Unofficial SP 5.2 for Microsoft Windows 2000 (WIP)

[win2kreviver]

Thank you so much for providing these updates for an excellent operating system.  Your outstanding work to keep it going after sixteen years is fantastic. Compared to XP, Vista, 7, 8, and 10, it runs on half the processes and services as the others do.  Great Job and all of us that still use the OS find that it is still relevant in today's computing environments with outdated and otherwise useless machines that will be thrown away.  What you have done should be the envy of any Linux programmer, even though they have come a long way.with open source.

 

 

win2kreviver

[Hackeronte]

 

I'm perfectly agree with win2kreviver and...

is good to see you again around here tomasz   

 

Cheers and lot of good luck to the W2K people

 

hckrnt

[tommyp]

tomasz86 - Best of luck porting the slip.  As a background, hfslip started as a w2k only project and expanded into xp.  One thing I found particularly useful was the hfcleanup.  Using hfcleanup, the source can be reduced pretty good thus providing an OS with very little overhead.  It worked great for me back in the day.  Regarding the wm codecs (and codecs in general), they were a pain.  Too many versions and variations of wm codecs. Another oddity was that the slip discovered many msft hotfix errors thanks to the other-than english testers.  Testing the slip out now should be much faster with today's machines.  Again, best of luck.   

[Tommy]

Tomasz, I downloaded your new HFSLIP compilation and around processing DirectX files, i get a page fault error blue screen. Any ideas what this happens?

[MrMaguire]

Any news? Does Tomasz86 plan to release a new version of Unofficial Update Rollup?

[Hackeronte]

Yeah, just asking...

Any news about new version of Unofficial Update Rollup?

Thanks!

[Anixx]

I have just found this thread and I think it is amazing!

I hevent read it all but I want to poit some bits that can be useful.

* There is Microsoft Application Verifier. It allows to lie the windows version to applications that require higher one. May be worth inclusion to this unofficial SP. https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=20028

* There is a way of installing IPv6 support on Win2000, the driver is by Microsoft. Link: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=21676Somewhere I read that this needs sone fix for better work... Do not remember.

* Some people added ClearType subpixel smoothing to Win2000 as well as support for true color icons

* It is possible to install the Windows Restore service on Win2000 from XP. The recipe is the same as with Windows 2003 http://blogs.msdn.com/b/carloc/archive/2007/01/24/enable-system-restore-on-windows-2003.aspx

* It is possible to install DX12 on Windows 2000 (the way is the same as with XP). It will not employ some things which only available with newer drivers but the programs that require newer DX will work well.

* The program Pitaschio allows to arrange icons on the desktop by a grid like in Win XP.

* If one needs more memory it is possible either to make Windows to think it is a server version (the difference is only in registry keys) or install a ramdrive putting the swap on it.

I hope this is helpful.

[jaclaz]

I hope this is helpful.

Sure it is , possibly with one exception :

... or install a ramdrive putting the swap on it.

JFYI:

http://www.overclock.net/t/1193401/why-it-is-bad-to-store-the-page-file-on-a-ram-disk

jaclaz

[Anixx]

 

I hope this is helpful.

Sure it is , possibly with one exception :

... or install a ramdrive putting the swap on it.

JFYI:

http://www.overclock.net/t/1193401/why-it-is-bad-to-store-the-page-file-on-a-ram-disk

jaclaz

 

How it is relevant? It speaks about 64-bit systems which have no address space limitation.

[jaclaz]

How it is relevant? It speaks about 64-bit systems which have no address space limitation.

I was meaning about the futility of using addressable memory to hold a pagefile, see also:

http://www.msfn.org/board/topic/174002-windows-7-possible-advisable-to-disable-the-page-file/

A pagefile in non addressable memory might be OK, though, of course.

On XP this is possible using Gavotte's Ramdisk, but I am not sure it will run on 2K (possibly it will, but I cannot recall actual tests on 2K) if really-really more RAM is needed, the use of PAE and "Server like" tricks seems like a much better approach anyway.

JFYI, some versions of IMDISK do run on 2K and Olof has a swapadd.exe file that allows to create the pagefile in the IMDISK ramdisk:

http://reboot.pro/topic/6745-how-would-you-create-a-ramdisk-on-boot/

jaclaz

[MrMaguire]

On 08/11/2015 at 4:13 AM, Anixx said:

I have just found this thread and I think it is amazing!

I hevent read it all but I want to poit some bits that can be useful.

* There is Microsoft Application Verifier. It allows to lie the windows version to applications that require higher one. May be worth inclusion to this unofficial SP. https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=20028

* There is a way of installing IPv6 support on Win2000, the driver is by Microsoft. Link: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=21676Somewhere I read that this needs sone fix for better work... Do not remember.

* Some people added ClearType subpixel smoothing to Win2000 as well as support for true color icons

* It is possible to install the Windows Restore service on Win2000 from XP. The recipe is the same as with Windows 2003 http://blogs.msdn.com/b/carloc/archive/2007/01/24/enable-system-restore-on-windows-2003.aspx

* It is possible to install DX12 on Windows 2000 (the way is the same as with XP). It will not employ some things which only available with newer drivers but the programs that require newer DX will work well.

* The program Pataschio allows to arrange icons on the desktop by a grid like in Win XP.

* If one needs more memory it is possible either to make Windows to think it is a server version (the difference is only in registry keys) or install a ramdrive putting the swap on it.

I hope this is helpful.

Hi. I'm glad you've found this topic interesting.

If you don't mind, I'd like to know more about the above in red.

[Hackeronte]

Hi mr_maguire,

I think is talking about Pitaschio

 

------------------------------------------

Title        Pitaschio

Version      2.26

Date         May 7, 2009

Requirements Windows 2000/XP/Vista

Developer    Ara

E-Mail       ara999@gmail.com

URL          http://pitaschio.ara3.net/(English)

                  http://ara.moo.jp/(Japanese)

------------------------------------------

### What is Pitaschio ? ###

Pitaschio is a freeware which makes it convenient to use Microsoft Windows.

Pitaschio includes a large number of useful functions.

For example:

    Snap a window to other windows when moving and resizing

    Restrict a window position to inside of the screen

    Always keep a window above all other windows

    Minimize a window to the system tray

    Use small icons in the desktop

    Disable Windows key, Insert key, Alt key etc.

    Lock the mouse or keyboard while cleaning them

    Take statistics about mouse and keyboard

    Calculate Moon's age

    Control the sound volume using the mouse wheel

    Display the sound volume level on the screen

Pitaschio is the essential tool to use windows efficiently.

For more detail, please visit my website.

 

Good luck!

 

hackeronte

[Anixx]

Regarding true color icons and the cleartype, look at this topic:

http://www.msfn.org/board/topic/93160-windows-2000-revolutions-pack/

 

Regarding DirectX, I have confused the version. But for version 11 check these links:

 

http://www.itechtics.com/directx-full-setup-download/

 

http://directx11.info/

 

https://www.raymond.cc/blog/easily-install-and-download-directx-10-for-windows-xp/

 

Also, Microsoft RAMdrive for Windows 2000:

https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/kb/257405

[Hackeronte]

....Speaking of true color icons is not so far from the concept of pictures videos & audios (mp3, etc.) thumbnail preview in explorer...

So, maybe W2K-USP52-EXT KRN users may be interested in checking Media Preview, media file thumbnailing enhancer for Windows 32 & 64 bit

Next To The Metal

To develop any application, an IT crew has a large choice of technology sets, each one fitted for their own particular purposes. Media Preview being a shell extension directly connected to the low layers of Windows, it could easily crash your system if we didn't use the right tools and followed bad design principles. Here's some technical explanations of how we choose to do it.

No Java , no .Net

Both the Java and .Net platforms took the lead for high-level and server-side applications, and are more and more suited for general purposes. However, a nasty flaw in their design still prevent them to be used for shell extensions like Media Preview, as it can lead to some serious system unstabilities.

Both platforms are designed to run on top of a virtual machine, which conveniently hides some system management complexities to programmers. Those virtual machines have also evolved over time to become more efficient and include more functionalities, but their different versions came with binary incompatibilities. Most of the times, this issue can be resolved by keeping several versions of the virtual machine. But, as only one version can be loaded in a process at any given time, this solution cannot work for shell extensions: if an application runs on a specific version of the virtual machine and calls a shell extension that needs to load another version in the same process, this will simply result in a crash. For Media Preview, this would typically happen when an application opens a file open dialog, which in turn asks for thumbnail display.
.Net 4.x actually allows to load an earlier version side-by-side in the same process. But the more likely converse situation where an earlier version tries to load 4.x still doesn't work.

Moreover, by calling a dependent shell extension, every application would henceforth have to load a full-blown virtual machine at least to generate thumbnails, even if they originally didn't need it. So, those platforms definitively aren't a good fit here.

No DirectShow

It would seem natural to directly use your system playback capabilitites to read media files and extract thumbnails. In Windows, this is done through DirectShow, a flexible rendering pipeline that can easily get broken when badly configured.

Third-party media thumbnail extractors usually require to be installed along related media solutions to ensure that everything works as expected, reconfiguring your DirectShow setup and probably breaking some playback capabilities along the way. As thumbnail extractor and media player needs aren't the same, separating the extractor engine from the playback engine is actually a better idea.

More importantly, DirectShow is gradually being phased out by Media Foundation. That's why Media Preview doesn't use DirectShow at all but uses its own dedicated engine.

C++ Only

As a shell extension is really close to the core of your system, the fewer layers we put between the extension and the shell, the better the extension will perform. So after forgetting about adding a Java or .Net layer, and getting rid of the DirectShow layer, we searched for a programming tool that proved itself to be quite a fit for structured low-level development: C++ became our final choice.

Entirely free of any intermediate layer, Media Preview is just next to the metal, and performs using optimized low-level operations by avoiding duplicated resources and freeing them as soon as possible.

You'll hardly find anything else more suited to your thumbnailing needs.

 

 

FreeWare

Latest Version: 1.4.3.429
Release Date: April 13th, 2014

File Size: 14.7MB

http://www.babelsoft.net/products.htm#en

 

It works perfectly well with my 32 bit win2000-USP52-EXT KRN

For the first time,at last, since year 2000 when i bought this amazingly solid rock O.S. i'm enjoying gorgeous thumbnails preview on mp3 files

embedded covers...

 

Cheers

 

hackerontes

[LightAlpha263]

OK... So, just a question. Is Windows 2000 USP5.2 ready at all yet? Obviously, as you can tell by my username, I like Windows 2000. I also like repurposing older devices for everyday use. I just got a laptop going with Windows 2000 SP4+Unofficial Update Rollup 1 (Couldn't find download link for UUR2). So, I'd like to know if it's done, and if I can help (I'm very busy, but I can do what I can), I'd be glad to. That's all, I'm hoping for a reply soon. Bye!