[29] However, Abraham Silberschatz et al. claim in their computer science textbook that "Windows 2000 was the most reliable, stable operating system Microsoft had ever shipped to that point.

Much of this reliability came from maturity in the source code, extensive stress testing of the system, and automatic detection of many serious errors in drivers.

On February 16, 2004, an exploit "allegedly discovered by an individual studying the leaked source code"[34] for certain versions of Microsoft Internet Explorer was reported.

[36] Microsoft planned to release in 2000[37][38] a version of Windows 2000, specially codenamed "Janus",[39][40] which would run on 64-bit Intel Itanium microprocessors.

[59] In order to improve performance on servers running Windows 2000, Microsoft gave administrators the choice of optimizing the operating system's memory and processor usage patterns for background services or for applications.

[65] Generic support for 5-button mice is also included as standard[66] and installing IntelliPoint allows reassigning the programmable buttons.

[70] It allowed users to customize the way folders look and behave by using HTML templates, having the file extension HTT.

This feature was abused by computer viruses that employed malicious scripts, Java applets, or ActiveX controls in folder template files as their infection vector.

[72] The "Web-style" folders view, with the left Explorer pane displaying details for the object currently selected, is turned on by default in Windows 2000.

Windows 2000 also introduces a Distributed Link Tracking service to ensure file shortcuts remain working even if the target is moved or renamed.

[84] For a user losing access to their key, support for recovery agents that can decrypt files is built into EFS.

Windows 2000 introduced the Logical Disk Manager and the diskpart command line tool for dynamic storage.

Microsoft published quarterly updates to DirectX 9.0c through the February 2010 release after which support was dropped in the June 2010 SDK.

These updates contain bug fixes to the core runtime and some additional libraries such as D3DX, XAudio 2, XInput and Managed DirectX components.

[89] Windows 2000 introduced the Microsoft Management Console (MMC), which is used to create, save, and open administrative tools.

[97] REGEDT32 has the older multiple document interface (MDI) and can edit registry permissions in the same manner that Windows NT's REGEDT32 program could.

REGEDIT has a left-side tree view of the Windows registry, lists all loaded hives and represents the three components of a value (its name, type, and data) as separate columns of a table.

Windows XP is the first system to integrate these two programs into a single utility, adopting the REGEDIT behavior with the additional NT features.

[99] It is usually used to recover the system from problems that cause booting to fail, which would render other tools useless, like Safe Mode or Last Known Good Configuration, or chkdsk.

The ability to slipstream a service pack into the original operating system setup files is also introduced in Windows 2000.

The primary reason for using Sysprep is to quickly deploy Windows 2000 to a site that has multiple computers with standard hardware.

(If a system had different HALs, mass storage devices or ACPI support, then multiple images would need to be maintained.)

Its minimum system requirements are similar to those of Advanced Server,[109] but it was designed to be capable of handing advanced, fault-tolerant and scalable hardware—for instance computers with up to 32 CPUs and 32 GBs RAM, with rigorous system testing and qualification, hardware partitioning, coordinated maintenance and change control.

[116] The Update Rollup does not include all non-security related hotfixes and is not subjected to the same extensive regression testing as a full service pack.

This has led to an overwhelming number of malicious programs exploiting the IIS services – specifically a notorious buffer overflow tendency.

"[119] In addition to insecure defaults, according to the SANS Institute, the most common flaws discovered are remotely exploitable buffer overflow vulnerabilities.

[16] In August 2003, security researchers estimated that two major worms called Sobig and Blaster infected more than half a million Microsoft Windows computers.

In the case of Internet Explorer, Microsoft said in 2005 that, "some of the security work in IE 7 relies on operating system functionality in XP SP2 that is non-trivial to port back to Windows 2000.

IDC's report is based on telephone interviews of IT executives and managers of 104 North American companies in which they determined what they were using for a specific workload for file, print, security and networking services.

The report did emphasize that TCO was only one factor in considering whether to use a particular IT platform, and also noted that as management and server software improved and became better packaged the overall picture shown could change.