Welcome to Windows 2000: The Athlon is Go

It has been a while since I have written an article about retrocomputing. In some ways, it feels weird to refer to Windows 2000 as retrocomputing. I used Windows 2000 as my go-to operating system for the majority of high school, well after Windows XP was released. And yet, it is now 22 years old.

I have a special affinity for Windows 2000 in my heart.  It’s the last version of Windows that has the true “classic” UI.  Windows XP and later do have “Windows Classic” themes, but they are still obviously tweaked.  It is new enough to run some software considered modern yet old enough to run many of the software designed for older Windows versions.  The NTVDM still supports 16-bit Windows 3.x apps, and I’ve had success running DOS applications on it as well.

But none of that can compare to the true reason I find Windows 2000 so comfortable.  Weeks before my grandfather died in 2001, he took me to his new office to show me where he worked.  He had a Windows 2000 workstation and let me unlock it and open some of his files.  It was the first time I used a computer running Windows 2000, and the last time I used a computer with him.

The Athlon: An introduction

I have a Compaq Presario 2100 laptop.  It is a surprising workhorse.  I bought one new, in 2003, and had it for many years – but I gave it away to a friend who needed a computer in 2010.  In 2019, I needed a 32-bit x86 system for testing Qt 5 and Firefox for Adélie, so I found a Presario 2100 on eBay in good condition for a good price.  It ran Adélie for a while, with Windows XP Professional in dual-boot.

This individual specimen has a 2.1 GHz Athlon XP, 1 GB RAM, and a 250 GB WD Blue disk.  It’s a perky little laptop, with enough oomph to play some great games (SimCity 4!  Midtown Madness 2!) and chomp through small builds.  The Presario 2100 is actually one of the systems I did OS development on back in the day, and I ran everything from NetBSD to Solaris to Windows Server on it at one point or another.

The only quirk I’ve noticed – which will be relevant later in this article – is that when booting Linux, the battery needs to be removed.  It doesn’t hold a charge, and the kernel’s ACPI module is angry and deadlocks if the battery is present during initialization.

Installing the Windows 2000.

I inserted my Windows 2000 CD and proceeded through installation.  It took over two hours to perform the “hardware detection” phase, which struck me as odd.  About 20 minutes in, I turned the system off and back on as I was hoping that would help it along.

The GUI was slow and nearly unresponsive. It took multiple seconds to draw simple controls. And installation, in all, took almost four days to complete. When restarting, it was very slow to boot as well. I was concerned there may be a fault somewhere – perhaps the CPU was failing. However, Windows XP still worked fine.

I used the debug logging facility of NTLDR and found it slowed when ACPI.SYS was loaded. I removed the battery and rebooted Windows 2000. It was instantaneous. As it turns out, the Windows 2000 ACPI driver was having the same issue as Linux. After upgrading to SP4, I was able to boot with the battery inserted without issue, so the issue has been worked around in a patch.

You’ve come a long way, baby.

The next step was installing the drivers for all of the hardware. The modem, network adaptor, and display adaptor were simple and worked just fine.

I installed the official Broadcom wireless drivers from HP’s Web site. It worked, but only supported WEP and WPA networks. My network is, of course, WPA2. I found this fantastic backport of the Vista driver to older Windows versions. I installed it, and then installed the Boingo Wireless client for a front-end. To my surprise, the laptop works flawlessly joined to a VLAN on my dd-wrt powered Linksys WRT3200ACM. This allows me access to some internal resources on my network – most importantly, a micro HTTP server on my laptop where I can stage patches and file downloads from the Internet.

At some point, I do think it would be an interesting project to set up a proxy server and allow the laptop limited access to the real Internet.  It will require a lot of research to ensure full security.

And now for the fun!

So far, some of the productivity software I’ve installed includes Office 97, Office 2000, Visio 2002, Liquid Motion, and Crystal Reports.  In fact, this blog article has been written entirely on the Athlon in Word 2000.

For development, I’ve installed Visual Studio 6.0 Enterprise including Visual J++ 6.0.  I have some SDKs and tools that I would like to add, but I haven’t found a lot of time yet.  Some of the tools available in the Platform SDK may start to be useful to me soon.  I am definitely having strong ideas for software to write targeting these older platforms.

Games I’ve had success with include Hasbro’s Yahtzee, Chessmaster 7000, and Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit. Hoyle Solitaire from Sierra On-Line also runs flawlessly despite being a 16-bit game for 3.1 and even warning during setup that “Windows NT has not been tested”. The only game that gave me issue was Slingo. It crashes on startup, before the intro screen, and running the included DXDIAG gives a DirectDraw error.

• 

• 

• 

Final thoughts.

This has been a blast to set up and I have been enjoying running this laptop again with the software from yesteryear.

This project has been everything that I had no longer felt with my other projects. Personal accomplishment, inspiration for future projects and ideas, and surprisingly, a significant amount of fun!

I am looking forward to writing some projects to enhance the retrocomputing experience for the community at large. Here’s to the future, with one paw still in the past.