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Win2000 Still Performs on 8-year-old Hardware
Daniel Iversen writes "Still 95% compatible with Windows XP, The Windows 2000 OS still runs very well on very old hardware - hardware with low specs it was never even meant to run on (tech setup guide - not a review). The broad question is, does the fact that you can remain compatible with today's applications and data on hardware that is almost a decade old, impede PC sales?"
The two points learned from this article:
1) A previous version of Windows, with less bloat, runs better on hardware with less resources to accomodate the bloat of future versions.
2) If you turn off practically everything, it'll use up a whole lot less memory.
Well, anyone with even a shred of common sense regarding computers should already be aware of those facts...so what purpose does the article serve, other than the rather mediocre instructional value?
Just because someone can drag themselves through a decathalon with a broken leg doesn't mean they're going to be fast, effective or ejoy doing so. I don't see Pentium scaling back their development teams because Win2k was a smooth OS that brought life to the unwieldly Win95-capable hardware.
No, but it does impede XP sales.
At work we just bought a rather sizable chunk of Win2K licenses so that we could upgrade older systems from Win98 without taking the performance hit that we were expecting from XP. Plus since I'm more familiar with Win2K than XP, managing the network is easier for me without having to re-learn where they hid all the settings AGAIN.
-Pope Peter Porker, S.O.W., K.M.K.R., U.G.O.A., F.S.G.S.D.
Well I am impressed that it worked but I don't think it's going to imped PC sales at all. I get a new computer about once every year and a half. I still have my old computers, right back to the my frist one from 1993. I still use them all. It's amazing what you can do with old hardware. As long as technology keeps increasing I'll be buying new computers because to be honest, the current ones still don't run fast enough for me.
Nerds won't have to buy new PCs. People in the mainstream will have to throw their PCs away as they would rather upgrade than spend money on virus removal.
Also, expect some sort of "super-virus" to force everyone to upgrade to the next version of windows. The purpose behind this is to make sure that everyone has DRM enabled(i.e. crippled) computers.
Take the cheese to sickbay, the doctor should see it as soon as possible - B'Elanna Torres, "Learning Curve"
Until the hard drive crashed last month I was running Win 2K on this old Fujitsu Lifebook D765X Pentium Laptop. My sig other took the "good" laptop to Nova Scotia, so I travelled to San Francisco with this one.
Although slow, the machine actually ran quite OK, even logging into wireless networks and surfing the 'net. Office '97 ran just dandy, as did everything else that I usually have installed.
Pentium 166, 48 megs RAM. Stable as a rock.
I doubt very much that XP would even install on this machine, but 2K was happy as a clam.
Three Squirrels
Compatible with 95% of things.. so 1 in every 20 applications won't work.
Sounds like rather a lot to me.
I see no reason why, if you design your API correctly and extensibly in the first place, with good modularisation, your OS shouldn't be compatible with code in 50 or 100 years time, let alone 5. Backwards compatibility is useful. Especially in computing where projects are rarely maintained beyond the second or third stable release. I don't quite see why moving forward should necessarily leave old applications broken.
http://twitter.com/onion2k
Stated slightly more eloquently, there is definitely a demand for newer computers throughout the market. On the low end, you have people who know little about computers who are swayed by advertising, buying newer computers because their computer is "too old" or "worn out" (see http://it.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/07/16/180 221&tid=126&tid=172&tid=98earlier spyware article). On the high end, you have not only gamers, who require pricey hardware, but also those who are tech-savvy, trying to stay on the forefront of technology. In the middle of this, you have some users who have a basic grasp of the technology, and are willing to keep their computer around longer. If by "impede" PC sales, you mean show a percentage drop in sales, then no, because using older technology has been happening for years. The real determining factor in PC sales is going to be the naive user who needs a 2.8Ghz processor to run Outlook, and it is the PC industry's advertising pressure that will determine this, not the middle ground user who has an older computer.
Why is not buying new hardware a bad thing?
Because big companies don't like it... how are they gonna keep under-funding pension plans, raising health insurance premiums 25% annually and stealing 401K money if we don't buy their latest and greatest crap?
Uhh.. yes?
My fastest machine is an AMD Athlon 800Mhz. I dont do the gaming thing very often, and I honestly feel like the machine performs quite sufficiently for me. I have the money to upgrade, but its simply not a priority for me.
The fact that I can do everything I need to (I dont do video editing or photoshop type stuff) without excessive latency makes that 800Mhz quite sufficient.
That being said, I've also avoided going to heavier OS's. I ran W2k for many years, and recently went to XP. Turn off all that eye candy and it performs just as fast.
Hate to say it, but if I were running linux, I'd probably want something with a little more beef, because the eye candy with some of the X.org window managers is accually functional eye candy, and I would make use of it. As it stands, I dont need it.
I'd like to point to Gates Law - which I think Longhorn is specifically designed to achieve: The speed of software halves every 18 months. We've got machines now quite capable of running most everyday purposes. The only way to get people to buy the newest and greatest is to introduce overhead in the OS. Under the guise of "perty!" and "search!" M$ is throwing massive amounts of unnessecary crap into OS overhead. Relational database for filesystem? Completely unnessecary.
.
Sure, but what of the prime factors of 9,007,199,254,740,881?
It might... I didn't want to run XP because of Windows 2000 being just as good in most ways (except for speed of bootup imo)... & ran the apps I needed here and partially because I was NOT out to buy new ones, costs money is why!
BUT that faster bootup in XP?
Largely illusion - MS only kicks on PART of Windows networking beforehand is why, whereas Windows 2000 kicked it ALL on @ bootup... takes time!
(Yes, you can make XP/2003 like 2000 in that regard using gpedit.msc iirc somewhere in its tree of config items, but the point is the faster boot of XP/2003 is an "illusion" in a way of looking @ it).
XP has 2000 in one area, hands down - gaming compatibility. Great for home users, as games ARE the single largest market for home users imo.
BUT, think MS could not have built that into 2000, & backported it as they plan to do with Indigo for example from LongHorn into XP? For SURE!
BUT, they "changed the rules" to make sales.
Intel, MS, all of the "big ones"? Whenever their sales lag, they "change the rules"... to make more sales!
Either they:
1.) Add value (so much you cannot resist changing over to a NEW OS, as I did from 2000, skipping XP, going STRAIGHT to Windows 2003 Server... as it is, imo, the best of "all worlds" currently & most flexible/powerful OS there is out there to date with the most hardware and softwares out there for it, bar none!)
OR
2.) Do things like DRM, &/or change the OS to NOT run with older softwares...
This 2nd one? I fear to some degree... because as a developer??
I fear changes to an extent!
Why? Laziness mainly!
Hey: If I built a body of code that ran FINE on Windows 2000, & on XP before say, SP #2 technologies??
Why change it???
Well, I found out, that in SOME apps I wrote, I gave them TREMENDOUSLY large initial stacksizes... this is (up to a point, like anything else, there is a ROI point balance) usually something you do with an app that loops alot or has recursively called functions...
This gives that type of app "more room to run in" etc.
SO, why did I bring it up & complain & WHAT happened?
WELL, It "backfired" on the apps I did that on... I reset the init. stacksize of the app to normal defaults?
It ran fine again.
(Technically, anything NOT used by the app here on StackSize? Pages out to VM in the pagefile.sys if not used, like most all else... I still, to this day a few months later, do NOT understand HOW this was not working properly & messing up on XP SP #2 &/or Windows Server 2003 SP #1 with their "buffer overflow protection" being used...)
I'm not alone there either!
You folks may have used tools from SysInternals.com (Dr. Mark Russinovich & Dr. Bryce Cogswell)... many of their apps as well, are "ill affected" by that "buffer overflow protection" technology too! They don't write Ring3/RPL3 usermode apps only, but also ones with filtering filesystem intercepting drivers... the problem may be diff. in their code vs. mine but the POINT is there!
They're pretty good in this field & well known... think it doesn't bug them too when MS makes changes like this? Probably. Means more work!
Developers - We fear change, & especially @ the lowest levels of the Os' plumbing we code on.
APK
P.S.=> I can say one thing also, alot of you may laugh or agree - Remember MS-DOS 5.0 - 6.22? Well, how many times did you crash it while you used it???
Myself? Perhaps 3 times in 5 years... talk about solid/stable... & were I to use it (and yes, DOS still survives largely in industrial application with dedicated single task workstations) on a workstation that ONLY RAN 1 program?
I'd STILL go DOS... provided I could produce functions needed for an application to do its job.
I have noted, MOST companies? Make decisions on OS' platforms based on applications they need to run to get to their data... I agree with that! apk
windows XP on a 20 megahertz Pentium with 32 megabytes of RAM. http://www.winhistory.de/more/386/xpmini_eng.htm
With that said, I tried installing Win2K a few years back on my dual P II 450 with 768 Megs of RAM. It was on a really sweet Tyan board from 1997. It installed alright, but it ran like a slug through molasses on a cold January night. The boot alone took 10-15 minutes. This system had SCSI2 drives as well, so there really were no bottle necks. No weird interrupt problems to speak of, nothing odd. So then I installed RedHat 9 and did something you can never do with Windows. I recompiled the kernel for SMP and tweaked it with the realtime patches. I also customized the hell out of it by just installing the very minimum of RedHat, stripping what I didn't want and installing everything from source. The end result? A super secure, super efficient system that performs as well as a P4 running at 1 Ghz. It's been running like this going on three years now. Uptimes have been incredible compared to any desktop PC I've ever used before. It plays the role of internal DNS, NTP, Web, Mail and File servers. It's also the main application server for the house with centralized everything. The rest of my systems just act as thin clients that can easily attach to an IN PROGRESS desktop session using VNC. I never log out of my VNC desktop anymore, I just lock the screen. Same for my wife and two friends who use the system via OpenVPN over the internet.
The point to all this? I do things that you CAN'T do with Windows and this box is eight years old but feels like it's only 2 years old. Machines really should last closer to 10-15 years before having to buy a new one. The idea of the disposable machine is moronic.
-"...bad old ideas look confusingly fresh when they are packaged as technology" - Jaron Lanier (Digital Maoism on Edge.o
When this first appeared on OSNews 2 days ago a lot of us pointed out then that this entire article is ridiculous. They want you to install 2K and not update it and everything else, things which aren't possible. Then most of the "fixes" are disabling this or that service which is 4th grade hacking.
Considering a lot of code for 2000 came from systems being developed before the advent of the Pentium II it can be forced to work on slower machines with a few hardware hacks. First, we know that I/O is going to be slow in a Pentium I or II, so don't use NTFS and upgrade to dynamic disks. Even adding a second drive to use for the PAGEFILE and maybe even the TEMP will speed things up and keep the machine stable.
I've got a few machines (K6, Pentium II each with ~64 MB RAM) running 2000 smoothly with this setup: 2 Hard drives, with the system installed on the first primary partition (on the first disk). The system is on FAT32, formatted for 5.1 GB and just a "normal disk". Then I've got a large "Striped" partition, formatted FAT32 holding documents and programs. Then three small (1 GB) striped partitions all holding one of each of these: TEMP, SWAP and SYSTEM CATALOG.
These machines never crash (and are regularly defragmented every two days). I've debated on taking out the CD-ROM's (never use them) and using 4 hard disk drives but that makes me have to re-install and that requires a CD-ROM (or floppies which I don't have)
Get your Unix fortune now!
Perfect platform for stress testing multi-user apps because the platform sucks. If it works well there, it'll work anywhere (that supports Win32 code, that is).
- I voted for Nintendo and against Bush
The support issues are one thing, but go install XP on something with 32 MB of RAM if you want to talk speed. If you've noticed no difference between versions, it's probably because you haven't run 98 and XP on the same machine. See you in a week after it boots. Maybe. Even 128 is slow as hell, which 2K works fine with.
You got to admit, the guy over at toastytech managed to get Windows 1.0 programs to run on XP just by changing a few bits in the header. All that was preventing the app from running was a version check..
God's in his heaven-All's right with the world. Karma=Bad ? F*ck that
I have some systems exactly like that. A dozen or so PIII-733 systems purchased 5 years ago, running W2K and MS Office. Aside from some increased use of browser based apps and Remote Desktop to a 2003 Server based app, the needs of the users has remained largely unchanged. So why should the hardware all of sudden become "obsolete". Elsewhere in the company where demands are higher, they were all upgraded to P4s throughout last year. Not every office worker needs Photoshop or cares if the lastest 3D game runs on it. They just want to get their job done.
"Build something idiot proof, and someone will build a better idiot" - Samuel Clemens
People like that would be far better off loading Fedora 4, or Umbutu or.....
They would have the same functionality, but with no worries about the BSA coming in with a search warrent and battering ram. More importantly, they wouldn't have to worry about 40,000 viruses making the system useless before they even started working on it.
The would also have a modern, supported operating system, and software to do things like word processing without the need to spend more than the current value of the machine on even more buggy software.
I actually did that last week. Got a machine that was being 'dumped' at the computer store on the corner, loaded FC4 onto it and delivered it to a native elder who doesn't have the money to buy a new machine for himself.
I even gave him an old inkjet printer and enough ink to last him a few years of refills. Now he can surf, write memoires, use email and not have to worry about being 'owned' -- and once he gets cheap broadband, I can even do remote support for him.
Sometimes boldness is in fashion. Sometimes only the brave will be bold.
This is actually not true. The only time a Windows XP license is what is considered "downgradable" to a windows 2k license is if you are a software assurance customer.
I'm not saying this will NOT work, it should work, but it will not be legally licensed
I read
It did if it was connected. It slowed the machine down. It was fun explaining that when selling machines to people. Since we were building the machines custom, I'd usually explain it and ask if they wanted us to even connect it. Usually users would say "no". I often saw machines coming in for service that had the button pushed in. "Why is the Turbo button pressed in?" "to make it run faster, I've always had it in that setting." "Uh, you know, pressed in means "run slower"? *click* See, now it's twice as fast." "Oh."
I do the same with windows 95. I have an emu aps sound studio hardware/software that doesn't run right on Win98+. No virus/trojan issues, although it isn't on the net full time and I keep AV/Firewall updated.
If new MS versions were as tight and compact, and EASY to modify as 95 was, I wouldn't have so many Linux boses around. Assuming they updated to address more ram, ntfs, etc.
Personally, I think an even more stripped down version of 95 would be a perfect 'internet appliance' because it was easy for newbs to use compared to XP now. As much as I love (and use) Linux, it still has too many options for new users.
Tequila: It's not just for breakfast anymore!
sorry, but I run mandriva on hardware that win2K does not run as well on. Granted you need higher than crap level video hardware (Nvidia geforce 2 or better) but Gnome on mandriva limited edition 2005 is just as fast and snappy as windows 2000 on the same machine (my daughter's laptop, it dual boots.)
I strongly suggest you actually TRY linux on your machine (knoppix tells you alot about your hardware sans the nasty latency in the filesystem from running off a cd). No it will not be happy with 64meg of ram like win2k will, but I was able to upgrade her laptop to 512 meg from newegg for $17.00 (Laptop ram prices) by adding 1 256 meg sodimm.
a decent video card makes lots of the X eye candy run better under linux. Dont know why, but the 2D acceleration of the nvidia drivers seems to kick the crap out of the vesa and intel integrated chipset drivers.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Yep! I actually have tested a vax for nearly one year with *NO* root password, and with telnet, and nobody ever logged onto it. Nobody uses BSD 4.3 with telnet & win98 is quickly going that way too... Welcome to the obsolete internet!
The anwser is, why should I care about my old PIII550 impeding PC sales. Anything that drives down the prices of computers is a good thing.
The truth is a PIII with Windows 2000 will do everything just fine, or at least anything I have ever needed to do.
- Word 2000 for documents... lightining fast. Check!
- Excel 2000 for spreadsheets... no problem. Check!
- InterWin DVD Player... plays DVDs no problem. Check!
- Internet Explorer... no problem. Check!
- Firefox... 5 seconds slower than IE, but after loading, no problem. Check!
- QuickTime... no problem. Check!
- Nero... no problem, both DVD's and CD's. Check!
- DVD Decrypter (backup only, no piracy)... about 20-35 minutes to rip 5 gigabytes. Check!
- MP3's... played on both WinAmp and WMP... lighting fast, no problem. Check!
- Compiling Java Programs... 20-50 seconds. No problem, never stalls. Check!
- MySQL... Very fast. No problems. Check!
- Running a Web Server... Tomcat compiles JSP's and servers HTML very fast. No problems. Check!
Windows 2000 works perfectly fine for me on my PIII 550. As a matter of fact, my machine is dual CPU, but I only have one CPU. I have been toying with the idea of buying the second PIII to see how much of a boost Windows 2000 will give. I only have 256 megs in my current machine, and ram is a bit pricey. If it was like the 2001 when 128 megs of PC100 sdram was selling for $7, I would have all 4 Dimms filled and have 512 megs.Oh, for those wondering about DVD watching, I only have a 16 meg video card. Every DVD I have played is flawless and never choppy.
I don't understand the people who run out to spend $4000 on the latest P4 glow in the dark case with 256meg video card system just to play some game. There has not been a $45 game that I have seen yet that I would be willing to pay $4000 for. Or even $1000. If people want games, they might as well buy a playstation for $200-300, it is designed for games. And if I am correct, the playstation is nothing but a stripped down Windows 2000 OS with a PIII700 (or maybe that is the X-Box), either way, it shows what that kind of CPU can do.
If I was going to get a new computer, I think I would get a dell server (no OS included), they have them in P4 2.2-2.5ghz with 128-256megs, and they sell them for $250-350. Every now and then they have a deal where they toss in a free second CPU, or double the ram for free, or give away a second hard drive for free. I would wait for one of those deals.
And I don't think I would ever run Windows XP, just because I hate Windows Media Player v9. Plus, I don't like my computer telling me I can't do something. Windows 2000 is more willing to work the way I want than Windows XP. I see the direction MS is going, and I don't like it.
And for those who use Windows 2000 as their OS. How do you work around the problem of not getting the Service Pack, but wanting the security updates. I HATE that miscorsoft bundled so many security updates in the Service Pack. Why couldn't they have let users hand pick which security updates are wanted/needed?? I don't want to install 1000 packages, I might want 6 or 7 that I think are trully needed.
Rosco: "If brains were gunpowder, Enos couldn't blow his nose."
And, if my Linux friends want some software that Yum won't download, I can always login using an SSH private key and do the install for them. I don't even have to leave home.
Truth of the matter is that Linux comes with far more software builtin than most people know to load into Windows.... Games, starfield simulator, production quality image editor, office suite(s), typing exercisor, VOIP program, Kdict (a nice dictionary program).
If all of that's not enough for you, download the Knoppix Live DVD and try it out for yourself.
Sometimes boldness is in fashion. Sometimes only the brave will be bold.