They're both Windows but are based on entirely different kernels. Windows 98 is DOS based and Windows 2000 is NT based. Some software runs on both thanks to compatibility layers.

In terms of looks, afaik 2000 is a bit lighter and possibly shaded red a little—not so grey. Not much else differs externally, though.

Ah, and I also remembered that 2000 loved header panels at top of windows, with white background and a little artwork in them. This also worked to make the interface considerably brighter than in 98.

This kind of thing: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/c/c6/Windows...

(Though ME did have some white-background panels with large headers and graphical fluff, where I think previously you'd only find grey. In this vein: https://www.operating-system.org/betriebssystem/bsgfx/micros...)

windows 2k was the best!

Last version of Windows I had installed on a personal computer. It was a better time.

Microsoft seemed to have a better understand of UX design back then. I'm not saying it's prettier, it's not, but it seemed more consistent across the operating system.

I'm not sure it was a better understanding so much as it was much simpler back then. There were no radical changes to the GUI since 95/NT 4.

Windows 2000 was much more stable being based on a different NT-based kernel.

Which meant you couldn't play many Windows games on Win2K - I remember that Quake 3 was the only game which would run without issues. Other games either required some configuration, or simply wouldn't run.

I hear that comment a lot but I used Windows 2000 for gaming and I seldom ran into issues with Windows games. DOS games were a problem but that was predictably so given the lack of DOS on NT. If anything, Windows games generally ran better on Windows 2000, but for reasons I'll go into later...

The interesting thing about Quake 3 was that it's engine supported SMP which Windows 9x obviously wouldn't so Quake 3 must have been designed with workstation-class desktops in mind (I guess that makes some sense when you think that some of Id's earlier games were written on NeXT hardware and then ported to PCs).

At the time I ran an Abit BP6, it had dual Celeron IIs overclocked from 500MHz to > 700MHz. I think I got them as high as 900MHz once but the system as hugely unstable. I also had a bunch of BIOS optimisations for gaming too. It was an awesome motherboard in an era long before dual core processors were a thing. And surprisingly games actually ran better on Windows 2000 than they would if I'd dual boot into Windows 95. My suspicion was that while most games were still single threaded, NT would schedule the heavy process on one CPU while running all the background OS tasks on the other CPU. Thus giving the game a little extra overhead that wouldn't have been there on Windows 95 due to everything running on the same CPU.

I do miss that computer. It lasted far longer than Moores law should have allowed and it was probably the last computer I've owned where I could boast about understanding pretty much everything about it from the ground up (the chipsets, BIOS options, pins on the motherboard, bootloaders, software loaded, etc...every system since has been just that little bit too complicated that there's been some chip inside or background process that I've not understood).

That's an amazing write up, I enjoyed reading about this. Thanks!

You just dredged up memories of trying to run Thief: The Dark Project on Win2k and the installer failing, until I found an obscure forum post saying I should just run the installer with the "-lgntforce" flag. Dear god, the stability gained from running on a sane OS! On Win98 on the same hardware I was forced to save early and often or risk losing hours of patient sneaking and hiding when the OS inevitably borked out.