Syclone0044

Neo2k, I'm with you 100%. XP has been serving me well the past year for sure, but I still miss the efficiency and compact code of windows 2000. I absolutely despise Microsoft .Net Framework and any other bloated, recklessly coded trash that MS has produced in the last 10 years. I fear that computers have become so powerful that optimization and efficiency is becoming somewhat of a lost art. For shame.

I recently built a Core i5 760 2.8GHz quad-core 4GB system to replace my aging P4 HT 2.6GHz 2GB system and I had every intention of running Windows 2000 on it. I hate to see computer resources squandered with bloated, wasteful, and inefficient code. I also despise DRM like "Mandatory Activation". I spent weeks working out all the kinks in my new Windows 2000 system and it wasn't easy. But with BlackWingCat's help for the driver files and the Win2K Pro 4 CPU-unlock patch, I got it working. I have: MSI P55-CD53 motherboard 4GB Mushkin DDR3 1600mhz RAM. Gigabyte 512MB GeForce 9800 GT PCI-E card. (using BlackWingCat's nVidia forceware drivers) The Problems with Win2K that made me finally give up and switch to Windows XP The primary issue was that Win2K seemed to have some trouble scheduling the multiple CPU cores. When I would play a CPU-intensive fullscreen Flash game like FarmVille in Google Chrome, the mouse would hiccup and stop responding smoothly and the game animations would run wildly. The CPU cores would be loaded unevenly and the game was unplayable. In Windows XP and Windows 7, this worked perfectly and the game was very responsive. Also, Intel SpeedStep did not work properly under Win2K. The CPU VCore would not drop <1.0v to save energy and cool the CPU, like it does under WinXP and Win7. As a result my CPU temperatures were quite a bit warmer under Win2K. Intel Turbo Boost also did not seem to increase the CPU MHz as high under Win2K as it did under WinXP. Worse, I had major troubles with Standby and Hibernate. Hibernate wouldnt work most of the time (but sometimes it would). Instead it would act like it was going to Hibernate, and then kick back to the Desktop without explaining why it failed to Hibernate. Standby was worse - it would standby but upon Resume, the CPU would be loading 100% and the CPU temps would get very hot. It seemed that Win2K had a bug that upon Resume, the SMP CPUs would not be receiving HLT instructions. Manually running RightMark HLT program solved the issue, but then RightMark was always consuming "100% CPU", which made TaskManager and Process Explorer's results appear useless and confusing. Hardly a solution I could live with. Finally, the most recent Win32k.sys security update from Microsoft doesn't have Debug symbols and calling Microsoft was a dead end. Without those Symbols, I cannot run DHEAPMON, a Microsoft tool I used to monitor my Desktop Heap. This is necessary because I tend to open an extreme amount of windows and tasks simultaneously, and when the Desktop Heap reaches full capacity, apps begin to misbehave and crash as they cannot allocate additional desktop heap resources. So I bit the bullet and installed my retail Windows XP Pro. Immediately I was shocked at how much faster it boots that Win2K, and it is a dream to use the Standby mode at night (which fully shuts off the PC fans - silent) and be able to Resume in 2 seconds. Also Hibernate is at least 4 times faster due to XP using HD DMA (Win2K doesn't). Plus it's really nice to be able to upgrade and install any software without having to spend hours of my time researching unsupported hacks and methods to trick the software into working under Windows 2000. Windows 2000 served me well but it was time to say goodbye.

Sorry for the late response! With 4.57 I get about 15000 MIPS. What's interesting is that under Windows 7 64-bit with 7z 64-bit, I get 20000 MIPS! I'm not sure if the 64-bit is the big variable or if it's really that much faster? This is @ 4000MHz on the Core i5 760 with 8 Threads.

Photos of SUCCESS. Before and After. Here it is before BlackWingCat's 4-core Win2K Pro CPU Limit Breaking Patch: Here after BlackWingCat's patch: Proof of using all 4 cores: Long Live Windows 2000!

Thank you very much, iamtheky! That is exactly what I was looking for but unable to find.

Current version 3.2.8 gives immediate error upon install that it's not a supported Host OS. Old versions are available: http://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Download_Old_Builds But no documentation discusses which was the latest version that still did support Windows 2000? Any ideas? Here we see currently XP and up are supported. http://www.virtualbox.org/manual/ch01.html#id2641244 I have a feeling the kernel device drivers are what prevents Windows 2000 from working as HOST OS?

BlackWingCat's files are available again - better hurry and download his KB979683-v2 and CoreChg.zip while you can!! I just did!

Great news! Today I received the NewEgg.com shipment and built the system. It works AWESOME on Windows 2000 with BlackWingCat's help! The system is an MSI P55 CD53 motherboard ($109) which is fabulous and has tons of ports, including legacy ports, 10 USB, 8 SATA, tons of overclocking options. 4GB Mushkin DDR3 RAM. Gigabyte 512MB GeForce 9800 GT PCI-E card. Installs using BlackWingCat's nVidia forceware drivers. 3D games (Quake4) work, but the nWiz.exe display control panel fails due to UxThemXP.dll failure. Intel Core i5 760 CPU @ 2.80 GHz. Win2K Pro only uses 2 cores Until I can find BlackWingCat to reupload his patch that will allow all 4 cores to be used. Realtek 10/100/1000 NIC works great with driver right off Realtek website - it has win2000 directory in the driver install! Intel HD Audio works great with BlackWingCat's drivers ---> http://w2k.flxsrv.org/drivers.htm I'm so happy! I will continue to tune and optimize this machine and report back.

Windows2000-KB979683-v2-x86-ENU.EXE is not available right now, can you reupload it? https://files.me.com/theblackcat/hzziiw It gives error: "Account Error: Inactive"

Firstly: I am not interested in hearing any opinions on the age of Windows 2000. Windows 2000 is my OS of choice - please respect that. I am trying to upgrade a P4 2.6 HT system to a Core i5 760 which is a 4-core CPU (no hyperthreading). I am in the process of selecting the motherboard etc. My concern is that it wont boot and the motherboard is just too different for Win2K to handle. Today I tried booting a vanilla Win2K SP4/Rollup1 install on a friend's 1-week-old Dell Inspiron 580 "Core i3 540" system, and I got a NTOSKRNL KMODE_EXCEPTION_NOT_HANDLED BSOD right before the screen would have kicked in the video driver. Is there anybody out there running an Intel Core i3/i5/i7 on Windows 2000? I saw BlackWingCat has it running, but how? The USB keyboard and mouse won't function in Win2K Setup (with SP4 slipstreamed of course). Does win2k absolutely require a motherboard with PS/2 Keyboard? Will Windows 2000 Pro only use 2 of my 4 cores? I know Microsoft officially licenses by CPU "Socket" but I wonder if Win2K Pro will use all 4 cores? Thanks for your time,

Great news! I have just succeeded getting Chrome 4.1.249.1036 (March 2010 version) to work on Win2K using KDW 0.83a. First I made sure wtsapi32.dll was added to my ExcludeFromKnownDLLs registry and rebooted to take effect. Then I downloaded Chrome 4.1.249.1036 from here: http://build.chromium.org/buildbot/symbols/4.1.249.1036/mini_installer.exe Saved it to my "Default download folder" so BlackWingCat's Chrome2K can find it, and renamed it to ChromeSetup.exe. Then I went here: http://blog.livedoor.jp/blackwingcat/archives/360097.html To download crm2k35a.zip from here: http://files.me.com/theblackcat/7ypvtl Then I ran the Chrome2K.exe down the line of buttons and setup.exe CRASHED... but Chrome 4.1 was successfully installed nevertheless! See the result: Who needs Windows XP with it's Activation & DRM nonsense?

Has anyone successfully gotten the iPhone to function with iTunes on Windows 2000? With BlackWingCat's blog help I was able to get iTunes 7.4 installed on Windows 2000 (the minimum version to support iPhone, which also requires XP or greater). I used Fcwinen.exe from KDW to do SpecialRewrite, which allowed QuickTime and iTunes to install. However when I start iTunes, it says: Then, iTunes does launch and when I connect the iPhone USB it says: In TaskMgr I see AppleMobileDevice.exe "Apple Mobile Device Service" is running, and iPodService.exe is also running. So why doesnt the iPhone work? BlackWingCat's blog is in Japanese and has terrible Google Translation to English, so I can't follow it. Can anyone give a straightforward guide to what needs to be done?

Thank you, I didn't even realize that Recovery Console loads a registry hive. Brilliant solution! I assume this is tested & known to work; I'll post back if for some reason I have trouble.

I just installed a 1TB SATA drive on my Windows 2000 workstation and transferred all my partitions over to the new disk. Everything is working speedy (this Seagate 7200.12 does 100 MB/sec avg sustained reads, my old Seagate 250GB did 55 MB/sec avg reads...) However Recovery Console can't mount the drive because it's too large. It shows as 131GB. I'm concerned because since enabling HyperThreading, my NTOSKRNL.EXE Windows Updates always seem to break the boot by installing Uni versions instead of SMP versions. And I have to use Recovery Console to swap the files around to fix the boot. Now that I have the larger drive, this becomes impossible... I slipstreamed a Win2K install directory with SP4 and URP1 and the 2005 ATAPI.SYS and then did winnt32 /cmdcons which actually deletes the old CMDCONS and rebuilds a fresh one. This updated all my Recovery Console files to the latest versions. But still it fails! It mounts my smaller drives OK but not the 1TB. Am I screwed? I could use my Windows XP CD for XP Recovery Console but then it would obnoxiously automatically "upgrade" all my NTFS 3.0 (Win2K) disks to NTFS 3.1... Not sure if that has any harmful effects, but feels unnecessary.

you would only need 915985 if you're: Running Windows 2000 Server Using File Replication Services (FRS) Replicating a large number of small files to another FRS member Have compression enabled on the FRS volume(s) containing said small files Want to run Google Chrome 3.x or 4.x Unless you fit that list, you don't actually NEED 915985. As to system stability, I'd probably be as paranoid about it as you are, however, given that there hasn't been a new version of ntdll since March 2006 (915985), changes have had time to be fairly well tested. I think you're confusing KB915985 with BlackWingCat's custom patched KB915982-v2. I am running Google Chrome 4.0 and I do not have either version of 915985. So why do I need it? That is the question. What consequence do I face if I opt not to update it?

I am posting this from a fresh Windows 2000 VM with SP4, URP1, the user32, kernel32, and shell32 security updates, and Chrome 4.0.220.1 (Oct 2009) installed with crm2k30. I did not install KB915985-v2. Why is this necessary? It seems to function OK without it? I am concerned about replacing my critical NTDLL.DLL with a hacked/patched version. No offense to you Mr. BlackWingCat, you seem to know what you're doing, but NTDLL.DLL is used by every process on my system and I can't afford to risk system stability.

Hi Tom, I've dealt with this problem and it can be a REAL b***h. Try this, search your user profile for "Recent" folder, and it should have a giant list of hundreds or thousands of Shortcuts to programs and documents you've ran. If you see any that are from a network drive, you've found your culprit!!! DELETE them! But be sure they are just shortcuts (<1KB) and not the actual files, of course. The problem is that these stupid recent shortcuts cause Windows Explorer's shell to try and find/resolve the network location every single time you hit a File browse dialog. Unbelieveably bad design by Microsoft, to be sure.

Prepare to invest a bit of time on Google. You want to make a "system boot disk" floppy with NTDETECT.COM, NTLDR, and boot.ini. Those keywords will send you in the right direction. However there's a chance your disk is actually physically damaged, in that case obviously no boot disk will help. Perhaps your time would be better spent running a disk diagnostic first, I always had good luck with the IBM/Hitachi "Drive Fitness Test", a free download. Probably at www.hgst.com but I haven't kept up with the URL changes.

Guys I troubleshooted for months trying to solve this. LONG story short, the problem turned out to be a bad design in Firefox 3.5. It writes all your tabs and session data to disk in a blocking main thread, every 10 seconds. The solution is to increase that interval in your about:config to something like once every 5 minutes. Check this out: https://support.mozilla.com/tiki-view_forum...0&forumId=1 http://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comm...ery_10_seconds/ This single issue is the largest Firefox performance disaster I've ever seen! Here's a guy who bought a new PC JUST because of this issue (he thought his PC was the problem.) http://lifehacker.com/5342636/how-to-fix-a...ness-in-firefox I just spent WEEKS troubleshooting the crap out of this problem, and could not solve it. I was tracing stacks on Firefox.exe threads in Process Explorer, debugging memory dumps in WinDbg, running safe mode, trying processor optimized builds, reverting to FF 3.5.0, reverting to FF 3.0.13, swapping out my Sessionstore.js, etc. This post by a Mozilla developer sheds some light on the technicalities causing this: http://shawnwilsher.com/archives/294/ ---------- This affected so many people it's outrageous. I had to share it here because I saw a thread where someone was complaining about their youtube and PC lagging in general. Hope it helps someone; it's helped thousands already!

I downloaded a new version of Process Explorer v11.33 and noticed the handy Tooltips that show which app was causing the CPU spike, no longer work. Turns out they changed the Tooltip code to an XP-only API that breaks them on Win2K. I reported this bug and was told that the Sysinternals tools are being developed for XP and up only now. Check the bottom of this thread: http://forum.sysinternals.com/forum_posts....=11972&PN=1 and the response on the next page. Here's a link to the last fully working version of Process Explorer (11.31) for Windows 2000: http://www.filehippo.com/download_process_...c4452d074fdaa8/ I was also told that RegMon and FileMon are End of Life and being removed from microsoft's site September 1st 2009, so hurry up and download them if you want a copy. They say ProcMon is the replacement. ProcMon is cool and all (it doesnt officially support Win2K at the latest version but seems work fine nonetheless), but I hate how long it takes to stop a trace with it's "Disconnecting from Event Tracing for Windows (ETW) This may take 1 minute". Why does that have to take so long? FileMon and RegMon are instant. It does that even if you record the briefest of logs.

Mr BlackWingCat, you are a hero for all us Die hard Windows 2000 users. As I mentioned earlier on post #174, your KDW/crm2k019 kit got Google Chrome 2.0.166 working on my Windows 2000 - thank you very much! But I still have a few issues, for instance Right-Click Chrome Title Bar, "Task manager" and then Drag the bottom of the window vertically downwards, then the window is not painted properly... At first it works perfect: But after dragging its broken: Also there are some ToolTip bugs when pointing at Tabs in Chrome. Can I just swap the advapixp.dll 2008/11/22, kernelxp.dll 2009/05/24, and userxp.dll 2009/03/19 that came with chrm2k019, and update to the newest ones from KDW 078f? (all from 2009/08/xx)

Today I tried QuakeLive and was met with some frustrating errors on my Windows 2000 workhorse. Fortunately fellow Windows 2000 die-hards out there had the solutions. 1.) IE6 not supported but Firefox is. 2.) the >1MB DBGHELP.DLL needs to be in the C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox\ folder, or the Browser plugin won't load. 3.) After registering/installing the plugin, you get stuck at step 2 where you have to play a test game to see how well you rank. The problem is the game never launches and it just skips to "verifying results". 4.) The solution is here: http://www.quakelive.com/forum/showthread....4321&page=2 Success!! I played 2 games no problem. My stats update properly too.

BTW, was someone able to install SRware Iron, which is based on Chromium 2.0.178 (build 15300)? http://jeff-duntemann.livejournal.com/194845.html Thanks, Roman P.S. Here is another WebKit based browser in single executable: QTWeb http://www.qtweb.net/download.php It is working in Windows 2000. Thanks for this new version! I had to search for quite a while to find it, so many 404 broken links pointing to your old blog. Here is a direct link for other readers: http://w2k.livedoor.biz/arc/crm2k019.zip I checked out the QtWeb: Awesome!! Thank you for showing me this!

Mr Win2000. I wanted to make a note, that tonight I have finally achieved success installing Google Chrome 2.0 on my trusty workhorse Windows 2000 workstation! Using your crm2k018.zip tool. I made a detailed post about it here: http://nspeaks.com/348/google-chrome-on-wi.../#comment-10282 Here is the contents of that post: Hardcore Windows 2000 user here. Since Chrome came out, the only version I could ever get working was 0.2.149.30. I’ve been using the crap out of it for over 6 months. Newer versions always crashed or failed to install. I am SHOCKED to report SUCCESS tonight installing 2.0.166.1 with blackwingcat’s crm2k018.zip. This whole thing was so **** confusing, especially since I speak English not Japanese. Here is what I did. Googled until I found the full 2.0.166.1 install (sorry I can’t recall where I got it). It is 9MB (NOT 500KB). I renamed that ChromeSetup.exe and put it in my default download folder (goofy requirement of blackwingcat’s hack). Then I ran the crm2k018 CHROME2K.exe hack unpacked in a folder. I had to click each of the buttons from top to bottom. As you proceed, they should light up. The install itself happens fast and sometimes doesn’t happen at all. Get to your Docs & Settings Local Data Google Chrome Application folder and verify that the new 2.0 EXE is there and installed. I had to run the install a few times before it worked (WTF?). The last step is “Install USer32/Advpi32/Kernel32 Wrapper” (yeah it has a typo, not very confidence-inspiring…). After that you MUST reboot. Then try launching the new Chrome exe right out of the app directory (in your Docs & Settings Local Settings). I’m thinking about writing a high quality, native-English, edited web page for this problem so nobody else has to waste 2 hours like I just did!