Win2k was a big step forward. With NT4 I was possible to have a very stable system that ran for ages without a reboot or a crash, but only if you installed very little software on it.

My main desktop machine at home had Win2k installed on it when it arrived (can't remember when that was, it was when Win2k was released, so I guess about 4-5 years ago). About 2 years in it did start suffering from a bit of Windows rot, with odd things like the desktop icons reverting to 16 colours.

I've resisted the urge to reinstall the OS though and it is still soldiering on, though it looks like it has now been usurped by my nice new laptop running XPPro (the old PII300Mhz can't really compete with my PentiumM 1.4Ghz).

If I can work out how to turn the hard disks of the Win2k box into Virtual PC disk images then then hardware will be recycled as my Debian test box (so I can get ready to replace my RedHat 7.1 server also runnning on identical Dell hardware).

P.S. I know Tony and a few others hate WinXP, but if you are running an even vaguely recent laptop it is a must have upgrade to NT4, Win98 or Win2k. WinXP is faster than any of those OSes on the same hardware (assuming you have a half decent amount of memory, like 256Mb) and it makes it so, so much faster to boot, suspend, hibernate and wake-up.