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Comment by sho_hn | Hacker News Reader

If you've never used an older Windows, here is a Win 2000 in the browser:

https://bellard.org/jslinux/vm.html?url=win2k.cfg&mem=192&gr...

(The Qemu.js post on the front page today lead me there via a readme link to jslinux.)

It's probably my computer/browser, but that feels hella slow. For those getting ideas, Windows 2000 was lightning fast to use. Even on something humble at the time. Those windows and menus popped up instantly.

It's running through an emulator, and not even a native one at that.

I'm not sure if JSLinux will run Win11, but my experience with using QEMU in emulation mode to run it is that even on hardware a decade newer, it's still slower than this Win2k in the browser.

Not really. When I was a kid in the mid 2000s I remember the family computer was hella slow. The menus did not pop up instantly. You probably used it on a top of the line machine. For a lot of us, windows 2000 and xp was sluggish and slow. Our pc used to have 512mb of ram iirc.

512mb should be plenty for win2k, I'd think. My college had a laptop program with Compaq Armada E500s that had maybe 64mb of ram. It shipped with win98se, but ran fine on 2k and xp. (With XP or 98se, but not 2k, you could use the internal display and the vga port independently). That was a nice laptop, but still, if you had 8x the ram, your machine was probably nicer in most ways.

The key for 2k and XP is going to system performance settings and unchecking as many of the UI frivalries as you can stomach. Personally, I don't need window contents to move as I drag and resize windows... just the outline is fine, and it makes it more responsive, so it's better for me.

I loved Windows 2000 and liked XP but 64 MB is not a lot. 2000 probably ran on that but did XP really?

I seem to remember XP using about 120 MB on start-up. That is nothing these days but I cannot imagine trying to run it in 64 MB.

Google tells me that the minimum spec for XP is indeed 64 MB though with 128 MB “recommended”. Back then, recommended was really a lot closer to the minimum in practice ( if you wanted to do more than just look at it.

Archive.org on my school website indicates it may have been 192 MB ram (I see a posting showing 192 MB as the new laptop config, but I'm not sure if that was when they first switched to the e500, or the slightly bumped version the next year students got, and it was 20 years ago, so my memory is getting hazy anyway), but I don't actually remember how much ram we had; that model shows up on internet spec sites with 64 MB, but it was an engineering school, so maybe they got a better than standard spec. Some students ran Autocad, and something called Mechanical Desktop, which I think was a 3d modelling program, others ran Visual Studio, etc. But I do know XP ran fine with what we had. I was in the Windows beta program when I started, and ran betas and RCs of XP on that machine, and remember XP supporting multimonitor that 2k didn't (it didn't show up until after the release date for XP though; I couldn't get an ATI or Compaq beta driver or anything, sadly).

Either way, a 512 mb machine should have been a beast compared to a laptop with < 256 mb and an ATI Rage Mobility.

NT3.5 was noticeably different to Win3.11 because dragging windows dragged the contents; on Win3.11, you got an XOR stipple outline indicating where the window was going to end up.

NT4 ran very well on 64MB. I used it as a daily driver shortly before switching to Win2k. I never ran Windows ME, I went from 95->98->NT4->Win2k->XP. NT4 correlated with me going all in on Win32 API programming.

The biggest slowness for start menu popup back then was disk. Random access loading icons for the entries, I suspect. Things would be faster the second time around. Disk was the general direct reason for slowness in usual use. Insufficient memory -> paging -> more slow disk accesses.

Context menus would be slow (and still are) if you had badly written shell extensions installed. Getting rid of those (sometimes requiring registry edits if you wanted to keep the related app) made a big difference.

Those were the days when you'd generally want to upgrade your PC every year, or at least every couple of years, if you wanted to be able to continue running the latest software.

Family computers were only sold with 98, Me, or XP. Unless someone in your family intentionally installed windows 2000 it probably wasn't running 2000. 2000 lacked the compatibility layer that was added to XP, so a lot of games wouldn't run on 2000.

At work (a college in the UK) decades ago the move from Windows ME/ Office 97 to Windows 2000/Office 2000 on the same hardware was like night and day.

Wonderfully solid and I was able to just get stuff done. Of course, we had IT technicians keeping everything going. I gathered that they had a lot less firefighting to do after the transition as well.

I wonder how much it would take to get explorer.exe and the rest of the UI (userland) from Win2k running on a newer version of Windows. Backwards-compatibility has been MS' strong point for a long time, and the majority of other applications from the 2k era would probably be fine on Win11 too.

I would do anything for a modern version of Windows NT 4.0 Workstation. Now THAT was a professional OS. I would even pay for it.

I rode Windows NT 4.0 into the ground. It was a truly professional operating system.

Honestly, Windows 7 and Windows 10 have been configurable into a mostly serviceable state. It was much more of a hassle to keep Windows 10 tamed, but tamed it can be.

I worry that Windows 11 will require a bunch of disassembly to get it operational, so I will keep Windows 10 until it is no longer supported.

Google "Enterprise LTSC IoT."

Downside is that "I would do anything" doesn't begin to describe what will be necessary to obtain a legitimate license.

Count me in. I'm willing to make sacrifices for this vision, too. HiDPI/scaling isn't required (well, no big deal for me, I try to buy monitors with the DPI I want to use). I can live without searchable start menu (although it would be nice). I'm willing to drop other features too.

Honestly, I'm considering running fvwm95, but that's probably a bad idea.

I can't go back to not having a searchable start menu.

That UI is just.. perfect.

Peak interface.

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