux Desktop was about 2009. That is when Android really took off. And by desktop, I mean computers that most people actually use, i.e. their phones. Microsoft lost the desktop war when their MS phone failed.
Today, Windows desktops are mostly used by corporations and PC gamers. And even in PC gaming, Windows is losing share. Steam proton practically runs every game on Linux without issues. A year ago, I needed a new gaming rig and couldn't tolerate the Windows 11 spyware, I so I picked up a sweet System 76 rig. And now I run Indiana Jones and Starfield on Linux without issues.
With no regrets whatsoever.
MS can faff around all they like and for people like me, it provides endless entertainment that is also tinged with sadness at all those who have tied their IT life to the MS Mast.
The redmond crew seem to be spending more time fiddling while rome burns recently and ignoring their customers.
I look back at the years I spent fighting the Windows Weirdness and can smile. What is not so funny is their total lack of quality control over their patches.
A long, long time ago, I wrote device drivers for some other operating systems. From time to time, making the changes to the kernel and rebuilding it was a journey into the unknown. The more recent W11 patch releases seem like that.
Image a world, were Windows didn't evolve in a Toys-R-Us interface of mishmash coloured graphics and animations, but a desktop interface that remained at it's core based on Windows 2000 but with todays machines capabilities and yes even Linux is bloating a bit with the GUI's eating resources.
Definitely best server Windows, XP definitely best desktop windows, 7 was pretty damn good too, I quite liked 98 and 3.11 just because of the ease with which you could drop back to DOS and delve into the guts of them.
11 belongs in the same bin as ME, Vista and 8, soaked in petrol and burned
Windows 2000 Server UI, fine!
But without shadowcopy since Server 2003? I cannot live without it, no matter whether server or client OS. And Server 2003 does not force-load the complete registry into memory.
Multicore optimizations in Server 2008 R2? Including improved NUMA awareness? Hyper-v since Server 2008? Network optimizations of Server 2008 (R2) needing less CPU and still more speed? 64 bit ?
Server 2012 with even more network optimization, being faster AND needing less CPU again? Offering Storage Spaces, with Tiering, instead of dynamic drives? Dedup anyone? Automatic bundling of 2 network adapters (each own IP, same subnet) for double speed automatically with SMB3? Copy offloading? Finally a built-in network bundling instead of "each network manufacturer do their own sh*t"? And surprisingly stable, I've seen uptimes with > 1280 days (in 2019) and noone noticed until I came and checked since they just worked.
Server 2019: Up to now the most stable MS-Server OS. There are still many bugs in post-covid MS-Server OS-es, with quite a number of "Won't-fix".
Server 2022: SMB Compression? (for me: robocopy /iorate ? Nested-v for AMD?)
If you don't know SMB3 copy offloading: Since Windows 8 / server 2012, if your client Windows 8/2012 copies one file from one computer to another computer with the same or newer OS, the network traffic will got directory from server to server instead through your client to avoid double traffic for one copy job. Of course only if those two servers can see each other.
I take the UI, but the OS itself, no. Not unless I run it on a hardware with low spec, like 256 MB RAM (or less).
But even the UI of W2K server has one stupid thing every system Administrator hates, since it is still that that way in Server 2025: Any Microsoft Management Console, the divider between tree and content pane, moving it 100 pixels to the right. THIS is the Windows Administrator move since the year 2000. Check any Windows Admin video with an mmc, and 99% of them will move the divider. Each time.
> Any Microsoft Management Console, the divider between tree and content pane, moving it 100 pixels to the right. THIS is the Windows Administrator move since the year 2000. Check any Windows Admin video with an mmc, and 99% of them will move the divider. Each time.
ISTR that using Group Policy Editor to turn off Extended View eases that particular irritant, but maybe I’m peddling false hope.
Oh please please don't tease, tell me where exactly! Because what I can deactivate is the "Extended View (Web View)". But that does not move the DIVIDER 100 pixels to the right. Test it, start gpedit.msc, change that setting, and star a second gpedit.msc. The divider is still not where it better would be.
BTW. That "Web View" was added with XP / Server 2003, so that is not the Server 2000 mmc.exe issue :D
Having to install Enterprise Licensed Win7 on server hardware to run a dongle locked license server and discovering Win7 couldn't activate (no OEM license I think) falling back to 2008R2 I grudgingly had to concede the uncluttered 2008R2 UI wasn't too shabby.
After installation I only ever used rdesktop to update the licences (annually) and patch Windows (infrequently.)
When I ran a laptop for gaming that was extremely under spec, shortly after win7 was released, I had the most fluid gaming experience I'd ever have until switching to linux. Fucker had a 2 core cpu at nearly 2ghz and under 2gb of ddr2 ram. I still managed some crazy long gmod sessions haha
I rather enjoyed using Windows XP Professional x64 edition, which was based on Server 2003. It was faster and more stable than XP 32-bit, supported GPT partitions, supported more RAM, and was generally more polished than the older 32-bit version. It was a brute on my old i7-930 + X58 system. It was also the last edition of Windows I used where home network sharing was dead simple to setup and troubleshoot. I feel like later versions of Windows required more fighting to make that (and most everything else) work right. I miss that aspect of XP x64.
As a downside, 64-bit driver support was rather limited at the time. And that was the first version of Windows to ditch support for Win16 executables, so I had to spin up a Windows 98SE virtual machine for a few old games. But the trade-offs were worth it, IMO.
Writing as almost-40-years of about-to-retire sysadmin, I'd go for Windows 7 as the easiest to handle for users, and WS2012R2 as the server OS of choice. The best piece of software Microsoft has ever produced, though, is the Office 97 Excel Import Wizard, at which you could throw Just About Anything and have it made sense of. Honourable mention, though, for the NFS Gateway that came with WS2003.
None of the NT4 vintage crowd remember setting jumpers on ISA slots and configuring IRQ an ports in system settings ?
IIRC only 7 irq where available and windows took most for itself.
And then win2000 hit, with that glorious Universal Plug and Play.
Win2000 server introduced AD and dns for discovery instead of netbui.
The 2000 series was the last of the unshittified OS'es.
+1 for 2000 series, doesn't get the credit it deserves.
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2025
