3 ms·
The difference is that now the breakage comes to you instead of being something optional that you can seek out or ignore. I remember installing, like, fewer tha
by Lammy 19d ago
The difference is that now the breakage comes to you instead of being something optional that you can seek out or ignore. I remember installing, like, fewer than ten updates ever for Windows 95: The ‘95A’ patch, a few updates to Dial-Up Networking, WinSock update, CHM Help Update, MSXML, MSVCRT. I steadfastly avoided the webby Active Desktop IE4 ‘Desktop Update’ but did install the browser itself.
- drooopy 18d agoOh, man. The "Active" Desktop. The only thing that it kept active was my CD drive when I was forced to reinstall Windows every time I tried to make it work on my PC and it broke everything.
- Lammy 18d agoI was all about some 98lite ‘Sleek’ on my hand-me-down 486DX/2-66 in the late '90s, Windows 98/98SE/Me with the original Windows 95 pre-OSR2.5 non-Active Explorer swapped in :) - https://www.litepc.com/swap.html https://www.litepc.com/swap.html - http://toastytech.com/guis/l98.html http://toastytech.com/guis/l98.html
- anyfoo 18d agoI think people just forgot how insanely unstable and prone to breaking MS OSes were back then. Crashes and hangs that take down your entire machine were common, and “reinstalling the OS” was seen as a normal thing that you just had to do every once in a while. Windows 95 was pretty much broken “by design”. This is truer than it seems, especially if you skip being charitable by taking the context into account, namely that Microsoft mainly designed Windows 95 for compatibility. (The contemporary Windows NT on the other hand was a much cleaner design, though still questionable above its kernel layer).
- rendaw 18d agoBut surely random crashes is better than a broken login screen that prevents you from doing any work at all?
- anyfoo 18d agoI mean, sure, although the crashes could sometimes come with data loss as well. You might now ponder whether a broken login screen, i.e. temporarily not being able to access data, is maybe better than downright losing it, but my point was more that I sometimes get the feeling that earlier MS DOS/Windows OSes are now seen through some kind of nostalgia glasses, that seem to make the OSes much more stable and put together than they actually were. In my experience, most somewhat mainstream OSes were much less shoddy. This includes various Unixes and Unix-likes, but also OS/2 (which was jointly developed by Microsoft, with IBM).
- wink 18d agoJust not being able to use one application is better than your whole OS going up in smoke every couple weeks. Yes, Windows 95A on the wrong hardware (and how would you know?) did that.
- Hikikomori 18d agoReinstalled win98 so many times.