This article is old so may be outdated.
One of our clients in the company I work for is running SQL Server 2000, how do I know this wonderful bit of information you ask? Well, let me tell you;
SELECT @@VERSION AS theVersion
This took longer than 30 seconds to work out, which is frankly too long, so hopefully I will save someone else the pain when trying to work out what version you are running when you have limited privileges.
I ran this in the “MASTER” database, I am not sure if this is required though.