Windows 2000

Windows 2000 is a major release of the Windows NT operating system developed by Microsoft, targeting the server and business markets. It is the direct successor to Windows NT 4.0, and was released to manufacturing on December 15, 1999, and then to retail on February 17, 2000, with Windows 2000 Datacenter Server being released on September 26, 2000. Windows 2000 introduces NTFS 3.0, Encrypting File System, and basic and dynamic disk storage. Support for people with disabilities is improved over Windows NT 4.0 with a number of new assistive technologies, and Microsoft increased support for different languages and locale information. The Windows 2000 Server family has additional features, most notably the introduction of Active Directory, which in the years following became a widely used directory service in business environments. Although not present in the final release, support for Alpha was present in its alpha, beta, and release candidate versions. Its successor, Windows XP, only supports x86, x86-64 and Itanium processors. Windows 2000 was also the first NT release to drop the "NT" name from its product line, however the "NT" moniker would be used for one final time in the "Built on NT Technology" tagline used on the product's packaging as well as a few other places in the operating system (such as the boot and logon screens). Four editions of Windows 2000 have been released: Professional, Server, Advanced Server, and Datacenter Server; the latter of which was launched months after the other editions. While each edition of Windows 2000 is targeted at a different market, they share a core set of features, including many system utilities such as the Microsoft Management Console and standard system administration applications. Microsoft marketed Windows 2000 as the most secure Windows version ever at the time; however, it became the target of a number of high-profile virus attacks such as Code Red and Nimda. Windows 2000 was succeeded by Windows XP in October 2001, while Windows 2000 Server was succeeded by Windows Server 2003 in April 2003. For ten years since its release, it continued to receive patches for security vulnerabilities nearly every month until reaching end of support on July 13, 2010. Both the original Xbox and the Xbox 360 use a modified version of the Windows 2000 kernel as their system software; the former's source code (as well as the source code for Windows NT 3.5) was leaked in 2020.

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