Windows 2000 is cool. I spent a lot of today messing around on my w2k gaming laptop (a Dell Latitude with a Centrino and 256MB of RAM,) and it yet again managed to get me nice and annoyed at the state of modern software. This is *fine*. I'm writing in emacs right now, I can play games, etc. It's even driving my monitor at 1600x1200x32 smoothly. I can do basically everything but web browsing (when I'm not on a reasonable site like this one, that is.) The other pain point is that security is an issue: tls is broken for most sites because I have to use an old browser and ssh is similarly broken because of old versions of putty. These aren't impossible problems: given enough pain (hi blackwingcat,) I could probably build some of these up from source and use them fine, but Windows isn't really made for that. The browsing would be slow, because we use much stronger encryption now, but it wouldn't be impossible.

My point is that there's no *technical* reason I shouldn't be able to use 20 year old hardware (though swapping out the slow, small hdd with an ssd would be nice.) It's just that software is shit.