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by jeffbee 23 days ago
Win9X wasn't Win2k's ancestor. Win2k was from the house of Windows NT. WinXP was the merger of the two lines.

Probably very few people switched from Windows 98 to Windows 2000. That wasn't considered an upgrade path. That was installing a different operating system.

Technically Windows ME existed, I guess.
4 comments
pjmlp 23 days ago
I did, but I was already trying to use Windows NT at home as well. At work Windows 2000 was quite common, however I actually used the server SKU as workstation OS.

As I used to be big into UNIX in the early 2000's, I used to dual boot between it and Red-Hat, eventually I got fed up dual booting all the time depending on the project work, or client support, and ended up using Windows, alongside Humming Bird X Server to connect to our development servers (yep back when we were still time-sharing UNIX servers for coding tasks).

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jeffbee 22 days ago
Yeah I used it as well, in fact I kept using it pretty much forever because I had a comfortable VMWare image with all my apps installed and wiping out your Windows system back to a known-good checkpoint is the only reasonable way to use Windows. Unfortunately this retro scheme fell apart after they stopped developing Intel Macs.
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keyringlight 23 days ago
I got curious and I had a windows xp ISO lying around, apparently it does support migrating from win98 onwards which surprised me a bit, win95 has to do a fresh install. From looking at the various .inf files it seems to pull a lot more information from a NT based starting point than 9x. I'm not sure if I'm curious enough to try a 98 to NT5 upgrade in a VM though.

Whether or not many people would want to do that upgrade/migration is another question, but similar to you I doubt the number was high.

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mrandish 23 days ago
> very few people switched from Windows 98 to Windows 2000

I was one of them. I went from ME to 2k and it was definitely a big step up.

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eunice 23 days ago
Me too. Went from 98SE on a P133 to 2000 on an Athlon XP 1600 in 2001, will never have an upgrade like that again...
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anthk 23 days ago
I'm pretty sure you could upgrade from Win2k as you could with Win XP.
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