16 ms·

It often wouldn't keep working. Win95/98/Me installs would regularly start throwing BSOD or just performing terribly and have to be reinstalled from scratch.

by ebbv 10y ago

minxomat 10y ago
I guess I'm in the 1% again. 95 was horrible, but ME or 2k never failed to install for me and even handled then-legacy drivers w/o any issues. Was there the occasional BSOD? Sure, but I experienced much more on my Windows 10 machines over the last few months.
- ebbv 10y ago
  Win2k was a very different beast from 95/98/Me. I guess it depends how long you used Me for but my 95/98/Me machines regularly had to be reinstalled from scratch, usually about once every year or so. Whether my gaming machines or work machines.
  - raverbashing 10y ago
    98SE was much more stable than Me or 95 though
  - minxomat 10y ago
    I used my ME machine for office, some gaming (with some external peripherals) and some Q(uick)BASIC programming. I never had to reinstall it, having used it for at least 3 years basically every day. The 98 PCs were used in an SMB with older printers and cash registers. They worked great. 95 never managed to run for more than a month without some catastrophe.
    - tinus_hn 10y ago
      Windows 95 and 98 actually contain a bug that limits the uptime to about 50 days because the uptime is kept in milliseconds and after that time the counter overflows and the system crashes. https://sites.google.com/site/edmarkovich2/whywindows95andwindows98wouldcrashafter49.7daysofuptime https://sites.google.com/site/edmarkovich2/whywindows95andwi...
  - bluedino 10y ago
    >> Win2k was a very different beast from 95/98/Me. Agreed. Memory protection and pre-emptive multitasking was such a huge improvement back then. Windows 2000 came out right around when I started working at a consultant/MSP, and all the power users that were using Adobe/Macromedia products were restarting their Windows 98 PC's multiple times per day. After installing Windows 2000 (and possibly adding another 32 or 64MB of RAM) they were running twice as fast and could go without a crash for a week. Mostly due to scanner driver hang-ups or losing communication with parallel Zip drives and things like that.
    - Unklejoe 10y ago
      Wait, there was no memory protection in Windows 98? Did it implement virtual memory for processes? If so, it seems like memory protection would be a freebie at that point? I was also unaware that it was not a pre-emptive multitasking system.
      - bluedino 10y ago
        The new 32-bit stuff was. The problem was all the 16-bit programs and driving weren't, and large parts of Windows itself were still 16-bit.
      - userbinator 10y ago
        The first 1MB ("realmode area") has no protection and is essentially shared, for compatibility with DOS and 16-bit Windows. Win9x is preemptively multitasked, at least for actual Win32 processes, however I would not be surprised if some parts of it weren't.
        digi_owl 10y ago
        And MS put in various exceptions to make sure programs and games kept working. IIRC, sim city had one such because it had a "use after free" bug. Something that was a nono even in DOS, but not properly enforced by the OS until 9x.
      - pwdisswordfish 10y ago
  - qubex 10y ago
    I participated in the Windows 2000 beta programme back in '99. I remember being amazed by how stable it was and what an enormous step forward it was compared to both 95/98/98SE/Me and NT 4.0. In many ways it felt like some kind of crowning achievement.
  - Nr7 10y ago
    Yeah, Win2k was NT based and thus much more stable than Me.
- bluedino 10y ago
  >> 95 was horrible The main problem with 95 was people trying to run it with Windows 3.11 era hardware. 386's, 486's, 8MB or less memory. Windows 95 wasn't robust but it would get the job done if you gave it some hardware to play with (Pentium, 16MB...)
userbinator 10y ago
I actually ran a dualboot of 98SE/XP up until around 2004 or so when I gradually transitioned to XP completely, and 98SE was pretty stable --- as others have mentioned, it lacks full memory protection so it really depends on what applications you use; I was never one to install/uninstall lots of apps "just to try them out", and stuck with old/stable versions of what I needed to use, so perhaps that has much to do with it.
- krylon 10y ago
  I have a mid-90s ThinkPad with Windows 95 and Office 95 sitting on my shelf. I cannot do anything with it, because the battery is long gone, it has no floppy, no CD-ROM, no network. But every once in a while I turn that thing on. Still runs like a charm, and the performance is good, too, for its age. (It better be - it's one of those butterfly notebooks, those must have been pretty expensive way back when...)
- djsumdog 10y ago
  When I started University in 2000, I quad booted Windows ME, Windows 2000, Slackware Linux and BeOS (all using the BeOS boot manager, because it was the most colourful at the time).
- ArkyBeagle 10y ago
  If you were able to be rid of FAT32, 98SE was just fine.
jpalomaki 10y ago
Could it be that the cause for the problems was in 3rd party applications/drivers that were messing with the system in ways unexpected by Microsoft developers? My feeling (not backed by any evidence) is that most of the BSOD bugs are actually related to faulty hardware or bad code from somebody else than Microsoft.
- digi_owl 10y ago
  Quite a bit of "BSOD" was the kernel going "Sorry, but all our lines as busy. Please hold". But MS decided to use the same basic framework as a honest to deity BSOD. Thus people were lead to believe the OS had gone belly up when it was actually trashing the HDD thanks to low memory, program trying to load files, and the swap file.
- justin66 10y ago
  Very close to 100% of the BSODs I've had since I began building my PCs in the early nineties were because of a substandard driver or piece of hardware. In the past twenty years, it's almost always been because of graphics hardware.
frik 10y ago
One had to reinstall Win95/98 every year or two. It got really slow, the Windows registry implementation was really sub par and caused a major slow down. (if you installed new programs, something that was a major problem up to WinXP) I kept Win95 with Plus and IE4 with Windows Shell update. Then Win95 looked like Win98 anyway and (from my experience) more stable and faster. Win98SE was good though. WinME on the other side was pretty unstable, and got a bad reputation similar to Vista, 8 and 10.
- krylon 10y ago
  > One had to reinstall Win95/98 every year or two. Depends on how many applications one installed and uninstalled - I used to reinstall Windows at least twice a year. I still faintly remember the joy I felt when the newly installed Windows was so snappy. :-) By the time ME was released, I had started to explore this other system called Linux, and I was hooked rather quickly. I did keep ME installed for watching DVDs, though, because back then my computer was too slow to decode DVDs in software, and the accelerator card only worked on Windows. So I can testify, if all you do to ME is install PowerDVD and the driver for that decoder card, and then watch DVDs with it, it is both stable and performant. I was always slightly baffled when others bashed ME. Was it really that bad? I wouldn't know, all I can say is it worked alright for DVD playback. ;-)
PakG1 10y ago
Formatting my computer and reinstalling Windows was a point of pride for me. I'd laugh about it with my friends. I have no idea why in retrospect. Just one of those things. I guess I grew up after XP was so stable.

It often wouldn't keep working. Win95/98/Me installs would regularly start throwing BSOD or just performing terribly and have to be reinstalled from scratch.

by ebbv 10y ago

It often wouldn't keep working. Win95/98/Me installs would regularly start throwing BSOD or just performing terribly and have to be reinstalled from scratch.

minxomat 10y ago

I guess I'm in the 1% again. 95 was horrible, but ME or 2k never failed to install for me and even handled then-legacy drivers w/o any issues. Was there the occasional BSOD? Sure, but I experienced much more on my Windows 10 machines over the last few months.

ebbv 10y ago
Win2k was a very different beast from 95/98/Me. I guess it depends how long you used Me for but my 95/98/Me machines regularly had to be reinstalled from scratch, usually about once every year or so. Whether my gaming machines or work machines.
- raverbashing 10y ago
  98SE was much more stable than Me or 95 though
- minxomat 10y ago
  I used my ME machine for office, some gaming (with some external peripherals) and some Q(uick)BASIC programming. I never had to reinstall it, having used it for at least 3 years basically every day. The 98 PCs were used in an SMB with older printers and cash registers. They worked great. 95 never managed to run for more than a month without some catastrophe.
  - tinus_hn 10y ago
    Windows 95 and 98 actually contain a bug that limits the uptime to about 50 days because the uptime is kept in milliseconds and after that time the counter overflows and the system crashes. https://sites.google.com/site/edmarkovich2/whywindows95andwindows98wouldcrashafter49.7daysofuptime https://sites.google.com/site/edmarkovich2/whywindows95andwi...
- bluedino 10y ago
  >> Win2k was a very different beast from 95/98/Me. Agreed. Memory protection and pre-emptive multitasking was such a huge improvement back then. Windows 2000 came out right around when I started working at a consultant/MSP, and all the power users that were using Adobe/Macromedia products were restarting their Windows 98 PC's multiple times per day. After installing Windows 2000 (and possibly adding another 32 or 64MB of RAM) they were running twice as fast and could go without a crash for a week. Mostly due to scanner driver hang-ups or losing communication with parallel Zip drives and things like that.
  - Unklejoe 10y ago
    Wait, there was no memory protection in Windows 98? Did it implement virtual memory for processes? If so, it seems like memory protection would be a freebie at that point? I was also unaware that it was not a pre-emptive multitasking system.
    - bluedino 10y ago
      The new 32-bit stuff was. The problem was all the 16-bit programs and driving weren't, and large parts of Windows itself were still 16-bit.
    - userbinator 10y ago
      The first 1MB ("realmode area") has no protection and is essentially shared, for compatibility with DOS and 16-bit Windows. Win9x is preemptively multitasked, at least for actual Win32 processes, however I would not be surprised if some parts of it weren't.
      - digi_owl 10y ago
        And MS put in various exceptions to make sure programs and games kept working. IIRC, sim city had one such because it had a "use after free" bug. Something that was a nono even in DOS, but not properly enforced by the OS until 9x.
    - pwdisswordfish 10y ago
- qubex 10y ago
  I participated in the Windows 2000 beta programme back in '99. I remember being amazed by how stable it was and what an enormous step forward it was compared to both 95/98/98SE/Me and NT 4.0. In many ways it felt like some kind of crowning achievement.
- Nr7 10y ago
  Yeah, Win2k was NT based and thus much more stable than Me.
bluedino 10y ago
>> 95 was horrible The main problem with 95 was people trying to run it with Windows 3.11 era hardware. 386's, 486's, 8MB or less memory. Windows 95 wasn't robust but it would get the job done if you gave it some hardware to play with (Pentium, 16MB...)

userbinator 10y ago

I actually ran a dualboot of 98SE/XP up until around 2004 or so when I gradually transitioned to XP completely, and 98SE was pretty stable --- as others have mentioned, it lacks full memory protection so it really depends on what applications you use; I was never one to install/uninstall lots of apps "just to try them out", and stuck with old/stable versions of what I needed to use, so perhaps that has much to do with it.

krylon 10y ago
I have a mid-90s ThinkPad with Windows 95 and Office 95 sitting on my shelf. I cannot do anything with it, because the battery is long gone, it has no floppy, no CD-ROM, no network. But every once in a while I turn that thing on. Still runs like a charm, and the performance is good, too, for its age. (It better be - it's one of those butterfly notebooks, those must have been pretty expensive way back when...)
djsumdog 10y ago
When I started University in 2000, I quad booted Windows ME, Windows 2000, Slackware Linux and BeOS (all using the BeOS boot manager, because it was the most colourful at the time).
ArkyBeagle 10y ago
If you were able to be rid of FAT32, 98SE was just fine.

jpalomaki 10y ago

Could it be that the cause for the problems was in 3rd party applications/drivers that were messing with the system in ways unexpected by Microsoft developers? My feeling (not backed by any evidence) is that most of the BSOD bugs are actually related to faulty hardware or bad code from somebody else than Microsoft.

digi_owl 10y ago
Quite a bit of "BSOD" was the kernel going "Sorry, but all our lines as busy. Please hold". But MS decided to use the same basic framework as a honest to deity BSOD. Thus people were lead to believe the OS had gone belly up when it was actually trashing the HDD thanks to low memory, program trying to load files, and the swap file.
justin66 10y ago
Very close to 100% of the BSODs I've had since I began building my PCs in the early nineties were because of a substandard driver or piece of hardware. In the past twenty years, it's almost always been because of graphics hardware.

frik 10y ago

One had to reinstall Win95/98 every year or two. It got really slow, the Windows registry implementation was really sub par and caused a major slow down. (if you installed new programs, something that was a major problem up to WinXP) I kept Win95 with Plus and IE4 with Windows Shell update. Then Win95 looked like Win98 anyway and (from my experience) more stable and faster. Win98SE was good though. WinME on the other side was pretty unstable, and got a bad reputation similar to Vista, 8 and 10.

krylon 10y ago
> One had to reinstall Win95/98 every year or two. Depends on how many applications one installed and uninstalled - I used to reinstall Windows at least twice a year. I still faintly remember the joy I felt when the newly installed Windows was so snappy. :-) By the time ME was released, I had started to explore this other system called Linux, and I was hooked rather quickly. I did keep ME installed for watching DVDs, though, because back then my computer was too slow to decode DVDs in software, and the accelerator card only worked on Windows. So I can testify, if all you do to ME is install PowerDVD and the driver for that decoder card, and then watch DVDs with it, it is both stable and performant. I was always slightly baffled when others bashed ME. Was it really that bad? I wouldn't know, all I can say is it worked alright for DVD playback. ;-)

PakG1 10y ago

Formatting my computer and reinstalling Windows was a point of pride for me. I'd laugh about it with my friends. I have no idea why in retrospect. Just one of those things. I guess I grew up after XP was so stable.