All good things come to an end, eventually, and operating systems are no different. Microsoft has reminded the public that support for several Windows versions will end over the coming months, which could likely have significant consequences if you or your company are still running these Windows versions.
Windows Vista is only a little over three years old, but the version without any service packs installed will already move out of support April 13, 2010. This means you will no longer receive security updates from Redmond. The same holds true for Windows XP SP2; you will no longer get security updates for this release after July 13, 2010.
Microsoft advises you to move to Windows 7 (obviously), but also highlights that if you’re not yet ready to do so, you should consider installing service pack 1 or 2 for Windows Vista, or service pack 3 for Windows XP. If you haven’t done so already, you deserve a spanking you should get with the program.
While both Windows Vista and XP still receive security updates when you install the latest service packs, this no longer holds true for Windows 2000. Support for all versions of that operating system will end July 13, meaning the time has now really come to move on to greener pastures.
“Customers running an unsupported version of Windows or service pack will not be eligible for any of our support options,” Microsoft states in a press release, “Updates, including security updates released with bulletins from the Microsoft Security Response Center, will be reviewed and built for the supported versions and service packs only.”
The server side of life will also face a number of support transitions. Like the desktop variant, support for all versions of Windows 2000 Server will end July 13, 2010. Also on July 13, Windows Server 2003 and Windows Server 2003 R2 will transition from the mainstream support phase to the extended support phase. During the extended support phase, security updates and paid support will remain available. Non-security updates, however, will only be made available to Extended Hotfix Support customers.
Windows Server 2003 and Windows Server 2003 R2 will remain in extended support until July 14, 2015.
It’s sad to see Windows 2000 finally put out to pasture. I can remember how impressed I was when I first installed this on my home workstation (coming from Windows 98 and NT 4.0 Workstation.) Even when Windows XP came along, I still had a soft spot for Windows 2000 as it was markedly faster on modern hardware without all the visual overhead of the Fisher-Price looking XP. And, it lacked the annoying, draconian Windows Activation “feature”. Windows 2000 was the last Windows operating system I ran as my mainstream OS before making the leap to Linux permanently. All good things must come to an end.
Same here. I love Windows 7, but 2000 will always hold a place in my heart (and mind).
In fact, Window 2000 with a decent firewall and protection (AVG and Spybot) plus a modern browser (Firefox 3.6) rocks socks for work purposes.
I still wouldn’t mind they take a page from the Win98SE experience, update it with a true x86-64 O/S core and hidden XP Home style of permissions (only accessed through safe mode or CLI) for a single user O/S-type of experience. A root password for administration and a separate log on password for the user – even if its limited to one user per system – is not a bad scheme to follow!
The whole Windows system folder layout made sense in Win98. Today’s implementation doesn’t improve on it by having so many layers – scattered layers at that – of folder/file locations for data, settings, and temp space.
Edited 2010-02-28 02:31 UTC
Windows 2000 is still my default boot option for these reasons. No activation, no brain-damaged UI, and very fast on modern hardware. It’s also very similar to XP for developers. Just this afternoon I was altering binaries that “require” XP according to their PE header but work fine on 2000 once the “requirement” is changed.
I’m sure I’ll still be using it in some form well after support ends.
It depends on your definition of modern hardware. The higher the core count, the likelier Windows 7, and maybe even Vista, will outperform it.
Not that it matters. If you like 2000, then you should use it
.
Still do at work, Windows 2000 takes the least amount of work, I found it to be the fairly stable and least annoying of all the Windows versions I’ve run.
I like it’s predictability.
Only thing is, it shows it’s age. The world has moved on.
I think GNOME will be my next work desktop, if I can manage it. As it’s a bit of a Windows-shop.
It pretty much does all what I need it to do.
I’ve been using Windows 7 on the side and just as my colleague who has been using it ‘fulltime’ we’re not impressed.
Yes, it’s less annoying than Vista, but that bar is really low.
My colleague said: I’m probably going back to XP.
Edited 2010-02-27 01:38 UTC
Your work place must be a crack house then because Windows 7 is light years ahead of XP in every way imaginable.
I dont agree.
Actually many companies are still using W2K and XP.
There isnt much motivation to upgrade.
Well, lack of security updates might become a motivation now. Still, some businesses simply can’t upgrade if they have software that just won’t work with new Windows environments. That’s what XP mode in 7 is for, but sometimes a VM is not sufficient.
Mainly PCs doing admin tasks: spreadsheets, wordprocessors, email, connecting to ERP systems. Typical tasks running daily business. So there isnt a need for upgrades. Emails and Internet go through corporate firewalls/security servers anyway.
Our new Dell laptops are downgraded to XP.
So it may take years before many corporations actually switch over.
2K and XP are inferior to Vista/7 when it comes to security.
2k doesn’t even have a firewall.
You really should be using 7 or Vista. Going back to XP is a security compromise.
Edited 2010-02-27 05:55 UTC
Doesn’t matter, I’ve always used a 3rd party firewall anyway. I’ve had worms get through Windows Firewall. Better to trust someone other than Microsoft if you really want security. They’ve improved, but it’s never really been top priority for them.
Sure you can get a third party firewall but you still don’t get:
Data Execution Prevention.
Windows Service Hardening.
Address Space Layout Randomization.
Windows Defender.
You miss out on a lot of security benefits when you run Win 2k. I really don’t see any gains.
agreed, as much as i love Windows 2000, it’s now completely out of date.
I think the other point i would make about Windows 7 is the way it uses memory, it seems to have file caching and making use of memory down to a fine art, similar to how linux and mac osx.
Windows 7 really is the sum of it’s parts, the good use of memory coupled with the points you have made, along with lots of other little extra’s such as IPv6, UI enchancements and making better use of modern hw (trim on SSD)
As for XP, i have it deployed at work, however i was never a big fan of it, even at release. If longhorn didn’t sit in developer hell for 5 years i would have skipped XP altogether and simply jumped from Win2k to longhorn. (Longhorn as in the 2003 version not the Vista version).
Edited 2010-02-27 07:34 UTC
Beside third party firewall like Zone Alarm.
You can get spybot search and destroy, which is better than Window Defender.
Install Avast anti-virus and you are safe from most malwares.
My WIN 2000 machine with 512 MB RAM is faster than my WIN XP with 2GB RAM.
The best part is you can reformat and re-install your system without the need to call MS to activate your Windows.
<BR>
The best part is many of my old computer games can run in WIN 2000.
There are free anti-virus programs? Really? Do you really think I know about Data Execution Prevention but not Avast?
Windows defender is just another free security benefit that comes with more modern versions of Windows. No anti-virus scanner catches everything so you might as well let defender scan once in a while as an additional precaution.
The basic fact remains that running Windows 2000 is a much greater security risk than Vista or 7. We saw this recently with the Google hack. There are third party tools that can increase the security of Windows 2000 but not to the level of Vista or 7.
As for activation you can reformat and reinstall Vista or 7 without having to call MS. Re-activation is only required when you make major hardware changes.
Using 2K in a VM for a single application is ok but I really don’t think anyone should use it as their main system. You can pay $50 on ebay for a vista basic upgrade which gives you a significant boost in security. With Win2k losing support it is really time to let it go.
True, but the number of cores required to make a serious difference here is very large. The benchmark that inspired Win7 changes was on a 128-way system, and Win7 thoroughly improved it.
Windows 2000 does not recognise hyperthreaded/multicore chips distinctly from physical CPUs (http://download.microsoft.com/download/5/7/7/577a5684-8a83-43ae-927…), and has a limit of two CPUs on pro & four on server. It has a RAM limit of 4Gb on pro & 8Gb on server (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_2000#Editions). It also no longer has driver support from Nvidia (among others) on current chips. Those limits are far more problematic than performance problems in large multicore configurations.
(Yeah, my machine’s a 2005 single core. But on Win2k, it’s _fast._)
You realize you can use the classic UI with 7 and Vista, right?
I suppose it is ok to use 2k if you are dual booting just to use a couple Windows apps but 2k is really missing some key security features like Data Execution Prevention.
Vista yes to a point, 7 no. Microsoft deliberately removed the classic UI, though I don’t blame them for it. There comes a point that you just have to cut the crap and move forward, that they moved in a direction completely opposite to the kind of UI I prefer doesn’t mean I fault them for changing. It does mean, however, that Windows 7 is not my cup of tea, pure and simple and so I don’t use it. I prefer OS X and GNOME instead, as the experience is simply more to my liking.
Are you talking about the taskbar change in 7? Because there is a classic theme. I guess maybe it doesn’t provide a classic enough experience for you.
If you think I’m talking about themes, then you don’t get what I mean about the UI and aren’t ever likely to. I’m not talking about how it looks, I’m talking about how it *behaves* and I mean the entire experience, from Explorer to the Start Menu.
Well I don’t think there was a revolutionary interface change between 2k and Vista.
You can keep programs in the taskbar, on the desktop or in the start menu. You load them, you switch between them in the task bar, you close them. The fundamentals are still the same.
I can see getting annoyed by some of the changes like the file explorer but I don’t how that is cause to switch operating systems. To me that is reason to download a replacement file explorer. I don’t like the default file explorer in OSX either but I can understand why they don’t provide a minimalist dual pane file explorer for typical users.
The major interface difference between Windows 7 and Win2k is the task bar which makes it odd that you have a strong preference for OSX. It just seems contradictory that you love OSX and Windows 2000 but hate Windows 7. There’s too much overlap between the three systems.
There are some slight differences in Windows 7. But for the most part, anyone proficient in Windows 98 or XP will not have difficulty with the transition.
Tried the classic UI in Vista, and it just didn’t look quite right. IMHO, the Win32 classic UI (insofar as the way it looks) is light years ahead of either Vista or Win7 (or OSX for that matter). Of course, I realize my position is biased.. I’ve been using this UI for over 15 years, and I have gotten very used to it. Anything else just seems painful for me to look at, even if it is ‘prettier’.
On the other hand, I know things change and I must change with them, so I will be moving to Win7. But not until I get a new machine
For now, it’s WinXP all the way.
Forgive me, but I cannot fathom how the “look” of Aero Glass is below what you get with W2K.
it’s not even close how much better Aero is.
Agreed, Win2k is the only version of Windows I can say that I absolutely enjoyed using. Lean and mean, with a minimalist UI that didn’t get in my way at all. Then, of course, Microsoft had to screw it up with XP and, at least in my opinion, it’s been down hill since then as far as the UI goes. 7 has some great technologies under the hood, but I personally think the UI is god awful. It gets in the way, has too many steps for some actions (come on, three steps to connect to wifi?), and a pain in the ass from the keyboard while feeling extremely clunky and slow. It’s like scraping nails across a chockboard for me to use 7 because of that UI.
Windows 7 is the only windows UI that gets out of the way.
If you are someone who knows the old UI to the point that you have ware marks in your screen from the mouse movements then I can see how the different UI would make you feel like it was in the way.
Windows 7 is the first version of windows that I don’t bump into the UI every time I want to do something.
No, I’m someone who navigates specifically from the keyboard. Guess what? The windows 7 UI, in that respect, is behind both GNOME and OS X. Badly behind, as was Vista before it. I do not use a mouse at all. In order of keyboard friendlyness it goes OS X, GNOME, old windows UI, and then the vista/7 UI. It may be miles ahead for you, but UI is a very subjective thing and everyone has different preferences. Use what you like and I’ll do the same, and with no need to insult anyone.
You negate the benefits of the GUI by sticking with the keyboard to navigate.
Unless you need to use the KB because of a physical impairment, you are just fooling yourself if you think th keyboard is a more efficient way to navigate a gui.
Except that I can’t see the screen and therefore have no choice.
Hence, my qualification after my first sentence
darknexus: We were just talking at work about how well windows 7 would work for blind people. We are possibly getting a grant to set up some work stations specifically for the visually impaired and I’m not sure what OS we will load on them. You have any suggestions? And do you use a combination of screen readers and braille displays or?
I work at a public library and we haven’t had anything for blind folk yet.
Well, I was going to send this as a pm since it’s somewhat out of topic, but for some reason the send message options don’t want to appear for me right now. So, I’ll just put it here. Anyone who’s not interested can just skip over it.
First off, it’s typically best to use the same os on the workstations you’re setting up for accessibility as is on the rest of your computers. The reason for this is two fold, it simplifies administration and it also simplifies troubleshooting. If the rest of the library is on Windows XP, and that’s what the staff is trained on, and you give the blind people a Mac for example, if the system has issues the staff probably won’t be as effective at sorting them out. The second reason is that, if done properly, there’s no need to set up separate workstations. You can set up a hotkey to turn accessibility on or off, and they can then use any workstation that is open. There’s no need to provide a separate workstation or environment if this is done right.
As far as access technology goes, my advice would be to just go with speech at first. I do have a Braille output device, but the only reason I was able to acquire it was that I traded for it with a friend. At a minimum of $3,000 per display for a good one, coupled with the limited use they’d get, it’s not an investment you’d need to make. The choice of screen reader is another thing to take into question though, and this is an important one. In the case of Mac or *NIX (I don’t know what your library uses right now) the choice is pretty well made for you. Voiceover in OS X or Orca with GNOME in *NIX. Note that KDE is not an option at this point. Both are typically provided with their environments, though Orca may need installed separately depending on how that was configured. Voiceover is always present as of OS X Tiger, and can be toggled on and off with the press of command+f5. If your library does use Mac, you’re already covered if you use Tiger or later. In the case of Windows though, there is a bewildering array of options. I’d suggest these two commercial options to investigate for starters:
Window-Eyes from http://www.gwmicro.com
and System Access from http://www.serotek.com. Also have a look at the open source NVDA from
http://www.nvda-project.org.
System Access is the most affordable of the commercial solutions and even has a free web-run version that anyone can use at no charge, but it’s not as versatile if you have a lot of custom applications you need to script. Window-Eyes is more expensive, but can be customized to do just about anything. NVDA is pretty young and not as mature, but it is open source and very actively maintained and I, personally, am amazed at the progress it is making in such a short time. Coupled with Firefox, NVDA does offer one of the best auditory web browsing experiences on the Windows platform. It is also fully scriptable by Python, so what it doesn’t do right now it can be made to do if needed. All three of these are freely downloadable, trials in the case of the first two (the System Access web version isn’t a download as it only works while there is an internet connection).
I’ll mention JAWS here too, http://www.freedomscientific.com. I don’t recommend it though. It is the most expensive but also the most buggy, a case of sitting at the top for too long without pushing the boundaries. The company is also currently engaged in what, in any other industry, would be grounds for an immediate anti-trust investigation. I do not exagerate when I say they are to the access industry what Microsoft was to the rest of the IT industry back in the days of IE6. My advice is to investigate all of them, preferably having blind people of different backgrounds do most of the testing as they will be the ones using the setup. My recommendation would be a Window-Eyes site license, but choose the one best for the situation. Make no mistake though, unless you go with NVDA the Windows accessibility route is the most costly route to go down. With OS X and *NIX you encur no extra costs, but if the rest of your library uses Windows then that’s what you should do.
If I can help any more let me know, hth.
Well, I for one am grateful that that send message option didn’t work and I got a chance to read this as well This is very useful information, thanks for taking the time to write it down!
You’re welcome. And as for the pm system, it seems to be gone at the moment. Not only am I unable to send pm’s but the entire message section of my account page is gone. Was this one of the removed features? Didn’t pay much attention to that thread a while back, guess I should have.
I too am glad the PM option was not working. I had a very good friend in college who was blind that used a screen reader. I’ve always been interested in this technology but haven’t kept up with it like I wish I had. Thank you very much for your write-up.
Windows 7 UI is better than any UI on any OS I have used in my lifetime — and I have used plenty of ’em. Win7 UI helps me to get my job done with fewer clicks while providing great aesthetics.
Have you used KDE 4.4 yet? I think it puts Windows 7’s GUI to shame. Intuitive, highly usable and absolutely gorgeous!
I would love it to be, but I didn’t find KDE4 intuitive (yet). Maybe I’ll try 4.4 soon from a livecd maybe they changed it ?
Highly usable, perhaps. Some stuff is pretty easy. Some not so much. See my rant in the next paragraph, however.
Intuitive…debatable. The K menu has inconsistencies that are quite annoying, such as when you can hover and when you have to click. To move an icon on the panel isn’t as simple as just dragging it. Oh no, that would be too easy. Instead, you have to hit the cashew or navigate to the panel settings, at which point dragging items around becomes possible. Setting the height isn’t intuitive. Instead of grabbing the edge of the panel, you must instead drag along this “Height” icon in the settings overlay. Not intuitive. Not easy to use.
Gorgeous? You have to be kidding. Well, I guess if you tweak it enough, you can make any Linux DE look gorgeous. Most people don’t have the time or know-how for that. The default Oxygen widget theme is still ugly as hell and makes terrible use of screen real-estate and to top it off, actually makes it hard to see what’s going on. It lacks contrast where needed, for example. The only thing that looks good on KDE 4 is the Plasma themes and those require much less effort than a good widget theme.
I have the opposite experience with Windows Server 2008. Many tasks now require many more clicks and several dialog windows than in Windows Server 2003. Even ordinary daily tasks have become annoying to perform – like switching screensaver. This is more tedious today than ever before.
This annoying tendency to reorganize things “smarter” is not a Windows-only thing. It can also be observed in Gnome (for an example changing fonts require more clicks and more windows than before).
Layers upon layers upon layers. I still prefer the way it was done in OS/2 2.1 – but I’m just an old gaffer annoyed with you younguns :p
That’s true (more clicks), a bit of a pain.
OS/2 – now you’re talking!
Almost everything you could do in Windows has a keystroke assigned to it. I’m not sure how it could be more keyboarder friendly.
I’m not referring to keyboard shortcuts, I’m referring to the UI behavior when the keyboard is used to navigate it. Windows versions prior to Vista were very consistent, when using the keyboard to navigate you knew what was going to happen. Elements were logical and you always ended up in the same place. In 7 though, like Vista before it, is erratic. Sometimes you don’t end up where you need to. Further, some windows such as the control panel have been redone so that, instead of being able to use first letter navigation, you must now tab through every item on the screen. This is slow, clunky, and bad design. Keyboard shortcuts are a second priority the the UI’s interaction with the keyboard. If you do want to judge by keyboard shortcuts though, OS X comes out on top again, no contest. There are more shortcuts than Windows by default and, if a menu item doesn’t have a shortcut, you can assign one to it either on an OS-wide or per-application basis.
If you want to know what I’m talking about, try it. Navigate 2k/xp with the keyboard for a day, then do the same in Windows 7. You’ll get it, and no cheating by using the mouse! If you really want to see what I mean, give it a try.
What exactly gets in your way compared to Win2k? You launch the programs, they go in the taskbar, you switch between them. I’m really not seeing a major difference.
I Totally agree.
Windows 2000 is still my main OS for all the reasons that you stated (and more).
I will continue to use it for as long as is possible, because I have yet to see any other operating system that I would rather use in its place.
Windows 2000 was an amazing release. I used it daily on at least one of my computers from ~2000-2008.
Pro was good on its own, but more than that, the entire 2000 environment of 2000 Server + Pro + Active Directory.
I can’t think of any other software company accomplishing such a large shift, to a radical new way of doing things (Active Directory, Kerberos auth, etc.) with very few flaws. Not zero flaws, but pretty close considering the sweeping scope and highly technical nature of the changes they made. It is truly amazing.
The 2000 Server’s automatic replication topology generation system, the KCC, is one of the great feats of engineering of the last few years.
So, short version, 2000 is an historic release, all the better for being a great release to use.
*edit*
Also it had a new driver model, a new disk model, offline storage, EFS. It goes on and on. I even think the 2000 Server and Pro Resource Kits are the best they’ve ever put out, all the more impressive because so much of that documentation had to be newly written from scratch for all the new systems.
Edited 2010-02-28 16:40 UTC
You have to be kidding me. Windows 2000 was an amazing release? Need I remind you of all the holes that hackers found in Windows 2000?
2000 had a solid kernel and file system but its security was swiss cheese. Windows Server 2000 shipped with all ports unfiltered by default. IIS 5 had a ton of vulnerabilities, mostly buffer overflow exploits.
2003 and 2008 are great releases. Windows 2000 users were beta testers when it came to security. Some people here think I am anti-Linux but when Win2K came out I thought it was just plain nuts to run it as a web server.
XP suffered the same security holes. Oh, that’s right, the same security holes were in the kernel all the way back to NT 3.5, but I guess that’s a Win2k problem.
Truth is that Windows is filled with blemishes on its record. The sales pitch of every version was its security on top of its feature set. Anyone that has bought Windows should get those patches because it wasn’t secure by default. In fact, it looks like Microsoft knew about quite a few of the problems and hid them from the public.
The same holes that were patched before XP was released? How about the vulnerabilities that took advantage of 2k not having a firewall or DEP? You really don’t know what you are talking about.
Truth is there is a massive leap in security between Win2k and Server 2008.
You speak of Windows as if all versions have had a roughly equal number of vulnerabilities. That’s absolutely false. Win2k and IIS5 were full of holes compared to later versions and are still much riskier to run.
In 2001 Gartner suggested companies dump IIS5 and wait for the next major release which is which is exactly what I was saying upon Win2k’s arrival.
Gartner remains concerned that viruses and worms will continue to attack IIS until Microsoft has released a completely rewritten, thoroughly and publicly tested, new release of IIS.
http://www.gartner.com/DisplayDocument?doc_cd=101034
There’s more to security then just making sure you have the latest patches. MS was far too passive in its approach to security with Win2k. Server 2003 was a huge improvement in this regard. As I said before Win2k was more like a beta when it came to security.
Windows 2000 was the first version of Windows that I actually quite liked using. Nothing that came after it did much to impress me.
These days I’m using Vista, but I don’t consider it a huge upgrade from 2K. Considering the time that passed between 2K and Vista, that’s pretty disappointing progress.
I’d definitely still be using Windows 2000 if it had drivers for my current hardware.
As a macosx and linux user i must admit that windows 2000 really impressed me. It was minimalistic and felt really responsive. Windows 2000 is the only version of windows that i really enjoyed to use.
I have seen quite a few people laud Win2k for its simplicity, its ease of use, and its consistency. I think some of you are describing why NT4.0SP6A was such a kick ass O/S to support. NT4.0 without service packs sucked until about SP4, but after that point it was getting good. And by SP6A it was really a lean O/S compared to even Win2k at the time.
On the enterprise network we used Novell Netware 5 – later 6 – to access groupware storage, personal profiles within the network, and for separate privdirs from the profile space. It was simple. It was secure. And it was F-A-S-T. 40,000 users shared space across 200 servers in the enterprise and it ran relatively smooth. That is until XP.
We rolled out XP because Microsoft was pressuring our legal department about the liability of computer security and whatnot. The lawyers that negotiated licenses basically painted us into a corner to switch to XP. And from there they began to push for more Active Directory integration. Slowly but surely Netware was losing its hold on main corporate LAN. And what sucked was the speed of the network suffered a horrible painful flood of QOS packets. Sure they contained them within LAN’s, but the QOS packets really brought each segment to its knees. WTF do they need QOS packets for!?
And from there it just went downhill. Downhill to the point where they were seriously talking Linux clients. Not sure where they are today as I don’t work there anymore. But I can say the trends when I left make me believe they ditched Netware. It was a shame, too. NT4.0SP6A and Netware was a pretty kickass combination.
There are no QOS packets, packets are only marked with QOS. That’s only a few bits in a packet so if that took your network to the knees maybe the problem wasn’t with the packets.
Well…..
I’d rather see Windows itself put to pasture….
If there weren’t things it did better across the board (vsync being part of almost every video driver being a big one for me), and if MS didn’t spend quality R&D time on development and management tools, that might be happening.
Fortunately for MS, yet unfortunately for many FOSS advocates, FOSS competition has caused MS to make their products more valuable (Small Business Server, Home Server, 7 Pro being a true superset of Home, Express editions of dev and server products, SQL overtaking MSDE after that occurred, IE7, IE8, etc.).
Firefox, KDE 3, KDE 4, Compiz, Apache2, MySQL 5, PHP 5, Python >=2.5 (ballpark version number), Postgres >=8.3, and so on, have been some of the best things to happen to Windows in recent years (along with Vista, to show them how much userland minutiae really matters).
Edited 2010-02-27 01:27 UTC
Yeah, competition really makes Microsoft work. I think that Server 2003 shows that best. Linux started kicking Server 2000 all over. MS responded with a great new server release.
I never understood how people could use Win 2K on LCDs without sub-pixel anti-aliasing. Also, my first worm was on Win 2K, minutes after connecting my computer for the first time to the internet.
Besides XP had some nice things UI wise and now 7 really is the best OS out there. RIP Win 2k, you will not be missed here.
Cleartype with most fonts is worse than no subpixel hinting. That’s why. If you force everything to use Tahoma, Arial, and Inconsolata, it starts to look OK.
<- only uses Cleartype on IPS displays
Edited 2010-02-27 07:29 UTC
No, it’s actually great IMO. In fact any AA (even the one used in Linux is better that no AA). Crispiness just hurts the eyes.
No, fuzziness. X (that one in Linux–Freetype2, IIRC) looks excellent to me on most TNs and *VAs, as does whatever OS X 10.3.x uses. Cleartype looks fuzzy with all but a few fonts, and Inconsolata is the only font that looks really great with it. With Freetype2, I can easily get rid of the obvious red/blue borders, which help make Cleartype look fuzzy. Yet, no amount of using the Cleartype tuner seems to able to fix that problem with it. The same display will be far easier on my eyes w/ X than Windows.
If you have red/blue borders with text, then you might have misconfigured the subpixel order. Usually monitors are RGB but there are also BGR, or evn VRGB (vertical pixel ordering).
So in correct subpixel configuration there should not have any blue/red artifacts.
Check this page:
http://www.grc.com/ctwhat.htm
At the bery bottom, there is a section about Sub-Pixel Order Sensitivity
This page is a good for subpixel order testing:
http://www.lagom.nl/lcd-test/subpixel.php
Edited 2010-03-01 13:14 UTC
Here’s an ideal link for showing what’s what:
http://www.lagom.nl/lcd-test/subpixel.php
Cleartype needs fonts to match it well. Inconsolata, FI, has no issues whatsoever, once Cleartype is tuned. It’s not Cleartype being misconfigured: it’s Cleartype making text look fuzzy on curves, even with the best looking settings from the tuner, where X and OS X look crisp, with practically any font.
I’ve never understood everyones fixation if AA. I use windows 2k on an lcd and it looks fine to me. I’ve actively sought out the option to disable AA fonts on osx/windows before due to them turning to a horrible blurry mess. It can look good on larger fonts, but its awful, to me, on smaller font sizes.
Ideally, if you had a 3840×2400 resolution on a 19″ LCD monitor you wouldn’t need AA at all, because the pixel density would be high enough that you wouldn’t be able to distinguish individual pixels.
Until such displays are common AA is necessary because:
– no AA on text is esthetically displeasing (says a designer – you might want to ask … oh … I don’t know … any other designer in the freakin’ world)
– no AA is bad on the eyes (I’d kill myself if I had to read a 150 page document with no AA)
– some fonts which were not designed for small sizes might become illegible without AA
Do you think that every OS for almost 10 years comes with AA by default because people working on them are stupid? Just try to use AA exclusively for a few weeks on a decent display and you’ll see there’s no turning back.
if you take designers as a reference you’re pretty much lost
they see fonts not as a way to transmit a message, but to transmit style (something i don’t care about)
and i’d kill myself if i had to read a 150 page document on a screen
dead wood or e-ink is the way to go, not font-fuzzines
so instead of fixing the problem (wrong/too small font) you are throwing mathematics at it?
i’m using 7 with aa since it’s release, but if you can show me the “kill all aa” butten you’d realy help me
Edited 2010-02-28 12:15 UTC
There are two things here that make this discussion completely pointless:
– first you make a gross generalization of designers (you know some of us might take into account both form and substance)
– second you care nothing about aesthetics – I have nothing to talk with someone who thinks that
Knock yourself out, hope it works:
http://social.answers.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/GettingReadyforWin…
*sigh*
it’s not that i care nothing about aesthetics
my problem is that in 99,9% functionality is limited by aesthetics (i’m sure there are exeptions out there but i can’t think of one right now)
even with the registry-hack you can’t get rid of all aa in 7
it’s easyer to remove the kernel than aa :/
You’re in a minority if you prefer to have Cleartype off. Most users perform tasks faster with it on.
http://www.ischool.utexas.edu/~ct/
“In Study 1 we looked at whether individuals have a preference for choosing ClearType text when
given a choice of three different font styles–some of which had ClearType, and others that were
just regular text. We found that people selected text with ClearType 80% of the time.”
20% is not insignificant, just because it is a minority. There is also the omission of other subpixel schemes, including OS X’s and the default used by Xorg (IMO, indistinguishable from OS X’s, w/o side-by-side comparisons).
On top of that:
“^aEURc self-reported as having 20/20, standard, or corrected vision, and
^aEURc self-reported as having no reading disabilities or color blindness.”
That rules out many people using LCDs. I would even go as far as to hypothesize that many reading disabilities would effect preferences for/against certain AA (or any).
Then, to top that off, they don’t mention specific Cleartype settings, nor monitors used. Each display can be quite different wrt making AA text not look fuzzy w/ a given rendering scheme.
WHY CAN’T IT BE SIMPLE?!
Edited 2010-03-01 04:40 UTC
i won’t deny that i’m not average
but it still is a fact that you can’t disable aa in 7
and there is no reason why there is no off-switch
if i had something to say at ms i would ask all the teams why they ignored the aa-setting
thats inconsistency that must not happen!
//i won’t deny that i’m not average//
He didn’t mention being average, he mentioned being in the minority.
I /have/ and it doesnt. bother. /me/.
-“esthetically displeasing” is subjective, I don’t mind not having it at all. Depending on the OS implementation of AA fonts, I find them to be “esthetically displeasing”.
-Not having AA has never hurt my eyes
-If I run into that I change the fonts.
And I never said anyone was stupid. Way to go completely overboard defending what you like. People really hate it when you put words in their mouth.
No it is not. I found that people with some sort of inclination towards visual arts tend to agree at least when something is generally ugly or not. I challenge you and anyone disputing that no AA is ugly to find a talented visual artist that would support you.
(the only allowed use of no AA is if you are going on purpose for a retro computer look, or if you have an insanely high DPI screen)
That, indeed, is subjective. You may prefer one implementation to the other, but any AA is better than no AA.
Yet.
It’s common knowledge that aliased text strains your eyes. Actually if you think about it, it’s common sense. The whole idea of AA is for the eye to see continuous shapes … you know, like you do in the real world.
Edited 2010-03-02 09:09 UTC
Well, we didn’t. Back then we used CRT-monitors almost exclusively. Besides that everybody was accustomed to jaggy fonts on LCD-monitors. What you don’t have you can’t miss
That said ClearType isn’t all that good. It only works well with fonts optimized for ClearType, and this requires a lot of work compared with PostScript-fonts. It’s the good ol’ difference between a dumb rasterizer and a smart rasterizer.
Would someone like to explain why this post was modded down?
Probably because a lot of people have a weird nostalgia towards Windows 2000. Probably the same type of people that would’ve argued 30 years ago that punching cards was better than using the fancy new hard-drives.
And I wouldn’t be surprised if they were right at the time. They obviously got better with time.
I think I’d be a little annoyed if I’d bought a mini laptop in the last 12 months with XP only to find it’s only going to be supported until July 13.
Oh well shame.
Edit
After this date what happens with product activation?
Edited 2010-02-27 08:12 UTC
XP SP3 is still supported. Read carefully.
Fair enough I didn’t notice SP3 was still going to be allowed to live. But I wonder how long SP3 support will continue and what will happen with product activation when it stops?
Edited 2010-02-27 13:07 UTC
Well, considering Microsoft’s ridiculously generous support cycle (seriously), I’d say the activation server will run for a while. XP support is probably built-in into the current Vista/7 activation servers, especially considering XP Mode.
Extended XP support, I believe ends sometime 2014.
Who knows, knowing MS they might not kill it off. They’ve had plans to for a while, announced it several times, but always they extended it for small machines. I’m not sure I’ll believe XP is ended until it actually happens and the XP update servers are gone.
I still use windows 2k on a few machines at work that do not need a newer OS for the few tasks they do due to it being rock solid. My brother still runs it on a relatively new machine (G31 motherboard with an e3300, 2gb ram) and it screams on his raid-10
I guess I’ll start nabbing all the hotfixes off the update site before it goes down.
i wonder how much will it take for microsoft to battle the market inertia they created themselves this way.
xp is definitely not going down without a fight, and they’ve already experienced it with vista.
Well, the difference between Vista and Win7 is that Vista (in many people’s opinions) was complete ass out of the gate, and many people avoided it like the plague.
When it comes to Win7, I don’t think most folks will go out of their way to avoid it. They may be like me and will not go through the trouble of upgrading to it on their current PC, but as they get new PCs, XP’s user base will start to dwindle, slowly but surely.
…you could try Server 2003 or 2008.
(TechNet Subscriptions are a great thing.)
Right, and they’re oh-so-cheap for anyone not a student, nor one whose company pays for it. Which is most people.
I’m pretty deep into the XP shell experience-wise. I’m disappointed that Win7 is basically the Vista experience warmed over. The virtual links can’t be followed like in a unix shell. You have a lot of default rights assignments in the Windows folder that cannot be changed. The flat space folder hierarchy for each program installation and its associated DLL’s. Its print spooler implementation is a pile of turd; we have to reboot to print on any hangups because print spooler service restart has zero effect. Its taskbar is an unwelcome change. And it no longer has a START button; describing that damn button in the lower left corner as a start button wouldn’t be right. And quite frankly, if you don’t have enough memory in your system you better set your expectations pretty low for response time when you start programs as the pre-caching is not a big benefit when its coming off the hard drive anyhow.
I’d much rather have a XP 2.0 or XP SP4 O/S than a Winblows 7 O/S. Win7 looks pretty but there is plenty of the Vista poo left in it to dislike it.
Some good points – I’ve not had problems with printing in Win 7, but in Vista it’s a horror show. I know someone will now leap in to defend Vista as the best OS ever until Vista and it’s all HPs fault or some crap about service packs which make little difference to the general vile experience.
Apologists Vista is a horror.
The thing that gets me is Win 7 might be a rewarming of Vista but it is so much nicer to use, how could MS spend so long to produce something so awful then transform it into something quite fair (without starting from the drawing board) so quickly?
Actually, that’s rather simple. MS were under such pressure to release Vista, an os that was delayed again and again and yet had almost none of the original list of features that were supposed to be in Longhorn. They caved to market pressure rather than testing it properly, and the results speak for themselves.
For the same reason that Windows 3.1 blew away Windows 3.0 despite taking much less time to make. For the same reason that OSX 10.1 blew away OSX 10.0 despite taking much shorter time to make.
Windows 7 is to Vista what Windows 3.1 was to Windows 3.0, and what Winodws 98 was to Windows 95. They’re all built on top of their predecessors, and therefore took less time to make than did their predecessors, but are also quite better than their predecessors.
I mentioned OSX above, but I’m not sure how I’d make a precise comparison. I could say that Windows 7 is to Vista as OSX 10.1 is to OSX 10.0, but I almost want to say Windows 7 is to Vista as OSX 10.2 is to OSX 10.0, since OSX 10.1 was really a SP for 10.0.
No one will claim Vista is the best OS ever but do explain which part exactly of Vista’s printing framework was changed in 7.
Claiming Vista has bad printing because you ran into HP crapware is like claiming Linux has a bad networking stack because your Broadcom wireless card works better in Windows 98.
Here’s a case of a webcam working with Vista but not 7.
http://h30434.www3.hp.com/t5/Operating-systems-and-software/DV4-112…
The logical conclusion must be that Windows 7 is horror show when it comes to webcams.
It sure ain’t same anymore. Germans are allies, fat is bad, you can just shoot everything, colors on busses and diners, diesel cars, women can vote… I tell you it was much better when I was young, green was proper green not some hazel, computers were dumb and youth smart, nowdays it’s opposite.
I know we used to laugh on those but when did we became them.
W2K was one of the longest used OS’s for me for a long while with XP coming in second. For me, W2k was replacing Win98ME. Had a machine with Win98 ME, reformatted it with W2k and didn’t look back. I retired Win2k in 2008 when I retired some old IBM hardware. Yes it may be dated by today’s standards but the world has changed. It was the first truly stable Windows release I thought for many years.
Sadly I had to move away from W2k when I bought a couple of new PC’s back in 2006. Had XP on both until late last year when I upgraded to Win7 and discarded XP. In fairness now I’ve had XP on my machines for seven years.
Win2K server was one of the best as well but now we’ve moved on to Win2k8/Linux servers. Unfortunately we cannot use W2k anymore due to security issues (IE 6 being the big problem) along our network but it is still being used in VM environments so that we can move applications and data to Win7.
I loved windows 2000
not for its aestethic, but about how windows 2000 seem better intgrated overall ( even if it still had some NT4 / NT3.51 /windows 3.1 style dialog ), overall it really seemed more polished than the more modern OS.
Windows 2000 had less service to manage, less open port. Security made more sense.
Unfortunately it was not designed with multimedia abilities in mind.
However it remains for me one of the best OS sold by microsoft so far.
What are you talking about? Fewer open ports? It didn’t even come with a firewall. A default Server 2008 install has a far smaller attack surface. You can break it down even farther with a core install.
Is there some luddite attachment to Win2k that I am missing?