3 ms·
I disagree with your redefinition of "crash". I remember the 90's quite well, and have spent lots of time supporting everything from DOS 3.3 on up to W10. That'
by geocrasher 7y ago
I disagree with your redefinition of "crash". I remember the 90's quite well, and have spent lots of time supporting everything from DOS 3.3 on up to W10. That's not to say that there weren't those people for whom "crash" meant "OS reload". Usually when somebody said their computer "crashed" and they had to reinstall their OS I discerned a few possibilities:
1) the user broke their system because they were installing anything they could and are blaming MS for their troubles
2) the user has no idea how to fix anything so they default to a reinstall because they think it's easier than finding the fix. In a pre-Google/StackOverflow world, this may have been true.
3) The user was on a quest for absolute stability, and was superstitious about uninstalling/reinstalling drivers etc.
As for the "only ever just barely worked" statement, I strongly disagree. Yes, a lot of maintenance and good habits were required, but it wasn't outside of the realm of possibility to have a stable Windows ME. I know, because I'm one of about 5 people who ever liked Windows ME. I thought it was a decent OS, as long as you figured out that the Device Manager had 10 copies of every driver, unhid them, and removed them all and rebooted.
- ncmncm 7y agoI guess you don't remember when it came out that a Windows 95/98/Me machine, running nothing at all, would crash spontaneously after, what? 39? days, when a time counter rolled over. No one had noticed, in years prior, because: No one had ever got one to run that long. Boeing 787s need to be fully power-cycled every few months, for identically the same reason, although its time counter ticks less frequently. They would fall out of the sky, otherwise. It is just lucky somebody noticed before it happened, because there has otherwise been no need to reboot it.
- silversconfused 7y agoOur win95 print server ran for years unattended with a simple nightly reboot set up in the task scheduler.
- nicoburns 7y agoSo that's what was wrong with ME. I still reflexively ctrl-s after every sentence due to a bad experience growing up on an ME system.
- ksaj 7y agoWow I had managed to completely forget all that. Yet I still spontaneously save documents way too often as a trigger reaction, even though I haven't used Windows in any meaningful capacity in nearly 2 decades. Another weird habit, but caused from learning Unix through QNX flakiness when dealing with "quad-density diskettes": using the 'sync' command, repeatedly. It is very rarely necessary to sync nowadays, but back then we used to "sync thrice like you mean it" because you'd lose everything on the disk if you didn't. Stability wasn't really the norm back then...