Windows 2000: Do you think Second Life Should Stop Support for Windows 2000

Well, it means I will not be able to use SL from my office computer that only can use Windows 2000 and will lose a few friends in the process who only connect during the early hours of the morning PST/PDT.

I think that LL are trying the best they can to disrupt my SL experience and are REALLY succeeding in doing so.

All the geeks who asked LL to drop Windows 2000 either have no life or are too geek to be interested in having a life. I am no geek and my personal condition is such that SL is a good substitute for RL personal relationships.

Dropping support on OSes which are still used for a program where social relationships are a staple in its success is suicidal. 'Nuff said.

Sandor

Umm not sure, can you run more bots on 2000 or XP?

Hey what about support for Win 3.1 and 95 too, if you want to talk problematic dinosaur systems, 2000 was a dog of a OS, please bury it, can't keep supporting it to 2010 for a small amount of users who I suspect if pushed would upgrade. I suspect many people who use these systems run on minimum settings but still wonder why their creations don't sell because they can't see how much better other peoples are.
Give them 3-6 months warning and do it. Actually I seem to remember a blog post about dropping support for Win2000 near 12 months ago.
XP is still sold, get it while you can and it's cheap and at it's best or you will be forced to buy Vista which is till in Diapers crapping itself

Oh good everyone who choses not to use an operating system developed last millenium is now a geek with no life
Not everyone is fortunate enough to have 2 computers to use on SL, some of us have to work at work.

Do you know something called lunch hour?

If no one connected to SL from work, considering the myriad of users connecting from my time zone during business hours, either I would have to assume SL is full of kids who should be at school or full of unemployed people.

Sandor

Have you actually used Windows 2000? Or are you thinking of Windows Me, which is completely unrelated to Windows 2000?

Objectively speaking, as someone who recently upgraded to VISTA from Win98SE...

Using Win98SE on an MMORPG I play had actually given me an a advantage. I was solid as a rock on there. However although they still supported my OS, it's held them back with some upgrades and I have no illusions about that. Following a major upgrade last spring, it took two weeks to get 98 and ME folks back in.

Win2000 is very stable, and its being an NT OS made it compatible for many things for a very long time, and 2000 people still use it - we dont know how many people used Win98SE or WinME in the game I have been playing, but others had the same prob as me.

In another parallel: This year the company I work for had to phase out a companion feature which was compatible to PalmOS. Maintaining this product became very problematic since Palm upgraded its OS to garnet several years ago. We couldn't just update the data on our servers, but had to troubleshoot ways for an increasingly diverse range of OSes to sync properly to them and utilize that data...

...In the end we had to look at the facts: there were far more people we could accommodate with a mobile-friendly website for the more popular OSes while maintain it versus trying to figure out the clunky application and gateway anomalies. We had to break the news but gave them time for the transition - almost half a year. Syncing ended this week and the apps will lock out by the first of the year. Yeah people were unhappy, and you'll always get people eager to plunk down money for a device just to take advantage of a free fringe feature, but it could have been worse if we didn't ease them into it.

I have to give you credit. You know full well what the potential consequences will be, and you are giving advance warning. If this warning is more visible to the masses so those with Win2000 catch it, you have won under all circumstances in my book.

6-8 years is a good run for a computer on the same OS. But the Win2k people must already feel the crunch with the inability to upgrade WMP, DirectX, ActiveX, etc. I know how that goes and the latter two are usually at the heart of game development. They won't understand that, but most will understand the consideration of advance notice.

PS: btw when I first came to work for that company, we had Win2000 machines. Solid as a rock and didnt have to restart Windows for weeks at a time. Since getting XP it's been daily reboots. I know 2k evolved into a stable OS, but that's not enough of a reason to hold LL back anymore than it was enough for Win98 and WinME users should hold back a product.

Have you actually tried to install drivers for a ATI Radeon HD Graphics Card? As example the HD 3650 is a good and cheap mainstream card, I use it at my office, but there is no driver for Win2k, nvidia have NO Win2k drivers anymore.

Sure, you can use SL with old graphics cards and low details settings, but why? For many users the social environment is important, that means the "look and feel". Maybe for scripters there is no different, except you want control the glow settings, you want see them with minimum details - and don't forget the bot farms, they don't need any graphics details.

Win2k was a good OS until SP2 for XP were deployed. IF you have the skills, you can keep it nearly actual, but Jane and John Doe dont. They know the switch to turn on/off - thats it. For the most ppl it isn't possible to keep Win2k up-to-date and this makes a OS outdated - additionally the support from Microsoft too, only security fixes are easy available for Win2k.

Drop Win2k support and if this means, that 20.000 bots are killed too, I'm fine with this.

Is it true or false that Windows 2000 doesn't check in with Microsoft when you install it to determine if it's legit or bootleg, while Windows XP does?

Inmidst of the most devastating recession since 1929 LL actually thinks of dropping support for a still running OS?

They can be glad if people will continue with throwing real money on their overpriced product next year, not to mention the necessary hardware upgrades for the to be expected useless shinies and programmer experiments.

But this only shows once more how far away LL management is from any economical and business ratio.

Get real, LL!

True, but not that significant because you can't download service packs or updates without signing in to WGA. So in practice it's not that big a difference, unless you're crazy.

No, I bought my nVidia graphics card for SL and the Windows XP drivers work fine on Windows 2000. I run SL with just about every detail setting maxed out except draw distance, and that's a sop to my crummy Internet connection. In addition, Microsoft's STILL doing security updates for Windows 2000, so long as you've got a legitimate copy. I can understand that you might imagine that it's some kind of horrorshow since you probably switched to Windows XP long ago... but honestly it isn't, it works BETTER than Windows XP, WITHOUT a lot of work.

And bot farmers don't run the SL client for their bots, they run LibSL or whatever it's called this week. If you're not just making problems up there, then someone's been feeding you a bunch of unprocessed fertilizer.

The latest version of DirectX that's compatible with Windows XP is also compatible with Windows 2000. I don't use any version of WMP post WMP 9.0 (WMP 9.1 is where they added the kernel DRM trapdoors to Windows Media Player). I don't use Internet Explorer so I don't care about ActiveX and other security flaws in Internet Explorer. However I have been able to get EVERY Microsoft API I've needed for Windows 2000, except for Bluetooth support (which it never supported), so Windows 2000 is NOT "holding Second Life back".

This isn't like Palm (which has been a lame duck anyway since Hawkins returned). Microsoft is STILL supporting Windows 2000. They're not supporting Windows 9x/Me.

Yep, it was better than Win98 but nowhere as good as XP.

Which version of Windows 2000 did you use?

One where it says Windows 2000, it wasn't NT or ME either, only used it for 12 months, I lent it to a mate years ago and haven't bothered getting it back.

SP1, SP2, SP3, SP4? Both 2000 and XP have had a number of updates since they were released, and SP1 and I think SP2 were released before XP. I'm using SP4 with all post-SP4 rollups and all critical and security hotfixes, and it is definitely lower overhead and more stable than the current build of XP in my work laptop.

What issues did you have with Windows 2000 that were resolved by XP?

What features of Windows XP that weren't in Windows 2000 do you consider critical?

Wait, what? Second Life does most of it's work on the CPU, so it doesn't require a top of the line graphics card. I am running it on a GeForce 7900 GTO (which is roughly comparable to an 8800 GTS). With all graphics settings including draw distance maxed out I get a good useable, smooth frame rate (15-20 FPS in a busy mainland sandbox). When I enable 2x or even 4x Anti-aliasing, I still get the same frame rate. Want to know why? Because Anti-aliasing actually DOES put significant load on the video card, not on the CPU. At or beyond 8x however it does start to slow down. The thing about this though is that Anti-aliasing is not required to see the same things everyone else sees. I have all that bump mapping, reflections on everything, basic shaders (I believe this is what is required for prim glow), atmospheric shaders (windlight), etc.





I got that from a third party.

I had SP2 then after amultiple crashing, I reinstalled to without it, still got plenty of crashes, went to XP and had nearly no crashes since. Trialling Vista 64 st the moment snd it 's crashing reminds me of Win98,98,&2000 days again. Going back to XP32 I think.

Well, my experience with Windows 2000 and XP is as a system administrator supporting 150 software developers and (varying over the years) between 10-20 customer sites, and your experience is highly atypical. None of my users had anything like the experience they had on Windows 9x/Me with Windows NT 3.1, 3.51, 4.0, Windows 2000, or Windows XP, unless they had bad hardware or drivers.

The difference between the Windows 9x family and the Windows NT family is night and day. The admin network when we started our UNIX-Windows desktop transition had 3 people full time, for maybe 20% of the users we were managing with 2 people... but they had to support Windows 9x, and we didn't.

Within the NT family... Windows NT 3.x video performance was less than stellar, but it was much more stable than NT4.0. Windows 2000 brought stability back close to the same level as NT 3.51, much better than 3.1 and 4.0. Windows XP kept the stability of Windows 2000, but had much higher CPU and memory requirements, and it's much more complex to debug things when something does go wrong.

I'm sorry you had problems with 2000, but if your experience had been typical I'd never have been able to move us from X Terminals to Windows NT/2000/XP workstations with only two people to manage the whole thing.

Hello, in my opinion, any support for this outdated OS will block ressources which are better used for Windows XP and Vista.
Regards
Taro

I think support should be removed now. Your resources could be better used elsewhere especially as Windows 7 is on the horizon now and will be in beta in January. 2000 was a good OS but its day has gone.

minus the floofy orange n blue interface, 10000000000 wizards that take 86 steps to do what was a checkbox and the name, windows 2k pro with all the service packs is 97% identical to xp sp3

its no more outdated than XP in all of its functionality (and im not talking about that uber unzip feature, that i recently saw a 14 year old write on his psp, or ect)

kill win2k support? you cant unless its xp support too, the whole "you cant install this on 2k" things others have been doing is mearly a 1 line if clause added, just so they dont have to deal with you anymore on support issues

and guess what, LL doesnt support you anyways so why waste the freakin time (its LL this will take 2 years to implement)

its a freakin stupid idea, its a post it note some one wrote before the meeting on tuesday cause they couldn't come up with anything else

For a long time it wasnt as stable as Windows 98SE - specifically SE, which is basically like saying Windows 99. ME and 98FE were both junk and very quirky.

2000, XP, and VISTA all had their nightmare first years. I've rassled my VISTA to the ground and it now does what I want it to do.

The big difference though is Win2000 is a network OS (It's Windows NT 5.0) and runs a different file allocation table from the personal computer OSes. It's kept it in the running for some time.

Why not just drop Windows support entirely? That seems to be the buggiest, most bothersome platform to deal with out of the three platforms supported.