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I debated building something like this for a couple years with my "Ultimate Windows 98 PC" [1] I found that I could take the machine to vintage computer events

I debated building something like this for a couple years with my "Ultimate Windows 98 PC" [1] I found that I could take the machine to vintage computer events and it would (generally!) behave the entire event. I'd then take it home and put it back on the shelf for a few months. After I'd bring it back down to use it again, it'd throw a fit and usually require a reinstall! It's not disk rot since I use SSD's throughout While this hasn't happened (this time) it's a constant looming concern, particularly when pressed for time to get something up and running for an event. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YETxI4rA_gs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YETxI4rA_gs

nurettin 2y ago
I remember having to constantly reinstall win98 back in the 2000s. It felt like the OS kept corrupting its own filesystem. I ended up "borrowing" a debian potato CD from a professor's desk and never went back to windows (or his office).
- pndy 2y ago
  Back then reinstall without formatting the drive felt like resetting system to defaults and was practised by almost everyone. I'm pretty sure W10 and W11 has similar feature nowadays by default. When I had chance to grab 180-days trial of W2000 I was shocked how stable it was - not seeing blue screen every few mins but modals with errors instead was... an amazing experience. The store where I've got my Celeron-based machine was installing 98 for everyone, not looking at licenses, all the legal stuff at all and when I ask guys there if they could drop W2000 they said that "it's a bad idea - many games won't work".
  - enopod_ 2y ago
    I still consider Windows 2000 the best Windows ever made. NT under the hood, slim, up-to-date, extremely stable, it ran all the games I wanted. I managed to grab a burned CD with a full version somewhere, the keys were not yet checked online for multiple installs. For a long time, all software and every driver for XP also worked for 2000. I think I should find an old retro PC and install W2000 on it, just for fun.
    - NikkiA 2y ago
      NT5 beta 2, before 2000 was enshittified. I would have stayed on it, but my video drivers (Rendition Vérité 2200) at the time were time limit locked and the next set of drivers released didn't support the betas anymore. 2000 was the next best thing, but it was definitely a step backwards from beta 2.
    - pndy 2y ago
      I really liked both stability and that subtle change from dark grey GUI colour to gray with a really subtle yellow hint that made it more pleasant to my eyes. So was the default blue background colour instead of teal green more appealing. > I think I should find an old retro PC and install W2000 on it, just for fun. I made a W2000 install in VirtualBox with most of the old software I was using back then - of course without network connection outside. IMO that's much easier than dusting out old machine and wondering if it'll work at all after so many years but ofc there are people who dig that - I admire their dedication
    - mcny 2y ago
      I remember things differently. Perhaps it was because I was working with older hardware or something I don't know but Windows 2k felt so slow to boot. I know it isn't a fair comparison since the computer with windows XP was newer and I don't remember the details but I remember thinking windows XP boots faster than 2k.
      - reginald78 2y ago
        IIRC with XP they late loaded a lot of things to get the desktop showing faster than 2000. My experience at the time was that while the desktop might have loaded faster it wasn't actually usable for quite awhile after I was looking at it, but that might have had more to do with all the crapware on many XP machines I used at the time. XP definitely needed more ram than 2000 to function acceptably. I remember 128mb being slow but tolerable on 2000 and absolutely brutal on XP.
        pndy 2y ago
        > IIRC with XP they late loaded a lot of things to get the desktop showing faster than 2000 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prefetcher https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prefetcher - that's the thing they introduced in XP to speed up loading the system and programs
- geon 2y ago
  It did. Or perhaps it was because I dualbooted 98 and 2k. All my warez were on a fat32 to be accessible from both. Somehow the audio in my mp3 collection got replaced with audio from my movies.
- reginald78 2y ago
  Windows 9x suffered from DLL hell. So every time a program was installed it potentially overwrote dlls with a different version often older or incompatible. Windows 2000/XP just redirected the installer's dlls into a per program location preventing this which is a large reason those versions were so much more stable. Most people recommended a complete reinstall every 6 months well through the XP era but I found this was hardly ever necessary after I switched to 2000. Conversely, during my 98 days I never had to schedule reinstalls, Windows had rotted apart by then forcing me to do it!
  - antisthenes 2y ago
    I definitely remember the DLL hell experience that manifested as an older 2d game overwriting some DirectX dlls in the OS with older versions, and suddenly all my FPS games stopped working. That was a fun one to troubleshoot as a 12 year old kid.
eloeffler 2y ago
While I have no idea if this is or isn't the reason for those issues, I think it's worth mentioning that SSDs do suffer from bit rot, especially when left unpowered. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_degradation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_degradation https://www.partitionwizard.com/clone-disk/is-ssd-good-for-long-term-storage.html https://www.partitionwizard.com/clone-disk/is-ssd-good-for-l...
userbinator 2y ago
It's not disk rot since I use SSD's throughout SSDs, unless they're very old SLC/MLC ones, do actually suffer from bit rot a lot more than magnetic/optical media. The unpowered retention ratings of new TLC/QLC flash is rather horrifying (months, not years or decades like they used to be). https://goughlui.com/2023/10/10/psa-ssds-with-ymtc-flash-prone-to-failure-check-your-ssds/ https://goughlui.com/2023/10/10/psa-ssds-with-ymtc-flash-pro... https://goughlui.com/2016/11/08/note-samsung-850-evo-data-retention-performance-degradation/ https://goughlui.com/2016/11/08/note-samsung-850-evo-data-re... If you want a reliable SSD for old systems, an SLC-based CF card is a good choice; it doesn't need to be very big (8GB is plenty), and the retention characteristics are also "period-correct".
- b112 2y ago
  While these posts are well written, one is about a cheap Chinese flash manufacturer, the other unknown, and the author muses that it may be the control chip or firmware, not the flash itself.
  - userbinator 2y ago
    Samsung famously "fixed" the retention problems in firmware by having it periodically rewrite data in the background, but that doesn't work if the SSD is powered off.

nurettin 2y ago

I remember having to constantly reinstall win98 back in the 2000s. It felt like the OS kept corrupting its own filesystem. I ended up "borrowing" a debian potato CD from a professor's desk and never went back to windows (or his office).

pndy 2y ago
Back then reinstall without formatting the drive felt like resetting system to defaults and was practised by almost everyone. I'm pretty sure W10 and W11 has similar feature nowadays by default. When I had chance to grab 180-days trial of W2000 I was shocked how stable it was - not seeing blue screen every few mins but modals with errors instead was... an amazing experience. The store where I've got my Celeron-based machine was installing 98 for everyone, not looking at licenses, all the legal stuff at all and when I ask guys there if they could drop W2000 they said that "it's a bad idea - many games won't work".
- enopod_ 2y ago
  I still consider Windows 2000 the best Windows ever made. NT under the hood, slim, up-to-date, extremely stable, it ran all the games I wanted. I managed to grab a burned CD with a full version somewhere, the keys were not yet checked online for multiple installs. For a long time, all software and every driver for XP also worked for 2000. I think I should find an old retro PC and install W2000 on it, just for fun.
  - NikkiA 2y ago
    NT5 beta 2, before 2000 was enshittified. I would have stayed on it, but my video drivers (Rendition Vérité 2200) at the time were time limit locked and the next set of drivers released didn't support the betas anymore. 2000 was the next best thing, but it was definitely a step backwards from beta 2.
  - pndy 2y ago
    I really liked both stability and that subtle change from dark grey GUI colour to gray with a really subtle yellow hint that made it more pleasant to my eyes. So was the default blue background colour instead of teal green more appealing. > I think I should find an old retro PC and install W2000 on it, just for fun. I made a W2000 install in VirtualBox with most of the old software I was using back then - of course without network connection outside. IMO that's much easier than dusting out old machine and wondering if it'll work at all after so many years but ofc there are people who dig that - I admire their dedication
  - mcny 2y ago
    I remember things differently. Perhaps it was because I was working with older hardware or something I don't know but Windows 2k felt so slow to boot. I know it isn't a fair comparison since the computer with windows XP was newer and I don't remember the details but I remember thinking windows XP boots faster than 2k.
    - reginald78 2y ago
      IIRC with XP they late loaded a lot of things to get the desktop showing faster than 2000. My experience at the time was that while the desktop might have loaded faster it wasn't actually usable for quite awhile after I was looking at it, but that might have had more to do with all the crapware on many XP machines I used at the time. XP definitely needed more ram than 2000 to function acceptably. I remember 128mb being slow but tolerable on 2000 and absolutely brutal on XP.
      - pndy 2y ago
        > IIRC with XP they late loaded a lot of things to get the desktop showing faster than 2000 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prefetcher https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prefetcher - that's the thing they introduced in XP to speed up loading the system and programs
geon 2y ago
It did. Or perhaps it was because I dualbooted 98 and 2k. All my warez were on a fat32 to be accessible from both. Somehow the audio in my mp3 collection got replaced with audio from my movies.
reginald78 2y ago
Windows 9x suffered from DLL hell. So every time a program was installed it potentially overwrote dlls with a different version often older or incompatible. Windows 2000/XP just redirected the installer's dlls into a per program location preventing this which is a large reason those versions were so much more stable. Most people recommended a complete reinstall every 6 months well through the XP era but I found this was hardly ever necessary after I switched to 2000. Conversely, during my 98 days I never had to schedule reinstalls, Windows had rotted apart by then forcing me to do it!
- antisthenes 2y ago
  I definitely remember the DLL hell experience that manifested as an older 2d game overwriting some DirectX dlls in the OS with older versions, and suddenly all my FPS games stopped working. That was a fun one to troubleshoot as a 12 year old kid.

eloeffler 2y ago

While I have no idea if this is or isn't the reason for those issues, I think it's worth mentioning that SSDs do suffer from bit rot, especially when left unpowered. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_degradation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_degradation https://www.partitionwizard.com/clone-disk/is-ssd-good-for-long-term-storage.html https://www.partitionwizard.com/clone-disk/is-ssd-good-for-l...

userbinator 2y ago

It's not disk rot since I use SSD's throughout SSDs, unless they're very old SLC/MLC ones, do actually suffer from bit rot a lot more than magnetic/optical media. The unpowered retention ratings of new TLC/QLC flash is rather horrifying (months, not years or decades like they used to be). https://goughlui.com/2023/10/10/psa-ssds-with-ymtc-flash-prone-to-failure-check-your-ssds/ https://goughlui.com/2023/10/10/psa-ssds-with-ymtc-flash-pro... https://goughlui.com/2016/11/08/note-samsung-850-evo-data-retention-performance-degradation/ https://goughlui.com/2016/11/08/note-samsung-850-evo-data-re... If you want a reliable SSD for old systems, an SLC-based CF card is a good choice; it doesn't need to be very big (8GB is plenty), and the retention characteristics are also "period-correct".

b112 2y ago
While these posts are well written, one is about a cheap Chinese flash manufacturer, the other unknown, and the author muses that it may be the control chip or firmware, not the flash itself.
- userbinator 2y ago
  Samsung famously "fixed" the retention problems in firmware by having it periodically rewrite data in the background, but that doesn't work if the SSD is powered off.