To Andrea: It's is simpler than XP, XP was built on the foundation of Windows 2000. Windows 2000 wasn't meant to be a consumer OS, although many users of the OS were home users. And it's far more secure than some reports have claimed, but not as secure as Windows 7 by a long shot. I can say that it's as good as an OS as XP, because for 6 years, it met my needs, and not once did I get a virus or malware on the OS. Only when I began dual booting with XP Pro did I begin to have these kind of issues.
To run it, you will need an older machine, like a Dell Latitude or IBM ThinkPad, anything produced before SATA hard drives became the norm. I have a Windows 2000 Pro install on a ThinkPad T42 that I bought a month ago for $99 on eBay. For it's age, it was in pristine (like new) condition. The only thing that I needed was a battery, which I found the exact OEM one for $30.
It's happily dual booting with XP Media Center, not my main computer, just something to use when moving about the house, or outside. And resides only on 12GB (the actual OS only uses 6GB) on my hard drive.
Cat
I would love to have Windows 2000 Professional on my HP Mini 210 Windows 7 netbook.That has 250GB of Ram with about 200GB hard disk space on C drive. D drive is the recovery partition, so I cannot install on there.
But even if I could install Windows 2000,which I cannot as I don't have a Windows 2000 CD and you cannot buy them now in England. What I was thinking might be a problem is that I might not have the drivers for Windows 2000.Or it won't recognise my drivers on my laptop,which are Windows 7 drivers.
So I may have problems connecting by wireless broadband or other things may not work.
Another disadvantage is that the highest version of Internet Explorer you can run on Windows 2000 is IE6. I read that Windows 2000 comes with IE5 but you cannot view web pages properly in IE5 or IE5.5. That is many web pages don't display right.So you would probably need to upgrade to IE6.
I had IE6 on my Windows XP because IE6 comes with Windows XP.Until yesterday when I found that my IE6 kept closing on opening.Or I got this annoying message saying "Internet Explorer has encountered a problem and has had to close. Sorry for any inconvenience."
And so I tried my other IE engine based browsers,Ace Explorer,and Advanced browser. Unfortunently Ace Explorer,Advanced browser and other IE engine based browser like Green browser and Avant browser run off of what ever version of internet Explorer you happen to have installed. In my case IE6,so if IE is not working properly then your other IE engine based browsers,Green browser and Advanced browser and others like it,will have the same problems.
I tried everything but could not fix IE6, so I had to upgrade to IE8 and I no longer have this problem. That is IE8 is working and so are my other IE engine based browsers,Advanced browser and Ace Explorer.
I chose IE8 over IE7 because I have used IE7 before on Windows XP and Windows Vista. And IE7 is actually worse than IE6 or IE8 or 9.
I have IE8 on Windows 7 of course as IE8 comes with Windows 7. I never upgraded to IE9 because I don't see the need. IE8 is just as good and some software does not work with IE9.And I won't be installing IE9 or IE10 on my Windows 7.When they bring IE10 out that is.
But maybe IE6 could be a problem on Windows 2000 as well as on Windows XP. The problem is that some websites don't support IE6. And IE6 and IE7 is not compatible with some modern websites. And I think my problem with IE6 was caused by visiting a site that was not compatible with IE6. And it crashed my browser.
With IE7 this sometimes happens but not with IE8. I don't know why that is.