4 ms·

In hindsight, stick with W95 until Windows 98 SE, then stick with 98 SE until 2K, or even XP, comes out. Maybe it's because I was not a big DOS gamer, but I fo

by retrac 5y ago

In hindsight, stick with W95 until Windows 98 SE, then stick with 98 SE until 2K, or even XP, comes out. Maybe it's because I was not a big DOS gamer, but I found Windows 2K to have excellent compatibility with everything I wanted to run, including DirectX games. My trusty old Pentium II with a Voodoo card was happy to run Photoshop, Simcity 4, World of Warcraft, VMWare and all manner of other 21st century software with Windows 2000. After a RAM upgrade. A few, actually. Started with a spacious-seeming 64 MB in '98, retired the machine in '05 in part because because even maxed out at 768 MB, it was cramped. That was a crazy era when it came to RAM, huh? Been a while since having enough RAM was a major concern for most consumer software, let alone just the operating system! I sometimes wonder if Microsoft should have made W2K a consumer release, rather than waiting until XP to give us a real operating system on PCs. (After a few years with Windows 2000 I switched to Linux and never looked back. I did keep a Windows 2000 VM until just a few years ago, though.)

bombcar 5y ago
For me the hotness was Win2k with winxp drivers for quite awhile. Worked well and seemed a bit more stabe
- retrac 5y ago
  I think I was lucky, but NT 4, 2K and Xp were always very stable for me. I'm sure I had at least a few blue screens but I don't have any memory of them :) Maybe it's just the contrast from the four crashes a day with Windows 95/98! I just found 2K to be way more lightweight. I tried XP on that Pentium II and even with the candy GUI turned off, it was quite a dog especially with RAM.
  - bombcar 5y ago
    2K was awesome - the main reason to steal XP drivers is that video cards often didn’t have 2K, only 98SE and XP.
kitsunesoba 5y ago
Upgrading the family PC from 98SE to 2K was such a huge improvement it was ridiculous. Went from crashing every other day, needing to restart daily anyway, general glitchiness, and the computer insisting on running a full ScanDisk on every boot to weeks on end with no crashes or need to reboot and practically no odd behavior. It’s mind boggling that that tried to sell the 9x-heritage ME to consumers instead of just dressing up 2K a little and calling that Windows Me (effectively no-frills XP).
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
Lammy 5y ago
> I sometimes wonder if Microsoft should have made W2K a consumer release, rather than waiting until XP to give us a real operating system on PCs They were working on one! There's even a leaked build of it before it got rolled into XP: https://betawiki.net/wiki/Windows_Neptune_build_5111.1 https://betawiki.net/wiki/Windows_Neptune_build_5111.1 This is total speculation on my part, but the change in direction had to do with moving away from IE and toward dot-NET, so maybe it was DOJ trial related? The Neptune UI seemed to be very "HTML Application" focused, and the bits that made it into XP reflect that, e.g. the new login screen, Activity Centers, the Help & Support Center: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTML_Application https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTML_Application
axiolite 5y ago
Windows 95/98 was horrible. It's only in hindsight we forget the rough edges. I still remember having to reboot to watch a video. Later I figured out it was a RAM thing and running Ram Booster at it's max setting would force everything out of RAM into swap or just dropping cache, at which point videos could play without horrid stuttering. Random slowdown and freeze-ups. Drivers that just suddenly stop working one day at random. Just non-deterministic behavior in general turned every Windows 9x technician superstitious. It was heaven getting a copy of Windows NT 4.0 in those 9x days. Yeah, app compatibility issues, but a fast and stable system that would stay up and running, and not wring its own guts out for no reason.
- memetomancer 5y ago
  Pshaw! Win95/98 was a masterpiece. Perhaps you forget that a 66mhz 486 has about 1/50th the compute power of a raspberry pi. Yet this 'horrible' software that vexed you so was able to run there, hosting web browsers, photoshop, a million PC games _and_ backwards compatibility with ~15 years of software ...all while playing mp3's in winamp. It's certainly not MSFT's fault that you ran some hokey memory compression garbage, that's just denial on your part. But rest easy! We all had to be newbs at some point ;)
  - axiolite 5y ago
    NT 4.0 was a contemporary operating system to 95. It could run on a 60MHz Pentium with 16MB of RAM. There was no memory compression involved. RamBooster can be found here: https://www.freewarefiles.com/RamBooster-V_program_8893.html https://www.freewarefiles.com/RamBooster-V_program_8893.html
    - retrac 5y ago
      That's quite a gap, though. Windows 95 could (but you wouldn't want to) run on a 386 with 4 MB of RAM. 8 MB was recommended. New PCs were still being sold in 1995 with less than 8 MB of RAM. Both NT 3.51 and 4.0 had a minimum requirement of 12 MB just to start. You'd want more to have breathing room. Few new machines could meet that in '96, let alone the large base of 486 and even 386 machines still kicking around. I figure that if Microsoft had released NT as a consumer OS that early (with 3.5 or 4.0) it would have been a disaster. There wasn't much of a market for a new OS that required twice the specs of the average new PC while having mediocre backwards compatibility. Even if it didn't crash much.
toast0 5y ago
Windows 2000 was pretty good, but there were a couple things here and there that wouldn't work or worked a bit differently that I don't think it was quite ready. I know my laptop at the time could output indepently to the built-in LCD and external vga, but only on windows 98 or XP, not 2000. And the no-cd crack for Diablo 2 was different for 98 and 2000, and the 2000 version wasn't always released as timely as the 98 version.
ThrowawayR2 5y ago
> "or even XP" XP had a fair number of issues at release. It didn't really become stable until around the timeframe of Service Pack 2, which was also around the time hardware manufacturers had finally mostly gotten their act together writing proper XP device drivers.
- ad133 5y ago
  Indeed - SP2 brought in the firewall which finally got rid of the Blaster and Sasser type-viruses that could be executed remotely because most folks still had their PC connected to the Internet with a public IPv4 address. I remember fondly that it took less than half an hour for a fresh XP install with no SP to get the dreaded "your PC will reboot in 60 seconds" shutdown window.
cloudking 5y ago
Windows 2000 stability was uncanny, loved it. Used it on personal and work machines!
glandium 5y ago
You probably don't want W95 before OSR2.
- hakfoo 5y ago
  Don't talk to me about pre-OSR2. I can recall being very frustrated going into Fry's with my scholarship stipend circa 1999. The K6-2/400 and mainboard I wanted ended up costing another $100 because I needed to buy Win98SE; the Win95 retail release I had features the famous "K6-faster-than-350MHz" fault, and this was not fixed except for late OSRs. It seems like until we got to NT_based consumer Windows, they had no real concept of service pack level updates.

by retrac 5y ago

bombcar 5y ago

For me the hotness was Win2k with winxp drivers for quite awhile. Worked well and seemed a bit more stabe

retrac 5y ago
I think I was lucky, but NT 4, 2K and Xp were always very stable for me. I'm sure I had at least a few blue screens but I don't have any memory of them :) Maybe it's just the contrast from the four crashes a day with Windows 95/98! I just found 2K to be way more lightweight. I tried XP on that Pentium II and even with the candy GUI turned off, it was quite a dog especially with RAM.
- bombcar 5y ago
  2K was awesome - the main reason to steal XP drivers is that video cards often didn’t have 2K, only 98SE and XP.

kitsunesoba 5y ago

Upgrading the family PC from 98SE to 2K was such a huge improvement it was ridiculous. Went from crashing every other day, needing to restart daily anyway, general glitchiness, and the computer insisting on running a full ScanDisk on every boot to weeks on end with no crashes or need to reboot and practically no odd behavior. It’s mind boggling that that tried to sell the 9x-heritage ME to consumers instead of just dressing up 2K a little and calling that Windows Me (effectively no-frills XP).

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

Lammy 5y ago

> I sometimes wonder if Microsoft should have made W2K a consumer release, rather than waiting until XP to give us a real operating system on PCs They were working on one! There's even a leaked build of it before it got rolled into XP: https://betawiki.net/wiki/Windows_Neptune_build_5111.1 https://betawiki.net/wiki/Windows_Neptune_build_5111.1 This is total speculation on my part, but the change in direction had to do with moving away from IE and toward dot-NET, so maybe it was DOJ trial related? The Neptune UI seemed to be very "HTML Application" focused, and the bits that made it into XP reflect that, e.g. the new login screen, Activity Centers, the Help & Support Center: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTML_Application https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTML_Application

axiolite 5y ago

Windows 95/98 was horrible. It's only in hindsight we forget the rough edges. I still remember having to reboot to watch a video. Later I figured out it was a RAM thing and running Ram Booster at it's max setting would force everything out of RAM into swap or just dropping cache, at which point videos could play without horrid stuttering. Random slowdown and freeze-ups. Drivers that just suddenly stop working one day at random. Just non-deterministic behavior in general turned every Windows 9x technician superstitious. It was heaven getting a copy of Windows NT 4.0 in those 9x days. Yeah, app compatibility issues, but a fast and stable system that would stay up and running, and not wring its own guts out for no reason.

memetomancer 5y ago
Pshaw! Win95/98 was a masterpiece. Perhaps you forget that a 66mhz 486 has about 1/50th the compute power of a raspberry pi. Yet this 'horrible' software that vexed you so was able to run there, hosting web browsers, photoshop, a million PC games _and_ backwards compatibility with ~15 years of software ...all while playing mp3's in winamp. It's certainly not MSFT's fault that you ran some hokey memory compression garbage, that's just denial on your part. But rest easy! We all had to be newbs at some point ;)
- axiolite 5y ago
  NT 4.0 was a contemporary operating system to 95. It could run on a 60MHz Pentium with 16MB of RAM. There was no memory compression involved. RamBooster can be found here: https://www.freewarefiles.com/RamBooster-V_program_8893.html https://www.freewarefiles.com/RamBooster-V_program_8893.html
  - retrac 5y ago
    That's quite a gap, though. Windows 95 could (but you wouldn't want to) run on a 386 with 4 MB of RAM. 8 MB was recommended. New PCs were still being sold in 1995 with less than 8 MB of RAM. Both NT 3.51 and 4.0 had a minimum requirement of 12 MB just to start. You'd want more to have breathing room. Few new machines could meet that in '96, let alone the large base of 486 and even 386 machines still kicking around. I figure that if Microsoft had released NT as a consumer OS that early (with 3.5 or 4.0) it would have been a disaster. There wasn't much of a market for a new OS that required twice the specs of the average new PC while having mediocre backwards compatibility. Even if it didn't crash much.

toast0 5y ago

Windows 2000 was pretty good, but there were a couple things here and there that wouldn't work or worked a bit differently that I don't think it was quite ready. I know my laptop at the time could output indepently to the built-in LCD and external vga, but only on windows 98 or XP, not 2000. And the no-cd crack for Diablo 2 was different for 98 and 2000, and the 2000 version wasn't always released as timely as the 98 version.

ThrowawayR2 5y ago

> "or even XP" XP had a fair number of issues at release. It didn't really become stable until around the timeframe of Service Pack 2, which was also around the time hardware manufacturers had finally mostly gotten their act together writing proper XP device drivers.

ad133 5y ago
Indeed - SP2 brought in the firewall which finally got rid of the Blaster and Sasser type-viruses that could be executed remotely because most folks still had their PC connected to the Internet with a public IPv4 address. I remember fondly that it took less than half an hour for a fresh XP install with no SP to get the dreaded "your PC will reboot in 60 seconds" shutdown window.

cloudking 5y ago

Windows 2000 stability was uncanny, loved it. Used it on personal and work machines!

glandium 5y ago

You probably don't want W95 before OSR2.

hakfoo 5y ago
Don't talk to me about pre-OSR2. I can recall being very frustrated going into Fry's with my scholarship stipend circa 1999. The K6-2/400 and mainboard I wanted ended up costing another $100 because I needed to buy Win98SE; the Win95 retail release I had features the famous "K6-faster-than-350MHz" fault, and this was not fixed except for late OSRs. It seems like until we got to NT_based consumer Windows, they had no real concept of service pack level updates.