Windows 2000 is a major release of the Windows NT operating system developed by Microsoft, targeting the server and business markets. It is the direct successor to Windows NT 4.0, and was released to manufacturing on December 15, 1999, and then to retail on February 17, 2000, with Windows 2000 Datacenter Server being released on September 26, 2000.
Windows 2000 introduces NTFS 3.0, Encrypting File System, and basic and dynamic disk storage. Support for people with disabilities is improved over Windows NT 4.0 with a number of new assistive technologies, and Microsoft increased support for different languages and locale information. The Windows 2000 Server family has additional features, most notably the introduction of Active Directory, which in the years following became a widely used directory service in business environments. Although not present in the final release, support for Alpha was present in its alpha, beta, and release candidate versions. Its successor, Windows XP, only supports x86, x86-64 and Itanium processors. Windows 2000 was also the first NT release to drop the "NT" name from its product line, however the "NT" moniker would be used for one final time in the "Built on NT Technology" tagline used on the product's packaging as well as a few other places in the operating system (such as the boot and logon screens).
Four editions of Windows 2000 have been released: Professional, Server, Advanced Server, and Datacenter Server; the latter of which was launched months after the other editions. While each edition of Windows 2000 is targeted at a different market, they share a core set of features, including many system utilities such as the Microsoft Management Console and standard system administration applications.
Microsoft marketed Windows 2000 as the most secure Windows version ever at the time; however, it became the target of a number of high-profile virus attacks such as Code Red and Nimda. Windows 2000 was succeeded by Windows XP in October 2001, while Windows 2000 Server was succeeded by Windows Server 2003 in April 2003. For ten years since its release, it continued to receive patches for security vulnerabilities nearly every month until reaching end of support on July 13, 2010.
Both the original Xbox and the Xbox 360 use a modified version of the Windows 2000 kernel as their system software; the former's source code (as well as the source code for Windows NT 3.5) was leaked in 2020.
History
Windows 2000, originally named Windows NT 5.0, is a continuation of the Microsoft Windows NT family of operating systems, replacing Windows NT 4.0. Chairman and CEO Bill Gates was originally "pretty confident" Windows NT 5.0 would ship in the first half of 1998, revealing that the first set of beta builds had been shipped in early 1997; these builds were identical to Windows NT 4.0, including a very similarly themed logo. Certain features such as the Microsoft Management Console as well as two-tone gradients on the Windows Explorer title bars (inherited from Windows 98) were introduced during this period. Beta versions of Internet Explorer 4 were also featured in these early builds before it was replaced by Internet Explorer 5 in later builds.
The first official beta was released in September 1997, followed by Beta 2 in August 1998. Windows NT 5.0 Beta 2 introduced a new "mini" graphical boot screen (in place of a text mode only boot screen in Windows NT 4.0 and prior), and elements of the "dark space" theme were removed in favor of the "square box" theme used in the final product.
On October 27, 1998, Microsoft announced that the name of the final version of the operating system would be Windows 2000, a name which referred to its projected release date. Windows 2000 was initially planned to replace both Windows 98 and Windows NT 4.0. However, this would be changed later, as an updated version of Windows 98 called Windows 98 Second Edition was released in June 1999.
Builds of Windows 2000 Beta 3 then followed after Beta 2; the new login prompt from the final version made its first appearance in Beta 3 build 1946 (the first build of Beta 3), the new, updated icons (for My Computer, Recycle Bin etc.) first appeared in Beta 3 build 1964, and the Windows 2000 boot screen seen in the final version first appeared in Beta 3 build 1983.
The Windows NT 5.0 and early Windows 2000 betas had different startup and shutdown sounds (some of which reused the same sounds as Windows NT 4.0), but during the Beta 3 builds, new piano-made startup and shutdown sounds were made, composed by Steven Ray Allen. These were changed to their final compositions before Beta 3's release, which was featured in the final product as well as in Windows Me. The newly updated system sounds from Windows 98, composed by Bill Wolford, were also carried out in later beta builds. Windows 2000 Beta 3 was released in May 1999.
Windows 2000 did not have an actual codename because, according to Dave Thompson of Windows NT team, "Jim Allchin didn't like codenames". Service Pack 1 for Windows 2000 was codenamed "Asteroid".
During development, builds for the Alpha architecture were compiled, but the project was abandoned in the final stages of development (between RC1 and RC2RC1 was the build 2072 from June 1999 (and last public Alpha/2000 build), the last known internal build was 2128 and the "Gold" release of Windows 2000 was build 2195. ) after Compaq announced they had dropped support for Windows NT on Alpha. The Alpha 64-bit builds of Windows 2000 were also in development simultaneously with the 32-bit versions (all versions of Windows NT for Alpha were 32-bit only due to it using 32-bit application binary interfaces on an otherwise 64-bit processor) until it too was discontinued; development of Windows for Alpha 64-bit continued on for some time as a development platform for the 64-bit Intel Itanium platform when no other Itanium hardware was available at the time.
From here, Microsoft issued three release candidates between July and November 1999, and finally released the operating system to partners on December 12, 1999, followed by manufacturing three days later on December 15. The public could buy the full version of Windows 2000 on February 17, 2000.
About three days prior to release, which Microsoft advertised as "a standard in reliability," a leaked memo from Microsoft reported on by Mary Jo Foley revealed that Windows 2000 had "over 63,000 potential known defects." After Foley's article was published, she claimed that Microsoft blacklisted her for a considerable time. However, Abraham Silberschatz et al. claim in their computer science textbook that "Windows 2000 was the most reliable, stable operating system Microsoft had ever shipped to that point. Much of this reliability came from maturity in the source code, extensive stress testing of the system, and automatic detection of many serious errors in drivers."John Wiley & Sons (2010). Operating System Concepts with Java, 8th Edition, page 901. InformationWeek summarized the release "our tests show the successor to Windows NT 4.0 is everything we hoped it would be. Of course, it isn't perfect either." Wired News later described the results of the February launch as "lackluster." Novell criticized Microsoft's Active Directory, the new directory service architecture, as less scalable or reliable than its own Novell Directory Services (NDS) alternative.
Microsoft planned to release in 2000 a version of Windows 2000 which would run on 64-bit Intel Itanium microprocessors, specially codenamed "Janus". 64-bit builds of Windows 2000 were already in development for the Alpha 64-bit platform (which served as testing grounds for Itanium), however the first officially released 64-bit version of Windows was Windows XP 64-Bit Edition, released alongside the 32-bit editions of Windows XP on October 25, 2001, followed by the server versions Windows Datacenter Server Limited Edition and later Windows Advanced Server Limited Edition, which were based on the pre-release Windows Server 2003 (then known as Windows .NET Server) codebase. These editions were released in 2002, were shortly available through the OEM channel and then were superseded by the final versions of Server 2003 on April 24, 2003.
New and updated features Windows 2000 introduced many of the new features of Windows 98 and 98 SE into the NT line, such as the Windows Desktop Update, Internet Explorer 5 (Internet Explorer 6, which followed in 2001, is also available for Windows 2000), Outlook Express, NetMeeting, FAT32 support,Description of the FAT32 File System , 3DNow!, SSE and SSE2 support, Windows Driver Model, Internet Connection Sharing, Windows Media Player 6.4, WebDAV support etc. Certain new features are common across all editions of Windows 2000, among them NTFS 3.0, the Microsoft Management Console (MMC), UDF support, the Encrypting File System (EFS), Logical Disk Manager, Image Color Management 2.0, support for PostScript 3-based printers, OpenType (.OTF) and Type 1 PostScript (.PFB) font support (including a new font—Palatino Linotype—to showcase some OpenType features), the Data protection API (DPAPI), an LDAP/Active Directory-enabled Address Book, usability enhancements and multi-language and locale support. Windows 2000 also introduced USB device class drivers for USB printers, Mass storage class devices, and improved FireWire SBP-2 support for printers and scanners, along with a Safe removal applet for removable storage devices. Windows 2000 SP4 added native USB 2.0 support, Wireless Zero Configuration support and SSE3 support. Windows 2000 is also the first Windows version to support hibernation at the operating system level (OS-controlled ACPI S4 sleep state) unlike Windows 98 which required special drivers from the hardware manufacturer or driver developer.
A new capability designed to protect critical system files called Windows File Protection was introduced. This protects critical Windows system files by preventing programs other than Microsoft's operating system update mechanisms such as the Package Installer, Windows Installer and other update components from modifying them. The System File Checker utility provides users the ability to perform a manual scan of the integrity of all protected system files, and optionally repair them, either by restoring from a cache stored in a separate "DLLCACHE" directory, or from the original install media.
Microsoft recognized that a serious error (a Blue screen of death or stop error) could cause problems for servers that needed to be constantly running and so provided a system setting that would allow the server to automatically reboot when a stop error occurred. Also included is an option to dump any of the first 64 KB of memory to disk (the smallest amount of memory that is useful for debugging purposes, also known as a minidump), a dump of only the kernel's memory, or a dump of the entire contents of memory to disk, as well as write that this event happened to the Windows 2000 event log. In order to improve performance on servers running Windows 2000, Microsoft gave administrators the choice of optimizing the operating system's memory and processor usage patterns for background services or for applications. Windows 2000 also introduced core system administration and management features, such as the Windows Installer, Windows Management Instrumentation and Event Tracing for Windows (ETW) into the operating system.
Plug and Play and hardware support improvements The most notable improvement from Windows NT 4.0 is the addition of Plug and Play with full ACPI and Windows Driver Model support. Similar to Windows 9x, Windows 2000 supports automatic recognition of installed hardware, hardware resource allocation, loading of appropriate drivers, PnP APIs and device notification events. The addition of the kernel PnP Manager along with the Power Manager are two significant subsystems added in Windows 2000.