Marian Stanescu :: My Journal

Believe it or not, but I’ve just downgraded the OS on one of my computers: from WinXP Pro to Win2000 Pro. Why? The short answer is: RAM. I haven’t had enough of it all my life - and neither have you, probably - so I had to do it.

See, I got this Sony VAIO desktop, pretty old and worn, but it’s still good at doing the job, except one thing, insufficient RAM. Well, I ultimately needed to take care of the problem, so I ordered an extra 512MB to add to the default 256MB, but I was still outraged at the way WinXP seemed to use it almost entirely… in idle mode! No applications running, except the anti virus-firewall duo, and these are pretty lightweight too; instead there were constantly around 35 processes open, and even if those didn’t amount for the “default” 220-235MB of RAM, this is how much WinXP used when doing nothing at all. I wouldn’t call this efficiency.

Long story short, after reading around on the subject and looking for Windows alternatives, I decided to give 2000 Pro a try. Guess what? It works. The use of memory is below half of that of XP’s, and I suddenly realized that everything moved faster - from (re)boot to opening windows. I like that. What I didn’t like was, of course, the old style look, but that’s nothing that a couple of little utilities like Stardock’s WindowBlinds and IconPackager couldn’t fix.

So, what do I have now? A Vista-like looking Windows 2000 Pro SP4, running on 256MB of RAM like XP wouldn’t even dream of! Only 17 or so base processes up and running, not ~30 - and I can still work on that too, to shut down the unnecessary ones. Only 3 of those damned svchost.exe, not 7, and only 1′46″ for minutes complete reboot process.

Now that’s what I call an unexpectedly useful downgrade!

— Update @ 2007.09.14, 17:50 —

My enthusiasm was short lived. Getting around little problems like ClearType and the look and feel was one thing, but not being able to install applications like Office 2007 or Expression Web Designer 2007 is another. Who knows for how many other programs I’ll be slammed the door into my face? As McCoy would put it: “It’s dead, Jim.”

I’ll soon be back on XP, with the regret that it could’ve been better on 2000 and with the hope that only stuffing as much RAM as possible into the motherboard will make things run a little smoother. C’est la vie!

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