Why Windows 95 Crashed So Often
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- Опубликовано: 30 июн 2024
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Windows 95 was a revolutionary operating system...but it was also very buggy. Here's why it, along with Windows 98 and Me, were so unstable.
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I still miss the pre-emptive multitasking kernal of the Amiga OS. It was so well made, IBM bought rights to it to develop OS/2 WARP (it's what powered their hyperthreading multitasking)
Yeah but.. at the very least it won't have the infotainment of the modern car... Which I'm convinced is a mechanical cancer at this point.. like how does it achieve so little but cost so much.. and why does it keep having increasingly essential functionality hardwired into it.. can I even use an aftermarket stereo in the modern age? I don't actually know anymore but I do know that that won't solve the climate control that's touch screen, fortunately I have knobs in this particular vehicle and fortunately unlike my 2006 Accord it's not DVD ROM based with no touch knobs, only touch screen.. and only on rare occasions of other quietness before the DVD ROM would skip when the entire system would reboot or end up in an endless boot cycle.. because someone thought it was a good idea to have DVD rom-based navigation in a vehicle that moves.. I think that was actually twice as expensive to fix then the infotainment system in my wife's Chevy, fortunately both cars died before we had to bother with either, mine was killed and hers was murdered.. and we had nothing to do with either, God just called them I guess.. don't ask me how the universe works damn it!
Why install a free app that listens to everything I type?
@ because the bartender doesn't have the heart to tell you he's been using back channels to try to get you into AA so he doesn't have to listen anymore.. and it's cheaper than a therapist and definitely cheaper than a stripper.. and unlike your therapist it'll actually remember your entire conversation in great detail... Especially if it works out to a publicity point towards automatic flagging, so much detail that will be entirely out of context to support the merits and reliability publicity potential of the algorithm and thus justify its existence.
02:00 huh, there were AmigaOS in between...mamy many years bevore Windows was there... What was multitasking agsin MS? 🤷♂️🤦♂️😅
Surprised you did not mention Registry Rot. The more you installed or uninstalled on Windows 9x, the more unstable your PC became. And the only fix was a full reformat.
Amen Wolf Amen !!!!
ahh the good ol days when formatting felt like buying a new pc
I remember formatting windows me every 6 months or so as a teen. It was a routine and felt like giving my pc a good ol shower.
Isn’t this still kind of true? When you uninstall a program there’s still files left over
@@toetie2019 Yep windoiws still slows down over time and starts having weird problems that only a clean install solves.
Dave Plummer, a developer on Windows back in the day, has a youtube channel "Dave's Garage" where he goes through a lot of old Windows stuff like this. Would love to see some sort of collab
ah yes, the "i like your funny words, magic man". his topic is really advance it makes my head hurt just trying to understand it. really good channel for someone who likes to program low level stuff.
I’m not sure that Dave would endorse this video ☺️
@@everyhandletaken Why?
Dave is a international treasure!
He's the guy who made task manager, and afaik, the 3d pinball space cadet game
USB support didn't occur until Windows 95 Service Release 2 and often needed updates from Microsoft and vendors to work. Winfow 95 was largely written in 1994 and USB was not introduced until 1996.
Windows 95 also introduced plug and play, or plug and pray, which made it much easier to install new hardware. For all its many faults, Windows 95 was a dramatic improvement over Windows 3.1. And to be honest, widows 3.11 and earlier also had memory issues.
As for running dos applications in a 32-bit environment, the best way to do so was an OS/2.
yup 100% this. Also from my Memory Windows 95 was not all that unstable. I mean we have come a long way, but it was very usable.
Yep. I still have my 3.25 disk with the Win98 drivers for USB support. It was a big deal at the time and I had multiple backup copies in case I lost one
Personally I didn’t have USB devices until windows 98 SE.
@@TenOfZero1 Compared to today Win95 was pretty unstable, it was rare that you could go more than a few days without rebooting, otherwise the thing would likely crash.
But back then? OMG was it an improvement over Win3.11 which would crash if you looked at it the wrong way.
Win95 was AWESOME for the day, it's only looking at what we have now that people would consider it 'unstable'.
@@TenOfZero1 Compared to DOS or even other OS that were around in 1995, Windows 95 was very unstable. Crashing multiply times per HOUR, that if you upgrade from Win3.11 wasn't bad at least for you.
I loved Windows 98SE (the "best" version of 95). That being said, when I switched my 98 machine to Win2K I went from a few crashes per day to one or two per month. Loved Windows 2000.
Yes but I needed an second drive for 98 as not all games ran on 2000 even cracked.
@@magnemoe1 True. Windows 2000 did have way better support for multimedia and games than NT 4 ever did. But only after Windows XP arrived did the NT kernel fully support games. Still. I've had a Windows 2000 system running as a home server for many years. With a reboot once every 6 months or so. But it ran rock solid.
Windows 2k was a nt platform/commercial platform. Windows me was the consumer platform and failed horribly and was the first merger of going to full NT to consumers. Windows XP perfects this
@@rodnemeth6766 I wouldn't call Millenium as "the first merger of going to full NT" as I don't believe it had any NT code. Windows ME was just a final version of the 9X line with a misleading name and a crippled DOS bootloader. At its core though it was still running on DOS.
Used the NT based Win2K for years on a machine that originally had 98SE and could run 99.9% of software aimed at XP (had to edit a few installers to ignore the version check, but they worked well)
@@rantsfromcanada1656 windows me did have nt code. You should idk Google it. Reason why it was so horrible.
I think a few details are slightly off here:
- Win95 didn't really share code with DOS the way some people might think: Win9x is part of the "Windows" line (a lineage separate from the "Windows NT" line), which ran on top of DOS. With its predecessor (Windows 3.11) you needed to install DOS then install Windows on top of it, but in Win95 DOS was assimilated and an updated DOS kernel (7.0) was bundled with it. There was nothing stopping a "true" 32-bit OS from starting from DOS (as it did little to nothing to prevent itself from being completely replaced), but Win9x had too much Win3.x in it, and things like the GDI subsystem were basically still 16-bit deep down.
- DOS was not built for cooperative multitasking. DOS was not built with ANY multitasking in mind. The closer to "multitasking" DOS provided were TSR (terminate and stay resident) programs. It wasn't really multitasking as an interrupt would cause the processor to execute whatever interrupt handler the TSR installed. Some softwrare used that as a sort of VERY primitive task switching, but the logic had to be done by the software itself. Windows 1.0-3.11, on the other hand, had cooperative multitasking, with Windows 3.x having a hybrid multitasking scheme in 386-enhanced mode which was improved on Windows 95.
- 16bit DOS software was subjected to preemptive multitasking if executed withing Windows. This had been the case even in Windows 3.x running in 386-enhanced mode. AFAIK every MS-DOS window had it's separate V8086 virtual machine based on a copy of the DOS environment that existed, and all 16-bit Windows applications shared a single V8086 VM and cooperatively multitasked among themselves, whereas the VMs themselves were preemptively multitasked. They could still wreck havoc, though, as things like sound and graphics drivers could allow them to directly access the hardware to mantain compatibility (and performance).
- Windows XP had, surprisingly enough, better DOS compatibility than Windows 2000, which was already much better than Windows NT 4.0. So not only the world had moved on to write 32-bit Windows apps, but the NT line itself became better at running legacy software. It was, for example, the only NT version that had some DOS sound support out of the box, through partial Sound Blaster 2.0 + MPU401 emulation.
Thanks Alex. You covered it I think. Presenting W95 as sharing DOS code is inaccurate, DOS had no baked in multitasking- preemptive or coop, and most importantly, we ALL knew who the Stones were.
Yes, DOS was single-tasking by design, even though clever programming could present the illusion of cooperative multitasking. I remember playing around with QEMM DESQview Task Manager which could successfully run several DOS programs at once in a windowed environment.
Wasn't Windows XP developed with Windows 95 engineering? I remember geeks and nerds claiming that windows XP was just a Windows 95 with better graphics
@@scuffediceposeidon9178 Windows XP (RTM) was basically Windows 2000 with a skin, prefetch and system restore. Windows 2000 was the evolution of Windows NT 4.0, with a lot of features from the Windows 9x family ported (like Direct X higher than 5, USB support, plug'n'play, etc.).
The Windows 95 line evolved into 98, 98 SE and reached a dead end with Windows ME.
@@scuffediceposeidon9178 no. Xo was based on windows NT.
But at least with 9x your computer doesn't restart at 2am and loose your work because of a windows update you didn't know was there
That must be a settings issue? This has literally never happened to me and I've been using Windows for 5 or 6 years
I have never had this happen to me, I have used windows since windows 95. Are you not saving your documents before leaving the computer it's your fault :)
Yeah you don't check your settings or idk, save your work?
I know! Windows sends a message and if it does not get approved, it goes ahead does it!
My work is always tight, never loose.
Man Jake has come so far finding his own voice. From those watching since the house days, we’re proud of you man.
I remember kickin' the crap out of the system work PC !!!!
He's still a very annoying person I can't stand
Anthony is still my favourite. He’s done out of his shell from his first video
@@BLX187 Agreed. Anthony has a lot better camera presence and confidence now. I'm just impressed with how Jake looked in this one. And generally with how he and Linus are giving each other shit like it's nothing.
Body language still off.. lot of jumping while talking
Lot of little misses in this article; failing to mention Windows 2000, the high impact of poorly written third party drivers impacting Windows (particularly printer drivers, even into the NT kernel days).
I was a sysadmin when 95 came out. Talking with colleagues at various companies including Microsoft, Usenet chatter and many IRC conversations, many more technically inclined people kept very stable Win9x builds going for years and years by avoiding the worst offenders in the third party space.
Windows 2000 was absolutely superb. Probably the best OS MS ever released.
Win2k was fantastic, and definitely the big leap forward that Jake says XP was.
@@dj_paultuk7052 I still remember the day I upgraded my uni laptop from Windows ME (that it shipped with) to Windows 2000. It was a revolution!
2k was apparently targeting businesses, but it definitely was the technological progression of taking what was in use already in 9x and making it run on NT kernel instead of DOS. This learning process is undoubtedly what made XP so great for everyone.
I remember getting a free copy of win2k at my college ( only if you took a certain course - i wanna say it was Operating Systems Design? )
I still have it and I remember it being a massive upgrade from win98
Bad drivers caused BSOD's well into the Windows XP+ days. The biggest problem was drivers unnecessarily running in kernel mode. Which meant any errors they encountered could crash the entire system. Things are better these days as most drivers run in user mode. Also improvements in the Windows NT kernel have made driver issues more manageable.
Task Manager gets highest priority at all times too, that helps a lot :D Remember back when things would make it so you couldn't even use task manager?
So nice that we dont have drivers run at kernel level today .... *cough* Valorant anti cheat *cough*
Yeah but by the time we had windows 2000 and XP it was pretty stable and reliable.
Unfortunately, the graphics stack was moved into the kernel beginning with NT 4, and remains there to this day.
@@rohansampat1995 I believe Valorant anti-cheat was near universally based upon for opening us up to the same issues that past kernel-mode drivers did.
I remember Windows ME having a VXD mod that would split the kernel up into the individual components that Windows 95 and Windows 98 had.. it really increased the stability of Windows ME. It's also important to note that Windows 2000 was supposed to have a Home version (ME was never supposed to come out), but the backward compatibility layer wasn't finished in time.
When Windows 2000 came out, it became my main OS for me and my friends. It was unbelievably more stable then Windows 98, and I don't remember any compatibility issues with Win9x games on Windows 2000... there was really no reason to run Windows ME unless you had a 3Dfx card.. 3Dfx's Win2k drivers weren't quiet as good as their Win9x drivers.
"it really increased the stability of Windows ME"
Everybody knows WinME was the biggest POS in MS' history
Sue your dealer
I always had problems with speeds on the AGP bus with Windows 2000. I ended up always having a dual boot with the 98SE for games only. Probably the drivers at the time of GeForce 3 and 4 were not optimized for Windows 2000.
There is no reason to choose windows ME over 98se.
@@9852323 I'm skip ME and Vista ahuauhahuauh.
"stability of Windows ME" should never appear in a sentence :D .. In my experience Windows ME was the most unstable piece of garbage out of the whole 9x family, sometimes with multiple crashes a day just doing every day things.
No. By far the larger issue was that while the OS was pre-emptive 32bit to some degree the shell was 16bit and not re-entrant. What this meant was the shell would hang and people would think (legitimately the machine had crashed. Oddly it hadn't, plenty of the OS was still running. It was designed IIRC that you would press clt+alt+del once, wait, do it again, wait and IIRC it would restart explorer and you would find your apps still running. The design flaw was if you do did ctrl+alt+del 3 times quickly in a row it would reboot the PC. This was documented in all the internal MS training material we used to support win95 on day one - but of course this was a silly design decision and no where did the OS tell users there was a way to keep the PC running. This was not an issue caused by running on top of DOS. #iwasthereonday1
Wait, really? On my work computer, I'm occasionally suffering desktop crashes due to insufficient RAM and having to use "RUN" to restart explorer.exe. I showed a coworker how to do it a month ago after he was complaining about "the Black Screen of Death" on his workstation. My situation sounds oddly similar to what you're describing...
@@c182SkylaneRG your issue is slightly different sounds like you have a leaky process - probably something that hooks explorer and possibly adds something the right click menu - only fix is to uninstall the bad app. for black screen of death or really weird issues and if you are on win10 or win11 they pressing ctrl+shift+win+B - this resets the display driver and by extension the composition engine in windows (which was first introduced in vista) - good luck
@@scytob It's a work computer, which the IT dept has locked down pretty tight, but I'll give that a try. Thanks! (The issue also went away when I added more RAM to the machine. They had it equipped with 8 GB, which they made it sound like was our local IT dept violating the lease agreement's specification of 4GB... I brought it up to 24 GB, and it seems to settle around 11 or 12 GB RAM usage, so at 8GB it was definitely bottlenecking).
@@c182SkylaneRG lol IT depts are the cause of at least 75% of windows issues IMHO. Yes putting more ram would defintely help as the process can leak more and not impact - pragmatic fix 🙂
Definitely agree that the shell was buggy in Windows 95:
"explorer.exe has performed an illegal operation and will be shutdown"
I think it automatically restarted, but with the systray icons gone (except the clock).
Great vid! I went from "a do everything tech" engineer, lab tech, company computer guy with 12 users, to being an IT manager at a company (1999) with 70 users... all running Windows 98 with Novell 3.x. OMG what a nightmare! Phrase of the day was- when in doubt, reboot it out! Sometimes we forget how far we have come 🙂
Windows 95 runs rock stable for me, once I fed any Win95 system enough ram, namely 4 or more megabytes (yes, megabytes, not gigabytes). With 8mb, it is great. The only step beyond that to help stability and performance was creating a dedicated partition for the page file. If you had multiple hard drives, you put the page file on the non-Windows system drive. You could prevent a lot of bottleneck issues that could cause instability that way. Programs being on yet another partition helped, too. All of this was possible if you spent some money on RAM (granted, it wasn't cheap then), and time to set up the partitions and set the locations (environment variables) for your Program Files directory, and the page file. My Win95 boxes would stay up and running for WEEKS. Couldn't say that about Win98SE. Only MS OS that finally beat it for stability was Win2k, with its rock solid NT base.
Edit: Oh, and Win95 did NOT require 4mb of RAM. It recommended it, for now obvious reasons. My father's system with its EDO RAM was running only 2mb, and when I swapped in a couple of 2mb sticks, suddenly it ran superbly. Every system I built after that had 4mb minimum.
is windows 95 nt
@@handlesrtwitterdontbelivethem Nope.
i actually had a 98 SE box running a mIRC bot get 198 days of uptime, it eventually crashed due to a memory leak in the screensaver eating up all 16mb
win95 was hopelessly unstable if you were online for more than about 20mins.
I used to dual boot - NT for internet etc and 95 only for games.
32mb ram and a p200mmx
@@mattsword41 I had a similar spec setup and never had major issues. I did do things like the OP said and put the swap file on another drive at set it to 2.5x the amount of ram I had. Only my brother and I ever used it and we knew to limit the amount of stuff installed and running. Keeping the system tray and startup items as light as possible was a great hobby of mine. I loathed programs that would automatically set themselves to load on startup🤣
Thanks for doing more retro content across LTT channels! I enjoy these trips down memory lane. :)
my first real PC was a win98 machine, and it was magical. Watching tv, recording and editing music, watching 700MB divx rips, all on the 19' CRT...
I long for the days when CRT stood for "cathode ray tube"
What does it mean now?
Win95, and especially Win98se were always very stable for me. Mind, the fact that I wasn't anywhere near a power user at that time, plus they were never connected to the net, may have something to do with it.
Most people in the 95 days had dial up... So, not always on the internet but, connecting to BBS's or AOL (the big one at the time) would happen but, very limited...
Internet Explorer was a stability time bomb back then, so not connecting to the internet (and not installing the IE4 shell update) might've helped xD
This was a really good one. Loving these deep dives into the older tech that was predominant when I was a young kid. Any chance we could look at the various different DOSes that were available through the 80s and 90s, as well as all the different Windows OSes that were available to run over these DOSes? Could make for an interesting Techlonger series.
I remember well. Back in the Windows 98 days, I reinstalled Windows almost on a monthly basis to keep it as stable as I could.
Ahh the good ole days.... I didn't reinstall quite that often but anytime my computer even hinted at not working flawlessly I would format and install windows again. That's why I always, even to this day, had 1 drive for OS and programs and another for files...makes reinstalling windows soooo much easier.
Thank goodness for win98 se
TRUEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE... a friend of mine knew when i formated my computer because everytime i formated the background image was diferent XD even i didn't done that in purpose it was really a thing !
But i kept doing 1 month format until i got into win 7 and 1 month~3 month started to be... but that was until i got an SSD and everything changed and most of the time is like "i need to format but whatever lets continue with this" XD
Yep, this caused me to partition my HDD to keep the OS and my filrs seperate. If the OS tanks, so what, scrape & reinstall, maybe a few cuss words and an hour (two tops) of my time. (now if the HDD tanked would be another story... which I never experienced...)
@@youdontknowme5969 Oh yeah Partitions ofc... i do that since i know about them until 2013 or so...
But my first partition was with a 20GB HDD where i used 6GB for windows and the rest as storage.. dayum... good ol'times
I still have W95 installed on an HP Omnibook 800CT laptop. Still use it to play the original C&C on original hardware. As somebody who was still using Windows 3.11 on my work PC, W95 was a delight.
With this piece it just points out to me how ahead of their time the Amiga line of home computers were. They had a colour graphical interface for their operating system (Workbench) which included features like pre-emptive multi-tasking as far back as the late 1980's. Unfortunately Commodore (who made these computers) went bust due to mismanagement issues back in 1994 which caused the end of this computer line just before the rest of the world started to catch on to these features.
I guess the Amiga was really a Unix-workstation-wannabe.
Amigas never had preemptive multitasking. They were based on Motorolla 68000 CPU which didn't support multitasking.
@@IkarusKommt And yet, Unix workstations did do preemptive multitasking on exactly those chips.
@@lawrencedoliveiro9104 Nope, they used a number of coprocessors to emulate multitasking.
@@IkarusKommt You use that word, “multitasking”. I do not think it means what you think it means.
Fun fact: Issues with cooperative multitasking were also what made Classic Mac OS so unstable. It didn't get proper preemptive multitasking until OS X released in 2001. Windows 10/11 and MacOS aren't perfect (especially Windows with its bloat and spyware), but it really is glorious how rare you get a BSOD or kernel panic nowadays.
It's an interesting comparison, actually: Windows NT was born partly from OS/2, partly from a ground-up attempt to make a graphical UNIX-based OS.
OSX, on the other hand, was born out of NeXT's work on making a GUI-based UNIX based on BSD
Both were even POSIX-compliant!
Not as buggy as triple A games
As a user of 3.11 Windows 95 was very welcome. I had a lot more problems with the W98, which only stabilized on the W98SE. For a long time I used the 98SE for gaming and the 2000, which was extremely stable, for work. When XP came out it took over both tasks as it was stable to work with and compatible for gaming.
I really loved my Windows 2000 Professional back in the day.
More secure than XP too. You could usually boot into XP as administrator, because most people didn't put an administrator password in ! 2000, you forget your password, tough cookies . Reformat time . And the just install disk and do a "dirty reinstall " didn't work. It still kept the password...
Win2K, I had exactly ONE Crash for all the time I used it, and it was the program I had to write for my college class that crashed W2K, the program wouldn't crash W9X since it had crappy memory protection. Also winning a FREE copy of Win2K from MS was great also. 1 of 6000 free copies they gave out.
There was also DOS's roots in the 8086 architecture, which had no concept of memory management or process isolation. No operating system could add safe multitasking without those in hardware. MS had a very spotty record of making use of the 386 when it arrived with MMU and privileges (Windows/386,, anyone? Didn't think so). And a lot of MS energy went into lock-in and control rather than making the world better for developers, developers, developers,.
This was nostalgic! I remember hitting all of these problems as they were invented. i even had the issue where the hardware was so fast, the system would time out before the disk could spin up. There was a patch to make the loop longer.
I don't really remember Windows 95 crashing more than other Windows OS. I do know it was the only one I bought an upgrade for. (Windows 95 to Windows 98) so maybe I'm just misremembering. Windows XP Pro and Windows XP MCE were the only two operating systems that I used for over ten years. (DVRs and Smart TVs made XP MCE computers obsolete.) The laptop (that I bought new) for my stereo is still running XP Pro. It is no longer connected to the internet since it is just used for Serato Scratch Live (Rane SSL1).
Its a bit misleading, as until Windows 95 you wouldn't dream of running Windows without a reboot for particularly long. Plus obviously it depends how intensively you multi-tasked which varies person to person. My personal memory is that everything before XP was fairly unstable, but even XP wasn't as good as people remember. It got better over time with service packs, especially once you could install an ISO with SP3 already installed.
I never felt like it was that unstable. And frankly, it was such an improvement from Windows 3.1 & 3.11 that I didn't mind :)
Now that I think about it, I reinstalled it more than a few time.
If you fed Win95 the recommended (not required as they state here) 4mb or more of RAM, it was rock stable. Page file swaps would murder both performance and stability.
@@sireuchre 8 MB or more.
You can tell a kid wrote this script and has probably never touched Win 9X in their life. I never had these issues.
Yeah, it doesn't ring very true, but then again, it was a long time ago, I was only 15... so my perception may be wrong.
My Windows 95 and NT PC didn’t crash that much either when I was using it. I think it has 64MB of RAM.
Everyone who had windows 95 saw the buddy holly video
There were a few things that made Win9X a bit more stable... my process back in the day (And now, since I still have 2 Win98 machines)
1. Reinstall OS every 6 months to a year at longest.
2. Reinstall OS when changing or adding major hardware (change video card? reinstall)
3. Shut down properly every day even though starting up takes time.
4. Restart after program or driver installs - it actually wants to do this and asks - go ahead, it does help.
5. Program crash? Even if it recovers semi-gracefully, restart anyway.
6. Actually track driver versions and compatibility, when reinstalling, use that info.
To my understanding the main problem with Windows operating systems before NT-kernel was that while Windows NT, 2000, XP and other modern operating systems create a virtualization layer between hardware and programs and do not allow software to do whatever it wants (I believe this applies to driver side as well to some extent), DOS based Windows systems were stable only as long as software you ran worked fine and followed the rules despite there not being any "enforcement" to do so by the operating system. Still, in my experience most issues people had, of which they always blamed Windows, were more often caused by broken hardware, bad drivers, viruses or some poorly written program. I don't recall having that many issues with Windows back then, atleast since Win98, nor later.
Amiga Workbench and SGI Irix also have Pre-emptive multitasking. And it actually worked
There were quite a problems not related to dos at all too.
For example, there are a lot of bugs related to the fact they tried to squeeze Windows 95 into 4MB of memory on the last lap of the development.
One of em is that there is a limit on how many windows you can have open before running out of the tiny memory allocated for the list of windows, and on windows every control is a window as well with a special parameter that make it behaves like a control. So if you have a windows with 30 elements, that's 31 windows being used on the table.
And if you somehow manage to keep Win95 running straight for 2 weeks, it will crash due a counter that rolls back and a lot of drivers etc use it.
GDI handles were 16 bit that's 65535 at most but divided by 2 and without 0 only 32232 handles remained. An icon to draw is a GDI object handle, drawing the icon in memory is an handle, blitting the memory dc to graphic card is another and GDI leaks were common.
Thanks for not being one of those long and drawn out video I loved it
Windows 2000 was the first nt based consumer operating system ^^ although it was a short period about 1 year and mainly a beta test for windows xp... I liked 2000 the most because it was the last windows that had a simple but strong ui with strict structure.... the features of nt sunce then were more and more simplified in a way that even the stupidest child could change permissions and so on. And other things were made simplified but more complex for AD.
2000 was not really an home system however, yes it was for professional use, NT was server and workstation only as it was so much dos software around who demanded direct access to hardware and would not work.
I seem to remember there were 3 releases of Win95. 95a Which needed DOS installed first, Then Win95 installed on top. Win95b Which installed on a blank machine straight off CD. And Win95c which installed directly off CD and had USB support out of the box.
Once i noticed how stable windows 2000 (NT) was over windows ME (DOS), I just decided to use windows 2000 instead, in the year 2000, and now XP to Windows 11, are Windows NT based
They changed the kernel in Vista, that created issues, mostly with security, the NT kernel was not designed for the treats internet brings so it needed to change.
one of the things that people forgot to tell is that you must turn of your computer by really pushing the power on off button after you click shutdown... another great thing that was possible till xp , was giving users the ability to upgrade-repair windows for installation disk rather than the running OS which makes fixing OS without losing data much easier when your windows won't boot at all.
Just to put it into perspective for youngsters out there, simple things as moving files around using multiple explorers could result in Blue Screen. Highlighting files in multiple windows would result in crash. And DOS hardware installation often broke Windows Drivers. And so on.
Jeez, looks like this was really tough back then...
@@gunlyrics Nah you could just get a Mac and laugh at all that misery.
Not mentioning Windows 95's "Plug & Play" feature is a huge miss of this video. It was the biggest feature by far outside of the Star Button for the OS. It was actually better to remove DOS hardware installation in most cases as the Windows Plug & Play could handle everything if it had the correct drivers. You only really need DOS hardware installation if you planned on running DOS stuff (which for games, was a must around Windows 95's launch).
@@disklamer true
@@gunlyrics I will never recover, it was so bad, you couldn't grasp to understand, cruelty isn't even the right word.
Got my 9x machine under my xp machine both next to my windows 10 machine all with the same keyboard mouse and monitors on switches. Amazing how much stuff can work on older hardware/software, or just how new of a computer you can get 9x on if you really want it bad enough.
Techquickie: Why Windows 95 Crashed So Often
Everybody: It was not yet Windows XP
02:12 nice edit in the tv reflection
I'm glad that you quickly addressed this timely issue.
Awesome video & very well said. it's funny because I knew this back in 90s lol
I am so sorry, but wasn't Windows 2000 earlier than Windows XP and used NT-technologies, too?
Windows 2000 was corporate targeted not consumer. But many consumers ran 2000 as it was more stable.
Yes, but there was no Windows 2000 Home Edition.
Yes, Windows 2000 was on the NT kernel, but was generally not installed on consumer grade hardware. That was Windows ME which was garbage. Windows XP was the first consumer focused NT based operating system.
Yes, and Win2K and WinXP were both NT-based.
Windows 2000, Windows XP and all following windows versions are the continuation of NT.
What you mean is that with Windows 2000 they tried to unify Windows NT with Windows 9X.
But the incompatibility was still so big that they had to release Windows ME.
"Good Times, Bad Times"... by Edie Brickell ...loved that little video that came with Win95 !
Not just buggy and crashed a lot, but so unstable it required *regular* re-installations due to show-stopping corruption. I can't count how many times I had to reinstall Windows95 both hands and feet. Got really good at it and streamlined the process - MS-DOS via floppy, then CD-ROM drivers via floppy, maybe the dos based sound drivers, then Win95 and it's subsequent service packs. The advent of bootable CD-ROMs and then install via USB was such a quantum leap in ease of install.
Conversely, I only ever installed WindowsXp ONCE. Built a computer in 2004 and used that same install until 2010 when I picked up a gateway running Windows 7 at Best Buy - a surprisingly good machine for its price that only needed a better GPU. Six years for a single installation of Windows has to be some kind of record. Sure, it probably crashed more than a couple times, but it never, ever, ever required a reinstall. Amusingly enough, that computer which I called 'Luminous', because it was one of the first to have light effects in the case, died within a week or so of getting the Gateway. I like to think it died of a broken heart, but by that time, the hardware was really struggling with any kind of modern gaming.
More Jake & Anthony = wins ;D Every presenter has their own way of doing stuff but it's great seeing the progress all LTT members have made with good coaching/guidance
You guys should do a video about GeoWorks GEOS and Ensemble. It was superior to Windows 3.x in stability and speed, the graphical DOS AOL client was built using its libraries. The UI was easier on the eyes too, it looked like CDE/Motif.
Why did Windows beat it?
@@naamadossantossilva4736 see Bill Gates The Godfather Of Tech Industry, a 10 hour episode 😳
Wow, that Jake reflection in the monitor at 2:11 is sweeeeet! And the memory graphic at 4:06. Neat editing!
Windows NT 4 was for businesses, not home users. It wasn't until Windows XP that we had a stable version for home users and it was a true OS as it is not on ODS
I always built my own systems and had very few problems with window 95 or 98.
AmigaOS in 1984 Pre emptive multi tasking. Windows 95 smoke and mirrors. 17 Years later microsoft caught up.
Amiga was a masterclass in “how to mess up a sure thing”. What a great hardware and OS platform.
I recall that Windows 2000 was on a lot of standard computers when it was released as well, not just for business computers. Our Dell ran it for many years.
Windows Me was... wow, it was wonky. A friend's Gateway computer came with it and all I could think of was "Is this a Tonka product?" Everything was so rounded, bright and colorful like a child's toy. I was proud then (and still am) to have the more simplified design of Classic.
Windows 95 was a fast improvement over Win3.11 and Win3.1, and far far less prone to crash. And the distinction between DOS (windows) and Win16 applications needs to be made. The DOS box was quite stable (actually being a pre-empted 32bit app running 16bit DOS apps - remember thunking?), old 16bit programs with shims often created by MS for Win95 (yes - for 3rd party apps) were more problematic. The new office applications (Office 95) were very good. Windows 95 was an absolute turning point for Windows. Many businesses were still using DOS because of Windows 3 stability concerns well into the 90s. Windows 95 changed the perception, and quite quickly caused the demise of applications like Lotus 1-2-3 and Word Perfect as businesses moved away from DOS. And having set up and maintained an office of 75+ Windows 95 PCs for an accounting practice in 1996, I can attest that there were very few issues with stability. Though we did have the best in tech at the time, Trinitron 15 inch monitors, 8Mb of ram on a 486.
windows 95 crash speed run:
con/con in the run command
your welcome
I assure you, almost nobody used USB in the 1990s even when it was available. It was PS/2 for the KB and Mouse along with Parallel for the printer all the way
Being a 40 year old tech nerd makes me laugh at these videos. I lived these times. It was great because it was better than dos. In college we all had windows 2000/ nt because it was more stable… not really but we thought so
drivers are sometimes still a nightmare makes you wonder if its because windows is still awfull
I recall my pc crashing back then, but that may have been down to me just using one program at a time. I did notice an increased rate of crashing on newer releases of windows for a few years or so.
The integration of Explorer.exe as both a file manager *and* a web-browser left it extraordinarily vulnerable in '98 also.
To this day I have not forgiven ID Software for forcing me to upgrade to XP just so I can play Doom 3.
Windows 2000 also ran Doom 3
@@fungo6631 I said I wanted to play Doom. Not be doomed.
@@InhalingWeasel What?
@@fungo6631 There's this old joke about Win 2000 being horrible.
@@InhalingWeasel Isn't the horrible one Windows Me?
2:13 I really liked the reflection effect. Well done 👌🏻
Win98SE was the "just right" version.
WinMe went too far.
95 and 98 didn't crash much so I dont know where your getting ur info from!
My source is that i pulled it out my a...
Went from win95, to win98, and about midway through 98's life, I switched to Win2000. Holy crap...that OS was incredible. Kept that up until midway through the winXP days, in 2007. I still have an older machine that still has 2k on it.
Yep, my father used Win2k well into the 2010s and before he stopped using it I virtualized his installation for posterity (his installation started off as a Win95 box being upgraded first to 98 then 2k, so it had a lot of legacy software on it).
I’d like to see some videos on pro audio, and recording studios: like audio interfaces, microphones, headphones, studio monitors, cables, mixers, etc…
i 2nd this
Windows 2000 used the NT kernel and was a brilliant OS, it also came before XP, come on guys get the facts right
Exactly!! How did they forget that W2k started out as NT5!?! Poor production.
You guys don't have good listening skills. Jake said XP was the first NT based OS aimed at the HOME user. Which is correct. Windows 2000 was aimed at the workplace.
@@natedavis82 I used it at home. It was stable.
Ah… what nostalgia…
Having Jake present this… way before he was born… 🤔
That is a little bit weird 😂 didn’t a recent video say he was born in 2000?? 😂
W98SE with the unofficial Service Packs from the community was the PEAK. I remember using it well into the XP era, depending on a machine being used as I had a few in parallel. I even used it for a home server and it was stable enough.
This reminds me of the days with IRQ setting issues and more fun win 95 stuff.
Back in the day during the short time it was relevant, we called Windows ME Windows MEstake.
We called it Windows (M)emory (E)ater.
Hey! The Pontiac Bonneville was a way nicer car in it's day, than Windows 9X was as an OS during it's reign of terror.
I still drive an '85 Bonneville. I will never own a vehicle newer than 1986, that's when they became flaming garbage.
@@garmancathotmailcom Hear hear. I had an old Pontiac Grand Prix, which was like the Bonneville's little brother.
I felt nostalgic when you show the space cadet pin ball game. How about talking about memory evolution? EDO RAM, extended ram and its limitations back in the day?
I'm surprised to hear you say this, as Windows 98 has far and away been the most stable version of Windows I've EVER used. Every other version of Windows I've used has crashed on multiple occasions -- even Windows 7 and 10 -- but over the many years I used it, Windows 98 never once crashed for me that I can recall.
Now, granted, it may have been the specific system and programs I was using at the time, as well as my computing style (I was raised on MS-DOS and, frankly, prefer command-line interfaces, so even today, I don't really multi-task much, generally focusing on one thing at a time as much as possible), but even so, I have a real soft spot in my heart for Windows 98. As far as I'm concerned, it was the last (and arguably only) truly good version of Windows, and certainly was the last to be fully backwards-compatible with MS-DOS programs of old (which was, and still is, important to me as a retro computing enthusiast).
I guess it's all a matter of perspective!
Thanks for showing East German computers at 2:15. These definitely would not have run Windows 95 though.
Whoever is your editor is definitely not in touch with 90's hardware, but at least they accidentally picked interesting stock footage like soviet block computers.
Jake is quickly turning into one of my favorite hosts at LMG.
Very cool presentation Jake!
There was also a lot of 16 bit code still in 95, often around GDI. That came from the Windows 3.1 code base and there were semaphores to prevent reentrancy problems... which kind of worked a lot of the time.
Meanwhile, Linux desktop has been running like Windows over Dos since it's inception. You can launch any desktop environment you want from a linux terminal.
This a great video, I learn alot watching your
videos and it has been helpful to me. building
steady income is quite difficult for newbies.
Thanks to Sophia for improving my portfolio,
keep up with good videos.
The Chicago95 theme for XFCE does a nice job with the classic looks on Linux as well
my favorite part of this vid is seeing all the old throw back websites/news ESPECIALLY @ 4:42 haha
I put it on about 80 machines when it came out and had very few crashes. But I did find some hardware drivers, mainly graphics, were often buggy, Cirrus Logic comes to mind - just used the Microsoft SVGA one and all was good.
How I made my father upgrade our family PC back in the day when it had Win 95 while XP already had been released:
I unplugged the thing, left it at our corridor, got some steps behind, dashed towards the thing and kicked it.
The MoBo snapped in half.
I proceeded to place the thing back at it's place and patiently waited for my spanking for late at night when he arrived from work.
Next week we had a better PC.
I wont regret this even after 20+ years later.
Memory leaks were the main issue that caused the OS to crawl over time.
There was an add-on called Professor 95, or similar, that made mouse clicks deliver instant responses.
8 MB RAM was very slow. 24 MB was very fast.
I remember there was also a hardware limit of cpu clock speed in the early versions. Something like 300-400mhz
Windows 95 was a very reliable file server. We used it in our business for over ten years and only gave up when we could not find drivers for the new components installed in new PCs we bought. I was told about W95 reliability as a file server from an IT consultant who had used it without problems for many clients. It is always good fun to malign Windows!
Coincidentally, LGR just released a video about the GameCam and he struggled to install the program and driver there because it always result of BSOD
The problem that I remember having with the old win98 desktop I used to have wasn't with the OS, but the power switch for the monitor got so worn out that when I was able to get it to stay on, I had to remember to leave it on when I was done and power it down at the surge protector instead. I mean sure there were probably shinanagans like this was about it was a hand me down after all, but the monitor was what I really remember along with the blasted trackball mouse that was more often then not gummed up and the like.
I remember this era. It was crazy times. I had no idea where this was going when computers and the internet first became a thing. I would have invested a lot diffrently back then if I had..
back in the day, I had Windows ME installation running for 5 years of daily use. Still feel a sense of pride, that I kept it alive so long.
I ran W95, W98 and even (yes) ME without significant issues. Before that I ran W3.1x and even DOS with things like DESQview to allow some sort of multi tasking. Never had any major stability issues once things were properly set up. But then, I wasn't trying to run games...
Great overview. Thanks
Kicking the tower usually came right after "have you tried turning it off and on again" and sometimes it worked. Aaaah, these were simpler times.
I knew exactly when to jiggle my mouse for windows to boot without crashing..
Thanks for that. Now I know why about half the Help Desk calls I received could only be resolved by restarting the computer.
"You always say to restart."
Well, because I've tried everything else and you're still getting the error.
I remember us actually taking out computer to the computer store we bought it from, and having them downgrade our Windows 98 back down to Windows 95, because the latter was less buggy. In retrospect, it's hard to know if that was really necessary, but it probably was an instance of an older but seasoned OS being more stable than a new one. Win 98 did get much more stable, though, even before Win 98 SE, and when I look back, I'm amazed how much I managed to get done on it.
It probably was, Win98 is where the MEME of odd/even Windows releases being good/bad came from. Win95 was a huge improvement, 98 was buggy, 98SE was pretty good, ME was buggy, etc. Although the MEME was never quite accurate due to service packs, as I recall XP SP1 things started to get a bit iffy and XP didn't reach its peak stability until SP3 I think?