tomasz86

Well, it's pretty simple. You just need to download every single ISO and check whether there are Windows 2000 updates included. In many cases they're are there despite not being listed in the description.

@ Microsoft will produce Windows XP updates for much longer than April 2014. The last official updates for Windows 2000 were released last year, 3 years after EOL, and were distributed inside the monthly security ISO update packages. Apart from that, a few more non-public official updates were leaked. In case of Windows XP I'd expect at least regular official updates until July 2015 (when Windows 2003 is becoming EOL). After April you should definitely check the monthly ISOs available under this link: Security updates are available on ISO-9660 DVD5 image files from the Microsoft Download Center Just keep in mind that Microsoft will not mention the existence of those updates in their official news channels. As in case of Windows 2000, the updates can be found inside those ISO packages even though Windows 2000's name itself isn't listed there at all. More than that, due to the fact that Windows XP is much more popular than Windows 2000, I'm 99% sure that a lot of non-public updates will be leaked as well.

This sounds similar to what Opera has been doing with its Speed Dial for a long time. There are several sponsored sites listed there when you install the browser for the first time. It's no secret that Mozilla has always received a lot of money for using Google as the Firefox default search engine, so I'm not really surprised by this announcement.

How about the HDD itself? Is it full and / or heavily fragmented? Is it in good condition (SMART, temperature, etc.)? I also don't reboot my Windows XP at all unless absolutely necessary, and use hibernation instead of shutting down so it's basically equal to being on 24/7. No performance issues here.

Avoid Atheros if you plan to use Windows 2000. I've tried everything to get the driver work in Windows 2000 but nothing worked. In the end I had to use an old PCI card instead. Among the popular manufacturers, Realtek is the one that still officially supports Windows 2000 in their drivers.

Unfortunately blackwingcat hasn't been able to fix the Javascript problem It's a known bug and has been present since the very beginning. You can check this post and the further ones: http://www.msfn.org/board/topic/159004-uxthemedll/?p=1018200 where this particular issue was discussed. I see. I suppose that there's no easy fix for this, right?

@epic I still can't see any particular connection with the tablet market. Opera has been always present in the mobile phone market, and in the past already had quite a large user base with its Opera Mini and Opera Mobile browsers. It's no surprise that they're focused on this market today too. But tablets? Opera doesn't offer anything special for tablet users. In case of Android, the browser is no different than the phone version. In case of Windows, there's no touch optimised version of Opera available at all. The browser is exactly the same as when you use it with mouse and keyboard.

This is what I mean by crashing. The whole browser is still open but the tab where the popup was displayed simply freezes. All scripts and extensions stop working. Eventually, it's equal with a crash as you need to restart the tab in order to be able to do anything.

There's a text file: عربي中文(简体)繁體中文版本češtinaελληνικάעִבְרִית日本語한국어portuguêsрусскийTürkçeI'd like to echo these lines to another file.This obviously doesn't work: FOR /F %%A IN (test.txt) DO ECHO %%AI've searched in the Internet and tried several different methods, including changing the code page go 65001, changing the CMD font to Arial Unicode, changing code page of the text file itself and others. None of them worked though.Above is just a list of these different language names but normally they appear in many different places in the text file and are surrounded by other text. They may also appear next to each other. Is there any method proved to work in this case? I don't mind using 3rd party tools if necessary.

I also haven't seen this website before. Thanks a lot for sharing! I've always used the Black Viper's guidelines too but this one is kind of special as it covers all versions of Windows NT from NT 4.0 up to Vista in one big table instead of having separate pages for each of them. It's especially nice to see NT 4.0 listed here as it's not supported by Black Viper at all.

There are at least two things that don't work in Chrome: 1. Tooltips (such as URLs) aren't displayed at all on hover. This isn't critical but still annoying. 2. Javascript pop-up crashes the open tab. If you're unsure what I mean by this, try to delete a private message which I've just sent to you. You won't be able to do it using Chrome in Windows 2000 (unless you disable Javascript in the browser completely which I wouldn't consider a solution to the problem by no means).

Interesting It seems that nowadays most software developers stop at the first step (20 Kb), rarely go further (1536 bytes) and almost never optimise to the maximum (164 bytes). I may be wrong but this is how I feel when using most of the so called "modern" / "updated" versions of the currently available popular applications.

Does it really matter that much in case of an e-mail client? One could say that there may be security flaws related to HTML e-mails and such, but I'd argue that it's no way as severe as in case of using ex. older web browser. As long as you download HTML / image content of incoming e-mails only on demand, and don't open e-mails coming from unknown sources everything should be fine. I can't speak for others but from my experience I can say that it's quite easy to distinguish betweem spam / malware e-mails and valid ones. I agree that the newer versions of Thunderbird are horrible. They are way too heavy, bloated, buggy and the UI is very user-unfriendly. In the past I'd used Outlook 2003, then switched to Thunderbird and used the newest version available for a long time... but later downgraded to Thunderbird 3.1.20 which is the last version of the 3.x.x branch. It was released in 2012 so it's still relatively new. More importantly, it's MUCH lighter and faster than the new releases (you can disable indexing if you want in the settings). It also works in all Windows OS starting from Windows 2000 to Windows 8.1 (tested myself). Here's the portable version if you decide to give it a try: Mozilla Thunderbird, Portable Edition 3.1.20 In terms of speed I can't really see any significant difference different between Thunderbird 3.1.20 and Outlook 2003. I didn't like Outlook 2003 mainly due to: 1. Lack of full Unicode support which caused a lot of problems with displaying e-mails / folder names that used language specific characters. 2. Need to reconfigure everything from scratch each time the OS was reinstalled.

No, what tomasz86 meant by portable apps, are simply apps that do not require an installer, if fact they are not "installed" at all. They are typically distributed in .zip format, you just expand them wherever you want them, make a link to the .exe if you want, and run the app. There are also portable apps that run in a "system", like the ones available at http://portableapps.com, but don't be thrown by the reference to USB, they can be installed to any drive you want. And most if not all of the apps listed there work with Win2K, AFAIK. Cheers and Regards That's exactly what I meant. I'm a big fan of PortableApps. With their utility you can easily manage your portable applications and update them. Apart from PortableApps, many other programs such as CCleaner or Opera also officially offer portable installations. For me using portable versions has at least a few advantages over standard ones: 1. It's possible to store both the program files and the user data in one folder. If you want to move the application to another computer / system you just copy the folder and voilà. No need to reconfigure everything from scratch. You can easily backup applications simply by copying their folders. 2. You choose where each program is located and have full control over updates. I can't stand any applications which autoupdate themselves without giving any choice to disable it (vide Google Chrome...). When using the PortableApps installation you can easily check for updates of all your portable applications and decide whether to update them or not. 3. There are often issues with official installers such as unwanted installation of adware / spyware or blocking installation in unsupported OSes which is the case in Windows 2000. There are no such problems when using portable versions of the applications. PortableApps support Windows2000 in their installer so you can install all programs offered by them regardless of whether the specific program itself will run or not in the OS. This way you can save a lot of time and nerves that otherwise would be required to tinker with the registry and other system settings in order to trick the official installers of those programs. Sure, I'm aware that PortableApps are not panaceum for all problems with running newer applications in Windows 2000. They greatly simplify the whole process though, and make everything a lot easier. It's really a pain in the neck (especially for an average computer user) when you need to play around with compatibility settings / modify the registry each time you want to install or update a program. That's why I'm such an advocate for using portable versions instead of standard ones. Some of the applications I use in this format are Firefox, Foxit Reader, KeePass, Notepad++, Opera, RevoUninstaller, Thunderbird, VLC and many others. @aofarrell2 SeaMonkey is perfectly fine as a "modern" browser for Windows 2000 as it's constantly updated and uses the same engine as Firefox. You also mentioned LibreOffice and VLC. All of these are available in the PortableApps format and work in Windows 2000 out of the box (with UURollup) without any need to modify their installers, etc. Instead of Chrome I'd suggest Maxthon. It uses the Webkit engine too but contrary to the former works 100% correctly in Windows 2000. @Tommy Good to know When it comes to Antivirus software, I'd suggest sticking to Avast 8 for the time being as it's probably the newest one that officially supported the OS and is very likely to be provided updated virus definition updates for a long time (they still provide updated definitions for Avast 4.8 which works in Windows 9x).

@Tommy I've got really no idea about the network sharing problems I've only used shared folders in Virtualbox, and there everything worked properly. As for Norton, it's been known for blocking way too many for no apparent reason. @aofarrell2 I'd be very careful with installing Antivirus software in compatibility mode. It may break the whole system in the worst case. As for the other software, I myself prefer to use portable versions as there are no issues with installation when using them, regardless of the OS. Especially in case of Windows 2000 it's much easier to install and use the unsupported programs. Also when it comes to Chromium based browsers, all of them are broken in Windows 2000. It's been already said many times - the browser crashes when a javascript window pops up. If you want to use a "modern" browser then Firefox or one of the less popular ones such as Maxthon are the way to go.

Well, this is what I get when trying to access the site: No matter what browser I use. The site loads when using a proxy. Same thing here: The message is displayed regardless of what web browser is used. It seems like some kind of IP blocking.

It's just a modified version of Windows XP. It's supposed to be supported for much longer than "normal" XP but it's unknown whether MS is going to release updates or just provide technical support only. There's been a long thread on this specific release already somewhere here on the forum. There's also a trial version available to download so you can check it out yourself. When it comes to standard usage, it's really no different than standard Windows XP.

Everything should be up and running again @Alll You shouldn't install UURollup-v10d if you're going to use UURollup-v11. Theoretically UURollup-v11 should replace all of the older files from UURollup-v10 but I can't guarantee that at this point. Also IE6 is missing from your setup. blackwingcat doesn't support IE5 based installations at all in his kernel. In the UURollup installer I tweaked the settings so that it's possible to use UURollup-v11 even with IE5 (the installer basically omits two files - shlwapi.dll and urlmon.dll if IE5 is detected). It used to work in the past but I've got no idea whether it's still the case. I haven't tested UURollup-v11 with IE5 for a very long time. If possible you may try to install IE6 SP1 after SP4 or just use the Gurgelmeyer's USP5.1 as both SP4 and IE6 are included in it.

The download Archive may be unavailable for 1-2 days. My old HDD has died and I'm now forced to use my backup USB disk instead (until I manage to buy a new one). Changing location of the Google Drive folder is such a mess compared to Dropbox. It's unable to detect that the files have been moved and tries to download everything again. After trying several different methods I just gave up, removed everything from it, and now I'm going to reupload the files. Edit My website is also down because the link has changed and the hosting redirection service is inaccessible at the moment so I can't update it. You can view my website under this direct URL: https://googledrive.com/host/0Bw_nt4aAJIoPZGNFNnFxVUlnems

@Tommy Thanks! I'm not planning any kind of "closed" beta but I'll definitely contact you concerning any required testing related to the USP. I'll post more details later (probably in the beginning of February). @Alll Have you checked the Bug Tracker? Is your problem similar to one described in Bug 2? Could you tell me what exactly is installed in your VM? If possible please attach a screen shot of your Add/Remove Control Panel applet.

Well, I did offer to share the script in his thread but he hasn't contacted me about it so I'm guessing he's not interested (at least at the moment). In the very beginning I'd also relied purely on manual integration but very quickly realised its shortcomings and shortsightedness. A completely automatic script is the only way to be able to easily prepare packages for different languages, and also reduce the probability of human errors. Gurgelmeyer used such an automatic script (but didn't share it with anyone else). OnePiece's Update Pack creator is also automatic so this approach isn't anything new. I forgot to say though that the script will have to be modified in order to work with x64 (maybe even IA64?) systems. At the moment I've only tested it with x86 in mind. However, all such modifications are scheduled for after the Windows 2000 USP is ready. There are already very good Update Packs for Windows XP and 2003 but nothing updated is available for Windows 2000. Thank you and everyone else for your support!

Well, I feel that almost all software released nowadays is unnecessarily bloated. Sure, there are some exceptions, but in most cases it seems like a "rat race" where everyone is focused only on adding "new features" instead of improving the existing code. Of course I can speak only from my experience... but to give a few examples: 1. Dropbox - I stick to Dropbox Portable which uses the older Dropbox 1.1.45 to sync data. The whole process needs around 60 MB of RAM. On the other hand, the newest version of Dropbox required 120 MB of RAM when I tried to run it some time ago. Still, synchronisation works in Dropbox Portable just fine. 2. SwiftKey keyboard (Android) - the keyboard used to need more than 80 MB of RAM on my phone. After massive complaints from users they've just released an update, and now the RAM usage is "only" 50 MB. In just one update they managed to drastically reduce the RAM usage. In my understanding, this simply means that they completely ignored optimisation before.

I've been following what harkaz has been doing very closely although I think that he integrates everything manually. I've got a script which I still need to improve. The goal is to make the process 100% automatic. Why? The main reason, apart from the obvious benefits, is that a 100% automatic script will make it possible to prepare such an USP for all language versions of Windows 2000, not only the English one. My script works for any NT 5.x system but at the moment I'm going to focus on Windows 2000 before everything else. I'll make the script available for everyone once I feel that it's stable and safe to use.

By the way, I'm going to radically speed up the USP 5.2 development. I can't give any specific dates except for the planned update of my website till the end of January. I can say though that USP 5.2 for Windows 2000 is my priority at the moment, before any other possible unofficial updates or packages.

I utilise wget in almost all of my scripts. Now I'm preparing a small script to automatically download hosts files from different locations, merge them and then update the system hosts file. At the moment the script is only for my own use but I'm planning to add it to UURollup / USP 5.2 as an optional component later if everything works correctly. Wget is first downloaded using WinHttp and then is itself used to download the hosts files. The -N switch is required to make it download only newer versions of the files. If it's possible to use the 50KB sized Wget 1.6 to accomplish the same thing, then why not? I'm also 99% sure that the newest version uses more RAM than the old one (can't check now as I'm writing from an Android device Wget 1.14 uses 2.28MB of RAM). Software nowadays is getting larger and larger in terms of file size (and memory usage) which in my opinion is in most cases a direct result of very poor (or lack of) code optimisation.