win2k is just fine for most people

Keep telling yourself that, it won't make it any less laughable. Take a look at this and then this and then finally this. Nevermind the fact that most driver developers abandoned 2k long ago, if they ever bothered to support it at all. And I'm talking about average user stuff not back-end business that really should have been migrated by now to either some sort of *nix solution or a newer Windows. For average users, 2k does not compare to any of the newer Windows systems. But I digress.

The original point was that Internet Explorer 7 uses hooks that take advantage of their more modern OSes, and to expect legacy support forever is completely unreasonable. You have diverted this so far from trying to make it seem like this (No IE7 on 2k) was an artificial limitation to simply attacking Microsoft because they aren't as in love with their old OS as you are. Go cry about your upgrade treadmill where someone actually cares, it was my sore mistake to expect any sort of discussion instead of this circular crap that ignores Microsoft is a business that, like every other business that stays in business, cuts costs when it won't bother a significant portion of their market. To quote Jacobim Mugatu "I feel like I'm taking crazy pills!" You really expect them to care about less than 2%?

It's spun in a rational way instead of your ridiculous assertions that the only or main reason IE7 isn't available on Windows 2000 is because of trivially-addressed issues that Microsoft only ignores because they want to keep people upgrading. Grow up and understand that it's wholly unreasonable to expect Microsoft to bother coddling your dying OS. It's not in their interests and ultimately it's not in their customers interests. The platform is less secure, it's less capable and it's almost 9 years old. You make it seem like their only interest is pushing the upgrade cycle, when it's not. You must be pretty upset that so many other software development outfits feel the same way about wasting resources on a shrinking market that is not worth their effort, they're all helping Microsoft push their upgrade cycle, after all!

It's not like most systems capable of running Windows 2000 can't run IE7 in a virtual machine anyways. It doesn't take a whole lot of power to run a simple web browser.

Some information for you to look at. The Microsoft blurb from the article states:

It should be no surprise that we do not plan on releasing IE7 for Windows 2000. One reason is where we are in the Windows 2000 lifecycle. Another is that some of the security work in IE7 relies on operating system functionality in XPSP2 that is non-trivial to port back to Windows 2000.

So it seems that the enhancements are not merely XP-specific but XPSP2-specific. You can complain all you want about them not caring enough to backport but the fact remains that as far as they're concerned doing so is non-trivial and it's not in their best interests to bother with an aging platform. You can hazard guesses all you want but that doesn't make anything so. There is a lot of software, not merely Microsoft software, which won't work on pre-SP2 systems. They don't have as much interest in pushing the newer stuff over the older stuff aside from consolidating their own development effort working around the shortcomings of old and more insecure designs.

Where in that link was there anything about wireless enhancements? Maybe you should have clicked it to actually see what his point was, which is that there are many changes in how Windows works between 2k to XP. That is kinda the territory that the thread started heading towards, you know.

I don't have any idea what you could be referencing to with the brief unexplained slowdowns (Maybe you need to be running on more than 512MB of RAM? Maybe not having crappy drivers?) but those BSODs were caused by Apple, who apologized and issued an updated iTunes specifically to address the issue. If you're going to post about something, at least take the time to Google it (Hint: The correct combination of terms is 'itunes bsod vista x64' pretty hard I know). Otherwise, you sound like you don't really care about being right.

Likewise XP x64 is nothing but grief when you have crappy drivers. This is not the OS's fault, but rather vendors. XP x64 is actually built off the 2k3 code base, and I don't see many people calling that a complete failure, because it was a very solid system as well.

Holy unsubstantiated and ridiculous claims, Batman!

Like TheThiefMaster said, the code base is pretty much the same, and if you've got any solid proof to back up your theory I'd love to hear it. And anecdotal evidence doesn't count. Vista x64 even outperforms its 32-bit counterpart in a lot of situations, if only marginally at times. Throw 64-bit compiled software into the mix that actually takes advantage of the extra capabilities (Audio/video encoding/decoding, for example) and it flies compared to 32-bit. But you don't care about any of that and probably are basing your judgments on horrid driver support for Windows XP x64. That OS Microsoft and hardware manufacturers pretend never existed.