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by bluedino 585 days ago
Man, that 1995-2001 era Windows UI was like, peak Windows.

It was so crisp and clean. Visual C++ and Visual Basic of the time were far from perfect, but they let you just get things done(tm)

XP was right around the corner and it's been downhill from there.

2 comments

Nothing beats a clean windows 2000 install
Gosh it was so fast. And only the drivers I needed (which was a bit of a pain but half the fun). And it was tiny on the HDD.

I played so much Half-Life, Unreal Tournament, CS1.5 and more on 2000. I miss it daily.

I visit https://bellard.org/jslinux/vm.html?url=win2k.cfg&mem=192&gr... every now and then for nostalgia. It's unfortunate that virtualising win2k with decent video drivers is such a pain.
Do you remember how snappy it was! im using an i9 with 32gb on win11 right now and there is noticable lag opening paint and notepad, typically 2 seconds.
Almost clean. One trip to Start Menu settings to disable the awful “Personalized Menus”. One more trip to Folder Options to disable “Hide file extensions for known file types” and to enable “launch folder windows in a separate process”.
> “Hide file extensions for known file types”

That never should have been a thing.

Naming files "totally-not-a-virus.jpg.exe" never would have been a problem if extensions weren't hidden by default.

Windows NT 4.0
NT4 isn't as nice, polished, and stable.
You can have that in XP, Vista, and 7 with classic mode.