alt.hn

4/12/2026 at 9:08:01 PM

Microsoft engineer says original Task Manager was only 80KB to run on 90s comps

 https://www.tomshardware.com/software/windows/veteran-microsoft-engineer-says-original-task-manager-was-only-80kb-so-it-could-run-smoothly-on-90s-computers-original-utility-used-a-smart-technique-to-determine-whether-it-was-the-only-running-instance

by thunderbong

4/12/2026 at 11:17:37 PM

I'd suggest just watching the YouTube video and supporting the content creator with likes and subscribes and not reading the ad-laden summary paraphrasing it.

by hermannj314

4/13/2026 at 2:40:17 AM

You don't want to be supporting that guy. He's an ex-scammer who used to operate a registry cleaner malware business.

He agreed to pay the State of Washington $400,000 for the scheme.

https://www.atg.wa.gov/news/news-releases/attorney-general-s...

by 0xy

4/13/2026 at 3:06:38 AM

I thank you for the information! However, I want to play devil's advocate with your sentiment.

Is his current content a scam? No. Did he rehabilitate? Maybe. Should former blackhats be banned from whitehat efforts? If that's the only instance of his ethical wrongs, I think I'll give him a pass. There was a lot of that crap software at the time. I never bought into any of it. A lot of people were scammed to a certain extent. I hope he learned his lesson. His sharing of knowledge is still valuable to him and posterity. Maybe we can get him to do a video on his softwareonline.com shenanigans!

by ghastmaster

4/12/2026 at 11:33:36 PM

Let's be real, Windows 2000 ran reasonably well on only 128mb of memory... if it needed megabytes like modern apps, it wouldn't be very useful, especially when you're low on memory.

by nubinetwork

4/12/2026 at 11:35:25 PM

Win2K was peak windows for me. Every subsequent version has gotten worse from my POV.

by carefree-bob

4/12/2026 at 11:36:50 PM

I'd probably lean towards Windows XP with the W2k theme (at least later in its life) but it was basically the same thing.

Main difference was easier-to-install video card drivers, though you could often get them to work on W2k by editing INI files.

by bombcar

4/12/2026 at 11:38:08 PM

Yes. A no frills but full-featured NT. It was the best version of Windows.

by ahartmetz

4/13/2026 at 1:34:01 AM

Agreed.

Even WinXP had goofy web technology tied into File Explorer (called “Windows Explorer” then, I believe). Win2K was just optimal, for me, for what I was doing at the time.

by naikrovek

4/13/2026 at 9:05:53 AM

I think Win2k already had that. As far as I remember, the explorer sidebar, the white box with the colored line under the heading, already being HTML. I loved hacking on that back then to customize my windows experience.

by Grumbledour

4/13/2026 at 9:43:15 AM

Yes, it was called Active Desktop and it was much older than Win2K: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Active_Desktop

If you changed the colour scheme on Windows 98, none of the cloud images were transparent in Explorer (they assumed the background was white) so you'd end up with these weird clouds/sky fading into a white background and then a hard line into whatever colour you'd set your background to.

The desktop was very sluggish if you added an active desktop to it, as IE4 had to run; at least it was on my underpowered machine. Additionally it came with a screensaver that you could interact with, which was odd because normally moving the mouse dismissed the screensaver.

by 72deluxe

4/13/2026 at 3:00:15 AM

[dead]

by johnwhitman