
Originally Posted by
davidhammock200
Your lack of "hands-on" personal experience is showing, big time!
Hopefully, one of these years you will be able to do more than quote others, don't believe everything you read, not even here.
I used Win2K since prerelease and I was using it up until several years after XP came out. I also used XP, Vista, and Windows 7 starting from beta and sometimes alpha stages. Win2K had serious UI issues as well as major driver and hardware compatibility issues. It was never a mainstream OS as far as Microsoft was concerned and as such they never pushed for third-party driver support. That's why a lot of hardware and software that works fine in XP doesn't work properly in Win2K even though the OSes are very similar under the hood.
The OS also had a fair amount of stability and security issues and wasn't really solid until SP3 or so. Similar to how XP had gaping security holes until SP2 came out. Vista on the other had had a completely reworked security system, as well as a significantly improved driver model (which is unaffected by a lot of things that would cause catastrophic errors and BSODs in previous versions of Windows), major UI improvements in a lot of areas (although unfortunately some backward steps in several areas), massively better memory management and prefetching which provides huge performance boosts in systems with large amounts or RAM, and a lot of other smaller tweaks. Win7 basically just built on that, with UI refinements, a slightly better driver model, new version of WDDM that supports multiple video drivers active simultaneously, better battery life management for laptops, etc. However, it isn't anything revolutionary compared to Vista.
Main: i5 2500K@4.6GHz w/Zalman CNPS10X Performa, Intel DZ68BC, 8GB G.Skill DDR3-1600, PNY GTX 470 + EVGA GTX 470, ASUS Xonar DX, ADATA S510 120GB, Samsung 1TB F3+1TB F1+2TB F4, Kingwin LZG 1kW, Lian-Li PC-9F, Dell U2212HM+S2209W, Win7 Professional.
Laptop: Dell Vostro 3450, i5 2410M, 8GB DDR3-1333, AMD Radeon HD 6630M 1GB, Intel X25-M 80GB, Seagate Momentus 750GB, Win7 Home Premium.