I was too young to really know what was going on at the time but when my parents upgraded me from my Windows 98 spare parts PC they tossed Windows 2000 on the new PC and I remember it being quite wonderful. I never did get to experience Vista nor ME because my parents were well enough tapped into the computer scene to know what was up. Now I get to help them setup their first home server this weekend
I greatly preferred XP to 2000. 2000 still needed a ton of configuration, and device specific drivers that were difficult to find. XP simplified a lot of that with their PNP support, but they still had robust configuration options for power users.
Me too. 2000 seemed.... Slow compared to XP on the same hardware, but to be fair the hardware I had was cobbled together from parts that my father's employer was going to throw out
Microsoft put a lot of work into speeding up the boot times with XP. Windows 2000 booted glacially slow by comparison. Though I'd say once booted, 2000 was a bit leaner and quicker.
It looked a lot sleeker too. I had my UI heavily customized, including the boot and login screens, and it made me feel like such a hacker. 2000 made me feel like I was working at an office.