Why I Use Windows 2000 My personal philosophy for PCs prioritizes my ability to keep my computer running smoothly despite Murphy's Law. Invariably my worst system failures are at the times when having my computer work normally is most important, and I have decided that preventing a crippling failure and making recovery from that failure straightforward is substantially more important than many things people normally concern themselves with.
I use four operating systems with some regularity: Windows 2000, Windows XP, Linux, and Mac OS X. Right now I use Windows 2000 for all my desktop workstations. As for why, my top priorities for a desktop operating system are as follows:
It's hard to completely secure a Windows machine without connecting to Windows Update on that machine. What I do is turn on the Windows Update Catalog feature on another machine, look at the list of patches it has installed, and then download all of them and install on the new computer. This is painful but possible; the main flaw is that you don't know if you got them all until you actually connect the new machine to Windows Update for the first time, at which points you could get hacked before you can even download anything. Windows machines suspected to be far behind on their patches should never be connected to the Internet unless they're sitting behind another device like a hardware DSL/cable firewall.
Windows XP has activation features that prevent me from maintaining my own computer, which is totally unacceptable when I rely on said computer to make my living. In addition, you are exposed to the possiblity that a bug in the activation code will disable your system, and there's nothing you can do to recover from that. If you think I'm being paranoid, I suggest reading up on Windows XP systems that hang on boot right after loading mup.sys on startup; http://www.annoyances.org/exec/forum/winxp/t1047532372 gives a good feel for why XP can't be the backbone of a computer you trust. On Windows 2000, the main emergency repair problem is that certain aspects of the system setup are hardcoded into the early part of the boot process. Foremost of the trouble areas are the type of hard drive controller and what power management/multiprocessing standard the PC has. This means that if you take a Windows 2000 hard drive and put into another machine, it may not boot. Sample problems are switching between an Intel based hard drive controller versus a Via/NVIDIA/Ali one, or having ACPI power management instead of APM. As a result of this, I try to avoid booting Windows 2000 from a drive that isn't using the generic Primary IDE driver.