Carol: the kernel + security has supposedly been improved in Vista, which could have been worth something. However the kernel is bogged down by the DRM crap, and the security gets so much in your way that you'll want to disable it.
As for eye-candy, I'm the kind of person that turns it off (takes up way too much screen real estate), and prefers win2k style look, even without gradient titlebars. I do like drop-shadows though :]
No one has really given me a sensible reason why anyone would want a pretty desktop that uses up massive amounts of system resources before the computer is actually asked to do something. - and that's spot on the sugar. I don't want my operating system to get in my way, and I want to use my resources for the applications I actually run.
People will claim that "but Vista uses less resources, it has a hardware accelerated GUI!" - to which the answer is "yeah, and I've had that since win9x. Really."
I suppose my experience of W2k was a bit coloured because a number of bits of hardware I had at the time effectively bit the dust because of lack of drivers. There were also a number of games companies (Chessmaster is the one that immediately springs to mind but their were others) that explicitly coded their installers so that the products would not install on Windows 2000 because it was seen as a business OS (even though they eventually installed on Windows XP).
-Carol Haynes
Hm, specific checks against OS... funny, one of the Age Of Empires (iirc) does that too, just for winxp... turns out that there's NO reason for this, as some reversers showed by eliminating the check
. Issues with 9x vs. Win2k were things like sloppy coders ("width" vs. "pitch" of a screen surface), stupid coders (doing direct keyboard port hardware access, even though it wasn't necessary - the POD game), etc.
I don't doubt drivers were a problem, btw, but I didn't own any esoteric hardware back then
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