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.)
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.
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).
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
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.
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 ;)
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.
"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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
I was always impressed that these older pages remained online but just noticed the images are broken now in this one. I really hope this is not the start of these older pages being decommissioned.
At least there are 20+ years worth of chances for it to have been easily archived. CNN was one of the sites that was big enough to need load balancing back in the HTTP 1.0 days, so their main `www.cnn.com` would redirect you to a `www{2..8}.cnn.com` URL that the Wayback Machine usually doesn't have cached, leaving you empty-handed when you have a link to an old article. To find archives of articles they deleted 20 years ago you have to hope it's been cached via one of the IP address, e.g. https://web.archive.org/web/20020309034530/http://64.12.50.2...
Say what you will about W95 and W98 but I'm still in awe that an OS that handles your basic productivity and gaming needs for the time could run with 4MB or 16 MB of RAM.
There was no Electron, so it's not that surprising.
More sincere: not sure what games you played, but Grand Theft Auto (1), definitely played better with 16MB+. Also, quake/Unreal, needed at least 32MB. Quake 3 / UnrealTournement needed at least 64MB -- 128MB was noticeably better if you didn't want to close every background service you had prior starting the game.
Upgrade? You should have installed Slackware and left all that nonsense behind.
ps. and then switched to Red Hat, and later Debian, and then Ubuntu, then Arch, followed by Manjaro, back to Debian, a short period with NixOS and then a dual install of Windows 10
Linux wasn't mass market ready back then. So much hardware was unsupported, or extremely difficult to get working. Multimedia support was severely lacking, with XAnim the only video playback option, which worked with few formats and very poorly. It wasn't until after 2000 when avifile and MPlayer came out that there was even the start of something.
Office applications were an even worse state. You could write documents in Netscape Composer, but spreadsheets were a text-only affair. Some were starting to come out, but there was no clear direction. Sun really had a huge positive impact buying StarOffice and releasing it as open source, giving the community one largely complete Office suite to focus efforts on.
I don't see the reason for the distro hopping, though. Nothing wrong with sticking with Slackware through to today. I don't, because work skews heavily towards Redhat, and managing one platform is complex enough.
Even before Sun open-sourced StarOffice or even bought StarDivision you could get StarOffice for Linux with v. 3.1. The same time period also saw Corel WordPerfect officially supported and running on Linux.
Corel was much too late in releasing their full Office suite. StarOffice was free by then. Even WordPerfect didn't have too much lead time over open source projects like AbiWord which were getting popular in the late 90s.
Looks like StarOffice for Linux didn't exist until version 3.1 was released in 1997. That's more than 2 years for someone to be running Linux (instead of Windows 95) without an office suite available. And more importantly, I didn't buy it at the time because I'd never damn well heard of it. They must have had a terrible lack of notability in the English speaking world. And in a couple more years, Sun made it free. Once open sourced, it was obviously the way to go, instead of being an also-ran.
I started with Microsoft at NT 3.51, and never used any of the Windows 3.1 -> Windows 95 -> Windows 98 -> Windows ME -> Windows XP line. I went to NT 4.0, Windows 2000, and Windows 7.
I still have a Windows 7 machine, which I really should power up to see if it still works. Everything else is Linux.
37 comments
[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 73.1 ms ] threadAfter 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.)
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.
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).
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
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
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.
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 ;)
There was no memory compression involved. RamBooster can be found here: https://www.freewarefiles.com/RamBooster-V_program_8893.html
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
More sincere: not sure what games you played, but Grand Theft Auto (1), definitely played better with 16MB+. Also, quake/Unreal, needed at least 32MB. Quake 3 / UnrealTournement needed at least 64MB -- 128MB was noticeably better if you didn't want to close every background service you had prior starting the game.
ps. and then switched to Red Hat, and later Debian, and then Ubuntu, then Arch, followed by Manjaro, back to Debian, a short period with NixOS and then a dual install of Windows 10
Office applications were an even worse state. You could write documents in Netscape Composer, but spreadsheets were a text-only affair. Some were starting to come out, but there was no clear direction. Sun really had a huge positive impact buying StarOffice and releasing it as open source, giving the community one largely complete Office suite to focus efforts on.
I don't see the reason for the distro hopping, though. Nothing wrong with sticking with Slackware through to today. I don't, because work skews heavily towards Redhat, and managing one platform is complex enough.
Looks like StarOffice for Linux didn't exist until version 3.1 was released in 1997. That's more than 2 years for someone to be running Linux (instead of Windows 95) without an office suite available. And more importantly, I didn't buy it at the time because I'd never damn well heard of it. They must have had a terrible lack of notability in the English speaking world. And in a couple more years, Sun made it free. Once open sourced, it was obviously the way to go, instead of being an also-ran.
I still have a Windows 7 machine, which I really should power up to see if it still works. Everything else is Linux.