After upgrading the CRT monitor on my Windows 2000 box to a snazzy LCD screen I found the text to be annoyingly chunky, unlike the ClearType-powered subpixel rendering of my Windows XP system. This is an interesting technically-straightforward method of improving the visual quality of fonts on certain types of screens. Thus began my mission to achieve a similar effect in Windows 2000.
The history of ClearType is described in detail by Microsoft in a Windows 7 blog post. This gives no indication that it works in Windows 2000.
The question was asked in Google Answers, and the seemingly comprehensive answer was negative. However, I am of the belief that the passage of time will eventually provide any software desired, and some Googling led to the Aqua-Soft forums, where they discussed the discontinued Japanese GDI++ software. thinkdigit provide an overview of its operation, and it seemed like what I was after.
My initial experiments were promising. The GDI++ program does not need to be installed. Just drag the program to be subpixel rendered, such as a link to Notepad, onto the GDI icon and the magic happens. Unfortunately, the only program I really needed this for was Firefox 3, and GDI had a pervasive text-width issue which removed some letters entirely from the display, making the result unusable. Further reading revealed this was a known problem in GDI++ with certain software.
Luckily, the development of GDI++ has continued, presumably with new developers, and results of their labours are available on the GDI++ downloads site. I was hoping later versions would resolve the Firefox issue, but SSE has been added as a prerequisite, which the Celeron CPU in my Windows 2000 box does not have. Thus I stopped my investigations into GDI++.
When Apple's Safari browser was released for Windows there was much comment about its built-in antialiasing. Potentially this would solve my desire to browse with the comfort of smooth text. However, Safari does not run on Windows 2000.
At this point a normal person would give up and just upgrade Windows 2000 to Windows XP. So I did.