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Windows 96

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171–180 of 332 posts

Re: Windows 96

#171

Pretty. :) Gives me PTSD-like flashbacks to the time when I was tasked with installing Windows 95 on 50+ computers on the local school. For the young(er), Windows was on 14-ish 3.5" floppy disks, and I had to do some heavy calculation and logistics copying those discs while installing the OS to make my effort as efficient as possible. IIRC, I managed to keep the installing cyclus going on 28 computers at a time, and…

I had the install disks copied to a Novell server and then xcopied them to c:\install\win95\ and then ran setup in that directory. It went faster than swapping floppies.

Re: Windows 96

#174

Pretty. :) Gives me PTSD-like flashbacks to the time when I was tasked with installing Windows 95 on 50+ computers on the local school. For the young(er), Windows was on 14-ish 3.5" floppy disks, and I had to do some heavy calculation and logistics copying those discs while installing the OS to make my effort as efficient as possible. IIRC, I managed to keep the installing cyclus going on 28 computers at a time, and…

I had a Windows 95 Update CD and had to insert a Win 3.11 install disc every time to verify valid installation...

It looks for a WIN.INF file on disk 1, you could make a blank WIN.INF and it would still work.

Re: Windows 96

#175
post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think it is nostalgia, I'd say that Windows 2000 was the peak when it comes to usability, and XP, Vista and 7 made it prettier, taking advantage of improved graphics hardware. And then Windows 8 arrived and broke everything. It is easy to find the culprit: tablets, and mobile devices in general, and to a lesser extent, web apps. Mobile devices needed a new kind of UI, something suitable for small touch screen…

> Mobile devices needed a new kind of UI, something suitable for small touch screens. People tried things... Exactly this. The flat "Metro" UI style was initially modeled and developed on Windows Phone 7, and for what it did, it was (imho) a great way to use a phone. Then the rest of microsoft took what that group was doing and made it one-size-fits-all UI for everything windows.

> The flat "Metro" UI style was initially modeled and developed on Windows Phone 7,

Originally it was for Zune, which inspired Windows Phone 7, and then it was horrifically mangled for Windows 8.

WP7 Metro had a ton of affordances to make the phone easy to use, things like scrollable pages of content should always show a peek of content that is below the current view, so users know there is more content down below.

Common sense stuff that has been forgotten. :(

Re: Windows 96

#176
post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Windows 95/98 definitely decayed over time. Especially after installing stuff like AOL and RealPlayer, your system was like a disgusting cesspool of random trash. I distinctly remember nuking the entire thing would noticeably increase my frame rate in stuff like Homeworld lol

To day I still factory reset my PC and my phone about once a year, just to keep them fresh. I have no idea if it's still helpful with modern a OS.

I used to reinstall Windows XP to squeeze a few extra points on 3D Mark 2001

Re: Windows 96

#177
post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Back in those days re-formatting and re-installing Windows was a very common thing because usually the system would get into some kind of bad state after several months of usage (or at least mine did). I believe I only had a Windows 98 'Upgrade' CD, which could not be used to install on a bare system. This meant I had to first install a previous copy Windows, which in my case was Windows 95 on floppy disks (and I fee…

I just looked it up -- Windows 98 was THIRTY EIGHT floppy disks hahahahaha

I don't think there any modern tech modern that can induce the stomach-turning horror of hearing hearing the pitiful, repetitive grinding of the floppy drive motor that presaged a "Cyclic Redundancy Check error"

Re: Windows 96

#178
post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Windows 95/98 definitely decayed over time. Especially after installing stuff like AOL and RealPlayer, your system was like a disgusting cesspool of random trash. I distinctly remember nuking the entire thing would noticeably increase my frame rate in stuff like Homeworld lol

To day I still factory reset my PC and my phone about once a year, just to keep them fresh. I have no idea if it's still helpful with modern a OS.

I think it is still helpful, at least for MacOS. My work 2018 MBP was feeling slow. I reimaged it last October and now it feels like new.

Re: Windows 96

#179

Pretty. :) Gives me PTSD-like flashbacks to the time when I was tasked with installing Windows 95 on 50+ computers on the local school. For the young(er), Windows was on 14-ish 3.5" floppy disks, and I had to do some heavy calculation and logistics copying those discs while installing the OS to make my effort as efficient as possible. IIRC, I managed to keep the installing cyclus going on 28 computers at a time, and…

I had the same task in 2002 for a computer lab. I used Norton Ghost. I was really impressed by the tool at the time.

Re: Windows 96

#180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Failed to load DLL". You have to click "Damn" to exit dialog box. I wish today's apps made interactions little more fun like this.

Cute messages are ok sometimes, they’re easy to make aggravating though. Like on Smugmug, which is generally a great product, when you try to delete a photo it has a message like “Do you really want to say good bye to … .jpg” Imagine if that was a photo of your dead grandma or worse

Why would you take a picture of your dead grandma?
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