5 ms·

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

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.
  - nikau 5y ago
    "could run" is a very apt phrase - I remember installing office upgrades in that era, users would go to lunch when we started the upgrade and it would still be installing an hour later. Mostly it was just constant disk thrashing due to the lack of ram. Machines were usable otherwise as users mostly just ran word, outlook, and a bunch of telnet sessions. Most users took the NT option as windows 95 was so unstable.
    - hyperman1 5y ago
      Considering win95 was still being distributed on floppys, you had to be thankfull that you could leave the machine alone that long. I still have nightmares from the insert disk x of y message appearing, followed by 2 minutesh of grnsh grnsh grnsh floppy reading. On bad days, at x=y-1, some vengefull god would have corrupted a disk and you were stuck.
      - nikau 5y ago
        Thankfully it was on a corporate network with 10megabit ethernet to the desktops - the only stuff running 100meg were the FDDI fibre connected servers. Still better than floppies at least.
  - jiggawatts 5y ago
    I vividly remember watching a friend's father doing programming on a home workstation that ran NT4 and had 16 MB of memory. Listening to the disk thrashing from the endless swapping was pure torture to my ears. I couldn't fathom how anyone could bear working with something so glacially slow.
techrat 5y ago
Oh. All of that lovely stuff still happens today. Brand new Windows 10 installation, suddenly my mouse and keyboard drop. Had to unplug the hub, replug it back in. Mouse and keyboard still not working. Plugged the hub into another USB port. It works again. Rebooted, plugged the hub back in the first port. Keyboard and mouse dead again. Plugged a USB drive into the 'dead' USB port and it works. Went into device manager, deleted the devices under the port that dropped the keyboard and mouse on me. Plugged the hub back in, things are working again as they should. I've experienced this all the way back as far as Win98/2000. Nothing has really changed with Windows, it seems.
- huachimingo 5y ago
  Mom wants to learn how to use my PC, specially whatsapp Web and google search. She had a previous tutorial in his 20s with Win9x at work. She then does some searches and brags about why is so slow, because last time it was also slow but responsive when not using internet.
nikau 5y ago
NT4 was great if you were running anything aside from games. I remember there was some kludged up gravis ultrasound drivers for NT where you had to boot into DOS to set the card up and then soft reset into windows NT for it to work. I then realized I could cut the reset trace on the ISA B2 reset pin on the gravis card and wire it through a switch so I only had to boot into DOS once to set the card up and could reboot as many times as I wanted as long as I didn't turn the PSU off. good times...
tinus_hn 5y ago
Don’t forget the security of a login screen that can be bypassed by pressing ‘esc’ and a passworded screensaver that can be closed by the task manager!
HKH2 5y ago
I remember it would slow down and you could drag the cursor or a window around the screen and watch the trails accumulate.

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.
- nikau 5y ago
  "could run" is a very apt phrase - I remember installing office upgrades in that era, users would go to lunch when we started the upgrade and it would still be installing an hour later. Mostly it was just constant disk thrashing due to the lack of ram. Machines were usable otherwise as users mostly just ran word, outlook, and a bunch of telnet sessions. Most users took the NT option as windows 95 was so unstable.
  - hyperman1 5y ago
    Considering win95 was still being distributed on floppys, you had to be thankfull that you could leave the machine alone that long. I still have nightmares from the insert disk x of y message appearing, followed by 2 minutesh of grnsh grnsh grnsh floppy reading. On bad days, at x=y-1, some vengefull god would have corrupted a disk and you were stuck.
    - nikau 5y ago
      Thankfully it was on a corporate network with 10megabit ethernet to the desktops - the only stuff running 100meg were the FDDI fibre connected servers. Still better than floppies at least.
- jiggawatts 5y ago
  I vividly remember watching a friend's father doing programming on a home workstation that ran NT4 and had 16 MB of memory. Listening to the disk thrashing from the endless swapping was pure torture to my ears. I couldn't fathom how anyone could bear working with something so glacially slow.

techrat 5y ago

Oh. All of that lovely stuff still happens today. Brand new Windows 10 installation, suddenly my mouse and keyboard drop. Had to unplug the hub, replug it back in. Mouse and keyboard still not working. Plugged the hub into another USB port. It works again. Rebooted, plugged the hub back in the first port. Keyboard and mouse dead again. Plugged a USB drive into the 'dead' USB port and it works. Went into device manager, deleted the devices under the port that dropped the keyboard and mouse on me. Plugged the hub back in, things are working again as they should. I've experienced this all the way back as far as Win98/2000. Nothing has really changed with Windows, it seems.

huachimingo 5y ago
Mom wants to learn how to use my PC, specially whatsapp Web and google search. She had a previous tutorial in his 20s with Win9x at work. She then does some searches and brags about why is so slow, because last time it was also slow but responsive when not using internet.

nikau 5y ago

NT4 was great if you were running anything aside from games. I remember there was some kludged up gravis ultrasound drivers for NT where you had to boot into DOS to set the card up and then soft reset into windows NT for it to work. I then realized I could cut the reset trace on the ISA B2 reset pin on the gravis card and wire it through a switch so I only had to boot into DOS once to set the card up and could reboot as many times as I wanted as long as I didn't turn the PSU off. good times...

tinus_hn 5y ago

Don’t forget the security of a login screen that can be bypassed by pressing ‘esc’ and a passworded screensaver that can be closed by the task manager!

HKH2 5y ago

I remember it would slow down and you could drag the cursor or a window around the screen and watch the trails accumulate.