OSNews points at Daniel Iversen's page, "Windows 2000 on old computers with 32MB RAM." Since Windows 2000's minimum memory requirement is 64 MB, this is impressive, but not anything amazing (like getting Windows 2000 to run on your refrigerator). I assumed that Iversen's page would contain a number of technical tweaks to make Windows run faster.
Thus, I was a bit surprised at some of his ideas to help Windows run better. His suggestion not to "install an extra service pack (they can offer perfromance [sic] and reliability improvements on faster computers but on old computers with few tasks they are just a bloat)" seemed strange. My experience with Windows service packs has been that while they do increase bloat, the "reliability improvements" that they provide can make the difference between running Windows slightly slower, and the dread BSoD.
When I came across his suggestion that for daily use, one should not "apply O/S patches for security stability or other things," I became even more concerned. While this would be reasonable advice for an old computer that was not connected to the Internet, the previous section of Iversen's page was entitled "Install network card." As I am certain that many of the Windows-using readers already know, not installing the Windows patches made available through Windows Update can easily become infected with viruses. Unpatched Windows 2000 computers, for example, are suspectible to the DCOM RPC vulnerability discovered in 2003. Several viruses use this security hole in attempts to attack systems, including the Blaster worm and hundreds of variants of SDBot/Agobot/Polybot (which is so complicated, it needs multiple names). Since all of these viruses have the side effect of making your computer slower, not installing security patches would be more detrimental to a slow Windows 2000 system's performance than installing them.