Best/worst Windows version ever?

***** WEIRD REQUEST! *****

If anyone coming to TAM has a complete Microsoft Windows ME kit in its original box and can bear to part with it, please let me know! We are looking for a functioning(!) version to have in our computer museum (we are trying to get one example of each OS). Would you believe - WinME been the most UNinstalled product here ever, and the kits must now occupy many hectares of landfill...and we can't find one!
 
My favorites:

Windows 95B edition: Before the unholy abomination that was Internet Explorer 4.0 had been melded to it like a face-sucker in Aliens. This was one of those rare times in personal computing that the typical hardware platform was powerful enough to run the popular version of Windows without too much pausing or chugging.

Aside from that... Window 98 SE (on a good enough machine)... and then Windows XP.

2000 was OK, just didn't wind up using it a whole lot.
 
Zep said:
***** WEIRD REQUEST! *****

If anyone coming to TAM has a complete Microsoft Windows ME kit in its original box and can bear to part with it, please let me know! We are looking for a functioning(!) version to have in our computer museum (we are trying to get one example of each OS). Would you believe - WinME been the most UNinstalled product here ever, and the kits must now occupy many hectares of landfill...and we can't find one!
Click to expand...

(shhhhh.....it's because the aliens have beamed all existing copies to Planet X....)
 
Red Siegfried said:
Let me get this straight. There are actually people claiming that Windows ME is worse than Windows 95 or Windows 3.1 or 3.0 or older? Put down the crackpipe and come back to reality. Or is it just that we have 16 year olds here who have never used those versions?

Sure Windows ME wasn't great, but not because it didn't work (in my experience, it worked fine) but because it did almost nothing new compared to the previous incarnation (Windows 98). Windows 98 SE was the height of the Win9X family and Windows ME was just a completely unnecessary solution to a problem no one had.

But worse than Windows 95 or Windows 3.1? Puhleeze. I sense elitism.
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It is also evidence of how unreliable memory is.
 
I can say I never personally had many issues with WindowsME however a lot of my colleagues and friends did and I had a lot of problems (mainly nasty compatibility problems) with some software for a little while.
 
Zep said:
I can sell you an unopened box of OS/2 Warp if you like! We have a dozen in our computer museum...
Click to expand...

And IBM probably have a few more million somewhere!

I still have most of my floppies for it (I think), along with the what a dozen or so floppies for a Windows 95 installation. (I can no longer use those discs - because they are an upgrade path installation so they need a working 3.x Windows installation or setup disc which I can't find oh and none of my PCs have a 3.5 floppy drive.)
 
Remember the introduction of MSDOs 4?!!?!!? Now that was a pile of smelly stuff and one of MS's worse releases ever.
 
XP is fine for most users provided they don't care that computing won't get any better in their lifetime. It's stable - almost all problems are caused, as with any OS, by 3rd party drivers and software. If the architecture was sound, though, that wouldn't be a problem, and the OS would be one that could be used in a century :)

Worst version is either 95 or ME. 95 was undoubtedly worse than ME but, well, ME should have known better after half a decade, really.

Ian Osborne said:
Anyone have any experience of pre-3.1 Windows, which I'm told barely functioned?
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Sure
When I arrived at my sixth-form college, they were in the process of upgrading Windows to version 3, then later 3.11, but I don't remember much about the previous OS. We just used DOS anyway. And I had GEM desktop on my PC at home, though I never saw the point in this whole GUI thing. It obviously had no future, etc.

El Greco said:
when messing with asm programming I'm pretty sure I can freeze pretty much every OS
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Unless you're re-writing the kernel this should be impossible on any modern computer hardware running a well-designed OS.
Yes, it's possible to crash Windows and Linux. But it shouldn't be.
 
Darat said:
Remember the introduction of MSDOs 4?!!?!!? Now that was a pile of smelly stuff and one of MS's worse releases ever.
Click to expand...

Yes, I remember that they couldn't get a lot of PC Manufacturers to bundle it in because it used up so much memory that customer's programs wouldn't run. For ages DOS 3.3 ruled!
 
Are there any simulators/emulators of these ancient old OSs, that wouldn't require an actual installation into a windows partition or something? I'd quite like to try the old programs I remember from school on Win3.11, and ancient versions of Word, and stuff. Just for old time's sake.

I learnt the word "abandonware" from this thread, but looking over some abandonware sites, I'm a bit wary of installing programs called things like "CPUkill" to "slow your computer down to 286 speed", and so forth. And sound patches, and pre-DirectX graphics extensions, and so forth. I'm scared of all that stuff.

Isn't there a nice easy way to do it, like my ZX Spectrum emulator?
 
IIRC MS-DOS 4 was blamed on IBM shoving stuff in, TSRs or something? IBM's DOS 6 was excellent.

Aaahhh OS/2's extended file attributes. Wonderful stuff that MS still hasn't caught up on.

My favourite DOS extender (QDOS????) was to allow an XT to run multiple 3270 sessions via something called MYTE. This fitted on a 5.25 floppy. You started it by typing "myte 4" for 4 sessions and it figured everything else out. IBM released it as Personal Communications and added value, like forcing you to enter the MAC address of you LAN card and all the other stuff that it used to just figure out itself.
 
I don't know about comparing ME to 3.11 (I had enough experience with 3.11, but they are two different animals with different types of demands placed on them) but in my experience the 95-98-ME series grew progressively worse, not better. I think one thing you have to look at though, is whether the OS was an upgrade or OEM. I know people who "upgraded" to 98 and then rolled back to 95 because of unresolvable problems. In my own workplace, I found 98 to be fraught with problems, whether upgraded or OEM, but much more so if it was an upgrade. ME just seemed to be very slow and uncooperative, and that was as an OEM on a brand new computer! I held out with 95B on my own machine until it was time for a whole new machine (forget upgrading). W2000 is one of the hardiest versions I've used. Even my boss never managed to crash 2000 (real-life equivalent of Dilbert's boss), so that's quite a testament right there. I will say for XP that it seems that "plug-and-play" has finally come into reality. 2000 was pretty good at that too, but before that, getting any new hardware meant you might well be spending a day and half trying to convince Windows that it really was there and you really did mean to put it there.
 
Nucular said:
Are there any simulators/emulators of these ancient old OSs, that wouldn't require an actual installation into a windows partition or something? I'd quite like to try the old programs I remember from school on Win3.11, and ancient versions of Word, and stuff. Just for old time's sake.

I learnt the word "abandonware" from this thread, but looking over some abandonware sites, I'm a bit wary of installing programs called things like "CPUkill" to "slow your computer down to 286 speed", and so forth. And sound patches, and pre-DirectX graphics extensions, and so forth. I'm scared of all that stuff.

Isn't there a nice easy way to do it, like my ZX Spectrum emulator?
Click to expand...

For Dos there's "DOSBOX" which has a speed control that works better than most applets I've found such as moslo
 
Agreed. DOSbox with the DFend front end works great for "emulating" DOS, right down to working well with modern sound cards and CDROMS. Not perfect, but good.
 
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