Some seem to remember 95/98(SE) fondly but what I remember is them being unstable messes even on good hardware, an effect which was multiplied on the crappy bar

Some seem to remember 95/98(SE) fondly but what I remember is them being unstable messes even on good hardware, an effect which was multiplied on the crappy bargain bin machines sold at Staples and the like. Mac OS of the same vintage wasn’t a paragon of stability exactly, but its stability seemed have more rhyme/reason - there were programs and activities that had a tendency to make your system more crashy while others had little to no impact. You could kinda plan around it, and rebooting after doing the instability-causing thing would clear things up. 95/98(SE)’s instability felt a lot more random which for me made it more day-ruining. Windows didn’t feel appreciably more stable than the competition until they finally ditched that crappy 9x kernel with Windows 2000, but that release wasn’t intended for general users, which is a shame because it was just as stable as the post-SP1 XP was, maybe more. Consumers got cheated with Windows ME.