Installing Windows 2000 Professional Edition!! 

I used W2K from the very beginning to EOS, I absolutely LOVED it !

Going from Windows Me to Windows 2000 pirat-professional edition was a breath of fresh air.

Man, 2000 Pro was just peak Windows. I dual-booted it with 98 for a while, before realizing (after a few SPs) that it was just as fine a gaming OS as 98!

W2k was a beast. Stable as f..., lightweight, secure as all OSes based on NT and introduces PnP unlike its predecessor. If you patch them with Extended Kernel, you can run even modern-ish browsers, like MyPal. Best OS ever! And in those days, where we have Legacy Update, working on Windows 2000 gives so much fun.

My first OS was DOS 5 on 5 1/4 floppies. Used pretty much all versions of windows except windows 8. I remember buying my copy of windows 95 (on floppies) at future shop when it came out. Windows 2000 was the best until XP came out. The windows 2000 startup sound is the best in my opinion. Loved the video :).

I had a Fujitsu Siemens PC with Windows Me and it was nothing but trouble with crashes and freezes every day. It was a great day when that PC went in the bin and was replaced by an HP Pavilion Elite with Windows 7 which was totally reliable. Now I have two PCs with Windows 11, the one I am on now is home built, and they are great.

Oh man, this brings back memories! Back in that era, I had an HP Pavilion 9870 PC with an Intel Pentium 4 1.3 GHz CPU (Willamette, Socket 423), 128 MB RDRAM, 60 GB HDD, and an NVIDIA RIVA TNT2 Pro 32 MB AGP 4X GPU. It came with Windows Millennium Edition, but I ended up wiping the drive, creating two partitions, reinstalling ME on the first one, and then installing Windows 2000 Professional on the second one. I ran ME for games and 2000 Professional for everything else.

When I was a teenager I used Windows 2000 Professional all of the time as my daily driver OS. I preferred it over Windows XP for years. It was stable, smooth and less resource intensive than Windows XP at the time. I absolutely loved this OS. In some ways I would love to be able to use it today!

glad to see 2000 content it deserves some review as it is the only version of windows that has dna in linux builds such as react os so it must be very stable :)

Maybe I’m wrong, but I never recall the initial boot post install being in a low resolution like 95/98. I think generic video driver compatibility was decent even on first release.

Just catching up to this video clip now, I've fallen behind with my viewings this week & had a gastro bug yesterday. As for Windows 2000 I never got to use it at home but got to use it on college campuses, it's a lovely retro OS to use!

Correction. Windows 2000 doesn't require NTFS but will work best under NTFS. Infact if you do the upgrade from 98, after the install you can run a command prompt to from within Windows to convert to NTFS.

I stuck with 2k for ages from 98SE. It did everything. ME was a joke. I started xp over a year after It was introduced. If it wasn't 10, 2000 was my fave.

I’ve upgraded from Windows 98 to 2000 and the installer will convert your drive to NTFS, it didn’t take too long.

Did you use a upgrade to do a fresh Install and does it work I always stay away from update edition

i have problem my computer is in language of czech republuc even when installing i cannot change the language any help please. and sorry for my english i am from czech republic

It appears to have been a good OS., but I went from Windows 98 se., to XP so I did not use Windows 2000 or ME..

Last week I just found a toshiba 330cdt laptop dead mint For 4.99 at vv in newmarket .. It has windows me Should I download to 98 .

Windows 2000 does not really mean you have to use NTFS. It will run on a FAT32

Windows Me is the only version of Windows you can upgrade to an older version (2000), but you can't upgrade 2000 to Me.

Windows 2000 was the turning point for Microsoft. Away from DOS and the 9X operating systems.I still use it from time to time. Thanks for the Video

Windows 2000 Pro was actually the first windows I didn't hate. I was primarily a DOS user before it. As my system early on was a K6-2 500 and my Voodoo3 2000, win 2k was a dream. I don't remember too many problems, that system was stable, more so then the user.

Funny start story, I was in a similar situation back then too. I went Windows 98 for play and NT 4 for work (Dual boot). I did update my NT 4 to Windows 2000 when it came out. Very good memories of computing back then 😉😃

I used Windows 2000 for 5 years straight without formatting or having any problems.with SP4. One of the most stable OS I have used. Keep up the good work. Take care. :)

Thank you my Windows 98 at 86box get one game is hoyle casino 98

Windows 98 & ME were gutter trash. Win2k was such a step up, but marketed to business uses. Not until XP was there a consumer Microsoft OS which was not a toy. I started with 95, then NT4, then Win2k, then XP. Completely avoided ME/98 Plague. XP was NT lineage kernel with consumer shell/GUI, and other more consumer friendly tweaks. That Dell desktop reminds me of my 1st computer I got while in college. Very cool video BTW.

Back then, Windows was clearer and limited to the bare essentials. Today it is bloated, spies and secretly installs games and other programs that no one needs. Some of my friends used Windows 2000 at the time. They liked it.

Got it the day it went retail. It's the last version with the OS/2 subsystem. It was so delayed in the deathmarch that was NT 5.0. By the time 2000 shipped Cairo had failed (yet again) and the updates, and option pack + IE's for NT 4 was just too much. 2000 had all the COM objects which took forever to register during install but changed the way you could program the OS, however .Net made it all more usable. In the professional world it's the first DDNS/Active Directory version and it was great for massive networks! Sadly all the RISC CPU's didn't make the cut, the Alpha64 wasn't public and there was that one preview for Itanium.. It's the last significant 32bit version of NT for me, afterwards with XP64 & 2003 Itanium/x64 it was all 64bit for me onwards.

Retrorecall can Setup DVD with USB on Windows 98 on 86box

Also something I learned about Windows 2000 just recently: One limitation compared to XP was video card support - Radeon x850 or GeForce 7950 were latest cards. BUT, nvidia supported Windows 2000 in their Quadro line for 4 more years all the way through the Quadro 6000 which is basically a GTX 465.

To this day it's still hilarious to me that everyone including my dad decided to go on journeys to find Windows 2000 just so they didn't have to use ME. That or they took an entirely different journey and bought Red Hat for $50 at a time when Linux was much more of a pain which should tell you how much people REALLY didn't like Me.

I used Windows 2000 on my main PC through 2017. I finally had to upgrade to something else because by then, web browser support just wasn't good enough for the modern internet. Didn't run any antivirus of any kind and as far as I know I never once got a virus. I'm now on Windows 7 and will probably milk that for as long as I can get away with.

I always woshed i jad a old computer but my parents say no but soon when i get a laptop ill be downgrading to wimdows XP my dad always says why do you want a old computer? I say i like but this was amazing!

I loved it so much back then. I managed schools with a HP NetServe and classes full of Vectra VL with Win2000 that I'd install over the network. These were the real good old days.

i remember getting Windows Me only to find out it was Windows 98 again only rushed and much worse than 98 itself (though i haven't had much problems myself). 2000 fixed the problem in a mere matter of minutes and we didn't care if it was business use or not because they were hiding something far better for us than Windows Me! fantastic OS at the time.

Going to watch this soon. But. I’ve always liked W2000pro. Would use that instead of ME. Then again. I never really gave ME a chance I. The past. Maybe sometime down the road. I’ll restore a pc and out ME on it. Just give it my best. Some have had problems with that windows. Some never did. Stay safe budd :)

I was an early adopter of 2K as well. I was at college doing programming and networking classes at the time, so this made complete sense to me. I had my own issues with win 95, so I’d been reluctant to try 98 and I was still mostly using DOS - even for word processing. By the time I was forced to upgrade my PC, 2000 came out. The most trouble I had was game compatibility early on. So stable, and that recover to earlier working config option was gold. I didn’t install another OS on my desktop until 2008.

I built my very first PC in 2001. It ran an AMD Athlon XP 1800+ CPU at 1.5GH, 768 MB of DDR SDRAM, and a 128GB hard disk, with an ATI Radeon AGP GPU. It started out with WIndows 98, then XP Professional. I was takigng the Cisco CCNA course in college and we got evulation copies of WIndows 2000 Pro and Server with working keys. NO ACTIVATION needed. so we made copies for ourselfs and had burned them on CD RW's. I installed 2000 Pro as a fresh install on my new PC and formatted it like this and damn....it was extremely slow. Way slower than 98 and XP. LIke turn it on and leave and go get a drink and come back slow. I wish I knew where the disks were/ had saved them, I would love to install it on a SSD. So not sure why this PC being older and slower with less RAM was faster..Maybe not good AMD support?

Ik you probably won’t read this but do you know what version of snappy works on 2000 as apparently the original has malware now and origin doesn’t say it supports 2000 but I don’t have it installed to test

Was a beta tester for Microsoft since Win95 so got a pre-release version of Win 2000 to install and thought it was great. Still a little buggy but at the time it was great. Found that it was able to play about 80% of the games that worked for me in Win98 after changing the game .exe to use "Compatibility mode". Otherwise it is like a 40% chance. Would I go back to using Win2000 again? Maybe just for fun. The newer versions of Win like 7 or 10 can do everything 2000 can do and more especially works with Plug and Play.

I originally went with Windows ME. later I discovered W2K and found it was the same thing.... never had any problems with either edition... and once XP came out, these were kept as a backup system. and the battle over speed continued.... now in 2023.... we have W10 and 11, wonder what W12 is going to look like, or will Linux take over......

i remember going from 98 to windows 2000 pro back in the day on my AMD k6-2 350 it ran good

I kinda missed the ball with these. lol My first ever computer was a hand-me-down that had Windows Me on it. And unfortunately, I do remember having instability and crashing issues. It was only after I had my first DIY computer in 2011 that had Windows 7 on it. And since then, my experiences with Windows have been rock solid since then.

I wonder if I had used Windows 2000 instead Windows ME it would ease up my migration to Windows XP? I really liked ME, but didn't had to experience anything before it until much later.

I went from 98 to ME, after 2 days said no. Went back to 98, then a week later went to 2000 and was very happy. Then in 2002 went to xp.

Damn you, you just twisted my arm into building another retro PC. :D I had some good times with windows 2000. I went to ME and then went back to 2k.

I always coped the I386 folder to C:\ and ran wnnt command to install windows, then you didn't need the cd when doing updates or drivers :)

i still have that same looking Dell Pc there. LOL with Windows 2000. I wonder if it would boot up. i remember it being a Pentium II that goes into a slot on main board.

I used W2K on an old netbook I had. Windows 7 SP1 struggled on that 1.5GHz Atom, but W2K flew.

Nice video. I did get the Win 2000 CD in 2001 or so from a colleague and I installed it on my laptop and used it till XP was released. I still have it in a Virtualbox VM and it runs with 2 cores, 384 MB memory and 10 GB vdi-disk. I installed MS-Office 2003. It also has Windows Media Player 9.0, the visual aspects are different from WMP-10/11, but it had all functions of the later XP versions.

I remember using WindowsNT on Avid video editing systems back in the late 90's which were then upgraded to Windows 2000. One of the Windows 2000 systems was still being used well into the early 2010s. The system was pre-HD so was towards the end of it's life it only used for one TV drama show that was still using SD (Digital Betacam) video.

you were lucky i think, my father bought a new compaw desktop with windows me and it would blue screen all the time, it was really unstable

i never had any isues with 2000 or ME it was the first time windows had all the drivers we know what a pain in the a^^ that was back in day

I used windows 2000 for games

Should install the server version on a core2duo (high end) or a i3/i5/i7 and have fun with it. To see how it fares with modernish processors and tasks, Then go through 3rd party mods to show how it still handles things. And i know it doesn't support hyperthreading (but it will see it as another cpu when changed) And since it supports multiple cpus (at least the server versions) it should be interesting to see how it handles 4 or more cores Might well think you're using a board with 4 processors or more. There's also gpus that are far newer than it but still have support (titan series or the 900 series i think had support for 2k, at least XP) And there is a program that allows it to run XP (i think there's one that allows XP to run vista as well, not certain if it goes further than that). but it'd be interesting to do that, give it lots of ram (2k doe shave a 64 bit version as does NT). Also the option of a antivirus (old version that can still get the modern updates, avg i think) Would be fun for a quirky build to see how 2k still handles modern times. There'd probably be more esp with the XP hack app. And possibly modifying XP drivers to work on 2k too (if they don't already). It'd then also be interesting to see how it still handles things like youtube and web browsing

Windows 2000 was awesome. When I was old enough to get my own PC I got a used one with a fresh install of 2000. I think our family PC was running XP home at the time and we had an older 98 and 3.11 machine too. 2000 Was awesome since it ran basically everything that XP did but consumed less resources. All my games worked on it and I definitely preferred using it over the family XP machine. Now that I’m older I realize it was probably just the low resource usage of 2000 plus the fact that the early Pentium 4s were pretty terrible. My 2000 machine was rocking a pentium 3 that smoked the Pentium 4 in the family PC. Definitely some nostalgia factor but still, it was the first OS I truly got to tinker around with since it was on my own PC.

3am 1998, you're excited, 5am, you're swearing

9:36 That beige Dell remind me with Druaga1 + Quantum BigFoot + Windows ME

As a result of my job, I went from windows NT4, to windows 2000, to XP, to windows 7. Now that I am retired, I use Linux.

Windows 2000 Pro was also kinda the stake in the heart of having a Novell Netware network with Windows clients, as 2000 was a true multiuser OS vs 9x. The Novell Client took a long time to really reach feature parity on 2k vs 9x and by then businesses were moving to AD like anything.

I always hear people complaining about Windows 2000 and ME but I never had the problems with either OS that others had.

I daily drove a dual boot 98/2000 computer back in the day. Never touched Me with a barge pole. Not even with someone else's barge pole! 2000 was kind of the best of the pre-XP operating systems, but 98 was really needed for the games, so a dual boot gave you the best of both worlds. In fact I still have a 98/2000 dual boot system sat under my desk right now....

I have never had problems with windows ME, so I feel safe to say I am a happy customer of ME (despite the fact i am currently in high school and i got it second hand)

Now there's projects you could checkout being made to try and restore windows updates. There's windows update restored which is restoreing windows updates for Windows 95, NT4, 98, ME, 2000, and XP. like it was 1999 up to 2004. And then there's legacy update which is a community-run resource to help you fix access to the internet and the Windows Update service on earlier versions of Windows. Which is Compatible with Windows 2000, XP, Vista, 7, 8, 8.1, 10, and 11 (including equivalent Windows Server releases) All Windows editions (Professional, Home, Media Center Edition, etc.) 32-bit, 64-bit, and Itanium processors.

I think that most of us have dual booted the Windows 2000 back in the day. Great OS ;) Win 9x was also good, but it was already showing the age even at the end of the 90s.

Love your content and your presentation style. Thanks for this - used Win2k quite happily and completely steered clear of Windows ME myself. Fortunately my computer had bog standard easy to find hardware and install drivers at the times - had friends who had horror stories with BOTH 2000 AND ME ;)

I love Acros II. It's my go to for the Fujifilm GA645Zi. My go to developer is Agfa Rodinal 1+50 and stand at 1+200 for art. However, I do miss the original Acros, especially for architecture.

i have windows me on my compaq presario 5003 as that's what it was shipped with.....my wifes uncle had it and gave just about everything it came with save the keyboard and monitor. i even have the receipts and the comp usa ad he got it from......saved all these years. my setup came with the jbl pro detachable speakers that could mount to the minitor....wish i had that monitor.

I'll admit that I didn't use 2000 Pro when it was popular, but visiting it later on, I never liked it. Internet support for it was quite short---it stopped being useable online about the same time 98/Me did. I also found it to be a stopgap measure----why release 2000 or Me when they knew they were releasing the far superior XP just one year later? And finally, it always felt buggy and underdeveloped to me. Can you tell I'm not a fan? lol

Despite all issues with Windows, it's still decades ahead of whatever Apple has with the Mac.

I used Windows 2000 Pro for Home, ME really sucked!!!!! Win 2000 Pro was the KING!!!!!

i made my self a win2k build, with 4gb(3.5) ram and core2 duo. runs super fast :) Still on a HDD as i haven't figured out how to get the sata ports recognized with drivers.

How I loved Windows 2000! It was such a big move from 98SE as a home user. Still my favorite Windows OS of all time.

ahh win2k/xp almost the same. i remember i had a teacher in high school who i got in an argument with. i told him i could install xp on a Pentium 1. he said no it needs mmx thats why min was a p2 i said nope look at w2k 133mhz p1. well i grabbed a p1 120mhz machine from the schools old tech closet and installed 128mb of edo ram and a 10gb QUANTUM BIG FOOT (druga1 reference lol) and i did an unattended install shure it booted like watching paint dry at first boot. but it was powerful enough to open word and browse the web at the time (2005) he was flabbergasted and i got 100 bonus points lol

I dual booted Windows 98 and 2000 when 2000 first came out. I think I spent 90% of my time in Windows 2000, it did everything I wanted it to do. 13:00 Windows 2000 doesn't require NTFS, it can also be installed on a FAT32 partition. Instead of deleting out the Windows 98 partition, you could have selected it and it would have given you an option to keep the partition intact, format it with FAT32 or Format it with NTFS. While playing with a multi-boot of Windows 98, NT 4 and 2000 I found that it will also boot off a FAT16 partition without any issues.

Try upgrading it to XP

I remember installing Windows 2000 on my Dell Latitude C521 with an AMD Athlon 64 with 512mb RAM back in 2010… I even used it on my other Dell Optiplex GX280 and still remember Windows Updates still being available in 2011! Missing those days!

It's amazing how many people have become nostalgic for older Windows OSes. I used Win2k Pro for a long time, and I just found an unused OEM licence in my pile of what George Carlin would call “stuff”. I’m getting ready to test it out on a 12-year-old Lenovo desktop. :-)

I just restored an old home pc with P4 to working condition and installed Win2K, because I saw that it was very stable. I think it's a good fit for a 1998-2001 kind of PC. It may not look the best, but I'll take stability over looks any day. The Snappy Driver Installer is a great suggestion, because I need the video card drivers to be properly configured before I can use the 64MB GeForce 2 MX-400 on it. After this I have plans to see and learn what this system is capable of running.

oh nice idea for a video! i love that tower. I actually got my MCSA in Windows 2000 (workstation, sever, infrastructure) lol

Greatings from a every day raining sweden brrrr.... I stil use windows 2000 on a old Dell and the reason not only do i stil like it it is because in windows 10 i dont know when they removed the old SMB1 to SMB2 this ment i cant reach my Network NetgearReadynas nv+ that only run SMB1..hm..You cant reach it by windows 10 or windows 11 not even Linux but i can at least use the harddrive on it true my Imac 27 whit Mac os High sierra..::).i need to enter it to admin it and everything els,,...I stil have 2 unopen windows 2000 sealed for a long time...IN the end of 80s begining of 90s i get a big huge mixed whit windows programs etc etc all original like original Dos all version and well you name it there is a lot never open never used..:)...I remember my oldest sons mum use windows 2000 on a IBM i think it was a thinkpad dont remember but this laptop you could turn the screen arround and use it whit touch like now days Ipads etc...Before well i think stil there was collectors of old program windows etc but today it seams no one care about it or?..I am trying to sell all of it but i dont know where the best place is..well you have Ebay but i left that place but a real collector place...Many times i say to my self stop bying laptops and more but hm stil i do so my apartment is full of well guess what..L.O.L...A friend of my renovate all different laptops from old to new ones and ask me do you want to buy and i say in my mind no thank you but then...L.O.L...if any one got a tip how i can reach my Netgear for all my computers whit out older windows pleace tell me..:)...like i say my mac cí can reach it and upload and download every thing but not my pC..i can se it on my pc but when i try to reach the it only say you cant reach it wrong this and wrong this....hm....any way thanks for another memory back in time..old good windows 2000..:)

I built my first PC in 1999 and used Windows 98 initially, once service pack 4 came out for Windows 2000 I used it for a while because I tried installing XP when it came out and my PC would keep freezing, It met the requirements but I had to wait for a Bios update for it to be reliable. Windows 2000 was great and I loved it had XP not came right away I would have used it much longer

Windows 2000 is and always will be my favorite version of Windows. It is very stable, secure, fast, for games it is fantastic. Today I have it installed on a dual boot machine along with Windows Vista. Long live Windows 2000.

I had no idea way back then that there was a difference between command prompt in Windows 2000 and Windows 98. One day I had a not so nice person prove it to me that Windows 2000 command prompt is not MSDOS. That was back when I was 18 and thought I knew everything.

Windows 2000 was a great OS. At home I had dual boot. Win 98 for video editing and Win 2K for everything else as I wasn't a gamer. At work at the time we bought some new HP desktops with Win 98 on them but found that it did not suit so they were all upgraded to Win 2K.. You know 1 disk , 10 machines. I still have a Win 2K install on a VM here.

Windows 2000 is based of NT and NT systems don't run on dos like 9x ones, while installing it it removes ms-dos but i think its still possible to run those games and programs in compatibily mode.

I want to install windows 2000 / NT 4.0. 2003 But in vm ware 17 it can not install . Setup started but it hang or not completed. In year 2005 . In my pc windows 2000 us fastest os. It boot very fast than other os.

Been there, done that. On my work computer i holded back for some time but one day i jumped at deep water. My suprise reflection was that by whole 12h day i didn't reboot or use reset button.... It was so strange feeling....nice but strange....

I agree with all of you. Win2k was the best windows ever made.I think they should bring support back.

I still use Windows 2000 on a 35W 3rd Gen i5 dedicated to running a Canoscan 9900F film scanner. Low power, speedy, no crashes, no drama.

I used to find windows 2000 so elegant and cool as kid, we had win 98, later i got my very own pentium 3 machine with win 2000, it was a server that my father's workplace stopped using and handed to him, i had to stop my dad from downgrading it.

I got several computers for free, thanks to Windows ME crashing so hard. Installed 98 or 2k on them and played Half Life

❤lthe video! I have memories of Win 2k a lot in school. I am curious where do you get boxed copies of old software/OSs and period correct hardware. Amazon doesn’t have and I am in a fixed income so kind of hard to come across

Internet Explorer?

This is just awesome. Looking forward to see what's coming next.

My favorite version of Windows. I ran it until forced to XP when some things stopped being supported by it.

my first visit to Microsoft campus was two weeks before the release of Windows 2000 RTM, I was working at Office Depot selling computers so they wanted to make sure that sales people knew the difference, I still have my copy of the OS they gave me back then, I wish I had kept the sleeve they gave me for it

Windows 2000 was indeed a very stable system. I still look at it from the business perspective, because in that time I was managing complete networks. So - On top of Windows 2000 server , I was also managing the Novell Netware 4.1 and UNIX systems. I think Windows 2000 was one of the best stable user systems. I was in a mixed hardware environment where we also used Sun hardware, but everyone preferred the Windows workstations. At the time I was transferring at home from Acorn RiscOS to Windows, but also dabbled with with that (at that time) rough Linux installations. Strange enough I still have RiscOS running, but now on the Raspberry Pi 400 (and even faster than on the original Acorn RiscPC hardware). I still use Windows (Windows 10 at the moment), but mainly Linux (Mint Cinnamon). That last one probably because of my UNIX background because , although there are some big differences, Linux is "familiar ground" for me. At the moment I am also doing "retro" stuff, because I am restoring my first computer (Cosmac Super Elf) and my old Acorn Atom back to full working order...

Thank you for bring back some great wonderful memories. I used to work at a private school here in the UK and I was responsible for upgrading all of the computers to Windows 2000, and then connecting them to the domain server. I lost count of how many I upgraded, but after a few hours of installing Windows 2000 I remembered the CD Key (literally burned into my memory for years after lol). I think I must have upgraded well over 200+ computers to Windows 2000. I never had any problems with upgrading all of the computers from NT4 Workstation, and a few Windows 98 systems, but I think thats because I slipstreamed SP1 onto the CD's that I was using to install 2000. The only problems I had was with a few bits of software that I had to re-register which was MIDI software which was a pain in the neck as had to do it over the phone.

How about doing a dual boot system 95 and 98se, my use case would be I have a voodoo 1 card which runs best on 95, but my agp voodoo 3 3000 runs best on 98se