4 ms·

Interesting. In 1997 I had a thinkpad running Windows 95 and I went weeks between reboots. It was rock solid.

toast0 6y ago
Windows 95/98 stability really depended on the quality of your hardware, drivers, and software. If things intracted poorly, it was easy to get a system that needed a reboot every few hours to stay responsive.
- TedDoesntTalk 6y ago
  Agreed. Drivers were a big one. As I remember, they had unfettered access to everything... so they could consume all ram or cpu or read any part of memory. Powerful and scary.
  - londons_explore 6y ago
    In pretty much all systems today drivers can do the same...
  - hyperman1 6y ago
    In win95, everything had access to everything if it wanted. E.g. DLLs were mapped in a shared memory segment that was shared between all applications. Lots of 16 bit code was still running, and this did IPC basically by messing in some other program's memory. Backward compatibilitty required very thin walls between processes. DOS TSR programs started before windows were still running. I had one that popped up a calculator in dos text mode, and if you pushed its hotkey in win95, it switched win95 back to text mode, paused win95, did its thing, then popped back in win95. Only the very basics of protected mode and virtual memory where there, and a well-behaving program had a reasonable chance of staying in its own sandbox. But only because it wanted to. Seen from the CPU, you could argue EMM386 was more the actual OS than win95/win98. None of this is meant to be negative. It was a solid step up from windows 3.x, and yet quite usable with 4MB RAM of which the first 1MB wanted a very different treatment.
- II2II 6y ago
  I used to joke that Windows 95 hated me more than I hated it, since it managed to "uninstall itself" within a couple of weeks. (For some reason, there was massive data corruption.) The odd part is that the computer was perfectly reliable under DOS/Windows 3.1, Linux, and OS/2. The quality of drivers could be a serious problem in the Windows 95 era. If it was a driver shipped with Windows, everything seemed to work fine. If the driver was provided by the vendor, the reliability was so inconsistent that I would try to find a compatible driver that shipped with Windows even if it meant missing out on some features.
eggsome 6y ago
There was a hard cap of around a month and a half: https://sites.google.com/site/edmarkovich2/whywindows95andwindows98wouldcrashafter49.7daysofuptime https://sites.google.com/site/edmarkovich2/whywindows95andwi...
- WantonQuantum 6y ago
  That's interesting! I wonder if that was indeed what I was running into.

Windows 95/98 stability really depended on the quality of your hardware, drivers, and software. If things intracted poorly, it was easy to get a system that needed a reboot every few hours to stay responsive.

TedDoesntTalk 6y ago
Agreed. Drivers were a big one. As I remember, they had unfettered access to everything... so they could consume all ram or cpu or read any part of memory. Powerful and scary.
- londons_explore 6y ago
  In pretty much all systems today drivers can do the same...
- hyperman1 6y ago
  In win95, everything had access to everything if it wanted. E.g. DLLs were mapped in a shared memory segment that was shared between all applications. Lots of 16 bit code was still running, and this did IPC basically by messing in some other program's memory. Backward compatibilitty required very thin walls between processes. DOS TSR programs started before windows were still running. I had one that popped up a calculator in dos text mode, and if you pushed its hotkey in win95, it switched win95 back to text mode, paused win95, did its thing, then popped back in win95. Only the very basics of protected mode and virtual memory where there, and a well-behaving program had a reasonable chance of staying in its own sandbox. But only because it wanted to. Seen from the CPU, you could argue EMM386 was more the actual OS than win95/win98. None of this is meant to be negative. It was a solid step up from windows 3.x, and yet quite usable with 4MB RAM of which the first 1MB wanted a very different treatment.
II2II 6y ago
I used to joke that Windows 95 hated me more than I hated it, since it managed to "uninstall itself" within a couple of weeks. (For some reason, there was massive data corruption.) The odd part is that the computer was perfectly reliable under DOS/Windows 3.1, Linux, and OS/2. The quality of drivers could be a serious problem in the Windows 95 era. If it was a driver shipped with Windows, everything seemed to work fine. If the driver was provided by the vendor, the reliability was so inconsistent that I would try to find a compatible driver that shipped with Windows even if it meant missing out on some features.

eggsome 6y ago

There was a hard cap of around a month and a half: https://sites.google.com/site/edmarkovich2/whywindows95andwindows98wouldcrashafter49.7daysofuptime https://sites.google.com/site/edmarkovich2/whywindows95andwi...

WantonQuantum 6y ago
That's interesting! I wonder if that was indeed what I was running into.