Windows 2000

Windows 2000 is a major release of the Windows NT operating system developed by Microsoft and oriented towards businesses. It is the direct successor to Windows NT 4.0, and was released to manufacturing on December 15, 1999, officially released to retail on February 17, 2000 for all versions, and on September 26, 2000 for Windows 2000 Datacenter Server. It was Microsoft's primary business-oriented operating system until the introduction of Windows XP Professional in 2001.

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.

Four editions of Windows 2000 have been released: ''Professional'', ''Server'', ''Advanced Server'', and ''Datacenter Server''; the latter was both released to manufacturing and 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. For ten years after its release, it continued to receive patches for security vulnerabilities nearly every month until reaching the end of support on July 13, 2010, the same day that support ended for Windows XP SP2.

Windows 2000 and Windows 2000 Server were succeeded by Windows XP and Windows Server 2003, released in 2001 and 2003, respectively.

Although unreleased, it was developed on Alpha in alpha, beta, and release candidate versions. Its successor, Windows XP, only supports x86, x64 and Itanium processors.

Both the Original Xbox and the Xbox 360 use a modified version of Windows 2000 as their system software. Provided by Wikipedia