Is anybody still using windows 2000?

[jeff1981]

I've heard that since it is no longer supported that it's not safe to use windows 2000 pro for internet and email. I'm wondering if there is a workaround for this, or if it's truly a dead OS. I always liked it, and I could still use it for a lot of what I do, but I don't want to put myself at risk. Thoughts?

[pianowizard]

On one or two of my secondary computers, I used Win 98 until support for it ended in 2006, and I used Win 2000 until support ended in 2009. (On all my primary computers, I have been running at least XP since 2002.) It is not safe to keep using 2000. Upgrade to XP. Are you running 2000 because your computer is too slow for XP? If you just like the user interface, XP in classic mode looks very much like 2000.

[craigmontHunter]

As long as you are careful and prepared for the worst (a potential system wipeout), then there are no problems. I am trying to get my old Dell back, which I will use as a surfing/IM machine when my other system is busy. As long as you are carefully and use a decent browser (not ie6), it should work as a second system.

[A31]

I don't know why anybody would want to run Windows 2000 anyway? It is not that fast and I prefer XP, so if you still have 2000, upgrade to XP, if your PC is too slow for XP, stay with 2000 and be at risk or look into Ubuntu or something.

[ajkula66]

A31 wrote:

I don't know why anybody would want to run Windows 2000 anyway? It is not that fast

I'd beg to differ...

On any single-core machine, W2K will be faster than XP if one knows how to set it up properly. On dual-cores and newer CPUs, it shows its age.

Having said that, there's way too much software that doesn't run on W2K already, and the list is only going to get longer. Many of these programs are unfortunately essential for safe networking...

For people needing a slimmed-down XP, FLP is the way to go.

[Colonel O'Neill]

Yeah I got Windows 2000 running on the X100e just for nostalgia's sake.
Runs okay, but gobbles battery life. 2.5 hours in 2K pro instead of 5 hours in 7.

Kinda miss the layout of 2000. XP was definitely too "fisher-price" for me.

Firefox Nightly 6.0a1 still runs on 2000, as does Flash Player 10.3 and Adobe Reader 9 (bloaty anyway). Office 2003 is the last version to work OOB on it, but 2007 can be made to work with some work. There's a ClearType-esque plus skinning implementation here: http://www.msfn.org/board/topic/107095-smoothtext-118/

Kaspersky 7 is the last Kaspersky to run on 2000. I think the latest Avira still supports it... Or was it Avast...

[ajkula66]

Colonel O'Neill wrote:

Kinda miss the layout of 2000.

That makes two of us...

I think the latest Avira still supports it... Or was it Avast...

Avast.

[Colonel O'Neill]

That default blue background color and warm-grey taskbar was comforting. The new trend of rounded corner's is starting to irritate me.

There's still a bit of a following for 2000 on MSFN, but doesn't seem to be as active as the 9x's.
Notably, WildBill (creator of SmoothText) and BlackWingCat (http://blog.livedoor.jp/blackwingcat/) are the primary sources of new stuff.

With respect to security patches, the WildBill has backported some here:
http://www.msfn.org/board/topic/146529- ... g-patches/

Looks like Avira also supports 2000, but is the baseline.

eBoostr, my preferred alternative to SuperFetch, also works in 2000. Not sure if it'll detect >3GB RAM though.

[A31]

For people needing a slimmed-down XP, FLP is the way to go.

You could use nLite to remove components of Windows XP (and Windows 2000 for that matter) you don't need. I have an nLited copy of XP Pro SP3 which is only 90MB in size!

[Unknown_K]

I still use Win98se and Win2k on a bunch of old machines. You need 512MB of RAM on a laptop to get decent results with XP while the older system software can do fine with much less. To be honest using Windows 98SE/Win2K with Microsoft Office 97 on an old laptop is pretty snappy with 256MB of RAM.

I guess it comes down to how much you need to be online compared to doing work. Being behind a firewall and not running mail attachments or cruising warez or porn sites will keep pretty much any old machine running an old OS virus and trojan free (AV software will help but will also suck up resources and speed). If you need to watch netflix, youtube, hulu or visit major flash sites online then you need a more modern machine anyway that can run a newer OS then Win2k (and has a higher RAM ceiling). Most OS choices are limited by CPU speed and RAM ceiling (affordability) anyway.

[lemonstar]

I have a T22 with 384Mb running Win2K Pro. Basically it runs very well without any problems. I use a wireless card in it for internet access - I use it every day. It's not the main machine in the house but it gets used in front of the TV (watching the twitter rants relating to TV progs like BBC Question Time) and I've lugged it around in my car for years with work, using it as a backup when there isn't a PC or laptop available for me to use. I run Avira 9 on it.

[ccookie66]

Well, I have an old WinBook SI, it had Windows XP, but it was painfully slow, it only has 65MB RAM, and 5GB hdd. It use to have Windows 95 on it, but the only thing I had was Windows ME. It can't even run Ubuntu! But, I just reinstalled Windows ME on it. lol, I know thats sad.

[Neil]

Yup, I still run Win2K on the desktop in my shop. It has a 500MHz CPU and I think its 576MB RAM. It's an ancient machine, but serves well for reading instructional pdf pages, monitoring my surveillance camera and occasional web browsing.

[ozzymud]

It can't even run Ubuntu!

You could use Debian net install (Debian is what Ubuntu is based on), do just a basic install (system only), then use apt to apt-get install xfce4 or jwm as a window manager, I use this on my ThinkPad 760XL's with a Pentium 166 and between 64 & 104MB ram quite nicely

[mnowell69]

still using win 2k on my trusty 240x with 128mb ram.. will cost too much to upgrade the ram (relative to value of my machine) and i have always loved 2000 ever since it arrived in beta form. Nothing on it is mission critical but i do still have the original Norton that came with it, just for a laugh i suppose. Anyway 2000 on this machine is much faster than XP and i like the challenge of getting software that is functional for this level of machine.

[Colonel O'Neill]

the challenge of getting software that is functional for this level of machine.

www.msfn.org/board/forum/35-windows-nt420002003/

[ozzymud]

Yea, just as in Win98, KernelEx has been around for a while now

I use 2000 on a T20 I recently aquired... haven't found anything I use that didn't work yet.

Firefox 2, Thunderbird 2, UltraEdit 9, Paint Shop Pro 7, Office 97, PuTTy, Kerio Firewall, Sysinternals suite, Linux utils for win, WinRAR 3.51 (PCA Freebie), etc, etc. No Antivirus, I use virusscan.jotti.org on dubious files I download (most downloads are on my fileserver though and it is running modern anti virus).

The trick is not expecting the larger modern software to work well on old hardware.

[Colonel O'Neill]

Firefox 8 works a charm on Windows 2000. (At least in my VM.) Some of the newer SysInternals tools are no longer directly compatible with Windows 2000 (grr.)

Usually it's the hardware that's limited.

[ozzymud]

I find older apps run smoother on a 750MHz... thus Firefox 2.

Yea, the main one i use, Process Explorer is limited to v12.04.. but you can get all old versions from http://court.shrock.org/sysinternals/

That's before sysinternals was acquired by MS (Even the good old tcpview 2.34)

[Colonel O'Neill]

XD. I remember my 800MHz P3 desktop. It had a massively clunky Kaspersky Internet Security 7, as well as a funky IDE cable that would send the drive into PIO mode all the time that I never bothered to deal with.

Firefox 8 could work a lot better considering the random stuff they optimized. Firefox 2 was nice, 3 blah, 4 and the rest an upward trend (or so I hope).

[ozzymud]

4+ is ok once i re-arrange everything so it looks like pre-4 and add status4eva

Firefox 2 with 5 tabs and the normal extensions (Adblock, NoScript, Greasemonkey, TabMix+, Customize Google) is only using 60MB of mem on my T20... 3+ is well over 150MB. So I stick with 2 on old hardware

[Colonel O'Neill]

And here I am supercondensing browser UI elements into a strip 34 pixel high.

[jdrou]

The main software that won't work on 2000 would be newer games and anything recent from MS or built using recent MS tools (surprise). e.g. nothing that needs .NET 3.0 or later or built with Visual Studio 2010 will work (although there are hacks available that may work around the .NET issues). The other major issue would be drivers for newer hardware but for running on old hardware it would be fine.

[mnowell69]

The truth is 11 years ago i was doing exactly the same things i am doing now. Windows 2000 worked great for me, as did office 2000. Adobe worked, games worked after fiddling with all the settings for a specific setup.
Anybody remember the first computers of the 80s, where hardware rarely changed, so the programmers got more clever with their software. Today we have to throw hardware at clumsy software. A good example is .net X which clutters up the computer with numerous versions. I am happy thet my TP240X and my 380Z don't need all the versions.
2000, happy days

[SMTBSI]

This thread brings up a question I've had for a while.

I've got an old a22m that still has Windows 2000 on it. (It's not my main machine obviously, although over the years it has been occasionally thrust into emergency service when I only had one other machine and something went wrong with it. That, and it has bailed me out a few times when I needed an emergency Windows environment because I found something I couldn't get done on Linux. Also, recently it's become my Blackberry management platform.)


I've been wondering just how insecure 2k really is at this point? Can it ever be rendered even remotely ok, or is it always going to be a disaster waiting to happen just by sheer virtue of obsoleteness?

For example, currently I run -

- as a non-administrator
- with Comodo firewall running
- Avast free version running and actively scanning
- Windows Defender running and updated (yes it is possible)
- internet via Opera with notscripts and adblock
- every single service remotely related to remote access disabled


How much does all of this really help? Or am I just, like, putting makeup on a goat here?




For the record, with Comodo, Avast and Windows Defender all running, my startup time is dismal (especially because Avast always updates when I turn it on), but after that, single task performance is pretty ok. Opera cruises the web very competently, with only 256mb of RAM (that is about to change!). And by "pretty ok", I don't mean, "slow but tolerable if there's no other choice". I mean "really pretty ok!".

[Colonel O'Neill]

Should be more than fine.

Just keep your Flash up to date, and consider some of the post-EOL patches on the MSFN forum here:
http://www.msfn.org/board/forum/35-windows-nt420002003/

[mnowell69]

For SMTBSI.

It made me smile looking at the list of things that you do to keep your computer safe, because there are people in THIS day and age who are nowhere near as secure and safe as you are. For me the important thing has always been to use the computer as a USER, not as an ADMINISTRATOR.
I have become tired of peole saying you should upgrade to windows ** etc, it's just not true.

If my trusty 240x was my only computer in the whole wide world then i still wouldn't 'upgrade' the OS, i would have to get another TP.

[SMTBSI]

Colonel O'Neill - thanks for the link. Looks like a lot of good stuff to be found in there. Much appreciated.


mnowell69 - I first became security paranoid when my computer got hacked sophomore year of college. Someone was using it to download movies, and I got busted for it. They only made me go and sit and watch a film about why illegal downloading was bad, so it could have been worse, but the whole time I'm saying "But I didn't do it!", which they've heard a thousand times before, of course.

Only after making me watch the whole darned 45 minute thing and "letting [me] off with a warning" did my continued professions of innocence apparently become convincing/suspicious, so they let me bring my machine in to tech support, who were able to determine that I'd been hacked.



Anyway, the a22m was my first ever computer, and it has survived a neat decade, outlasting three laptops in the interim (albeit, the first two being heavily used Toshibas that I didn't yet know enough to fix when they started to manifest the infamous power jack problem, and the third being a brand new honkin' Thinkpad, which met its end less than a month after I purchased it, because I spilled on it and didn't believe in warranties, because I'd "never had to use one in my life" up to that point...).


Point being, I've dropped this thing from waist height onto tile flooring, abused it, experimented with it, modified it, completely disassembled it component by component, fried the OS a dozen times... and the only component that has quit on me so far is the floppy drive.




... Am I old enough to say, "they just don't make them like they used to"? 8)

[mnowell69]

i don't know if you are old enough to say that, but i do agree with you in this day and age of rapid replacement and profiteering. A new model every month etc.....

One of the only i became interested in IBM was the abilty to download the Hardware Maintenance Manual and have the abilty to fix the computer correctly and not in a haphazard manner that meant that you had a handful of screws in your hand when finished.

The first OS upgrade i ever bought was win2000 and i have stood by it ever since. All my Thinkpads have their original systems installed so that i can do whatever i want, run whatever i want, whenever i want. I can even spend a few hours fixing something if i go too far,

If i was working for Microsoft ( luckilly for them i'm not!) win2000 would be on SP 10 or more, alongside XP SP6, and win 6 ( because Vista would never have existed)

Guys, don't get rid of win2000, just get another PC/ laptop designed for another OS.

[Colonel O'Neill]

Yeah I used to be on a P3 desktop for most of high school until my T400. It ran 2000, and I was avidly supporting WildBill's SmoothText on that forum.

@mnowell69,
They've got a few unofficial Service Packs for 2000 now, including a few recent ones in tomasz86's sig.


Anyone want to see Windows 2000 run on a W520? XD