Is windows 95 now nostalgia-ware!?

Archived from groups: microsoft.public.win95.general.discussion (More info?)

When I bought a P75 machine in early 1995 it came with Windows 95
installed, plus the floppy disks! it ran with 8MB Ram. I remember the
criticisms saying Windows 95 was too much of a resource hog, too
demanding of hardware!

I'd used DOS and Windows 3.1 before and recall being a little thrown by
'Explorer', so much that i remember winfile for a couple of weeks!

I remember thinking W95 quite clever at recovering from small errors,
and all the 'multi media' stuff it supported was exciting. Plug and
play didn't always work, but it managed often enough to be ok. When i
doubled the RAM (at quite some cost!) the performance improved some
more. It was the first personal machine i saw the internet through -
on a 28.8 modem with netscape 2 - pretty cool back then!

Windows 9x usage is dropping very fast indeed, has been for 2 or so
years, it is slowly but inexorably entering the same territory that DOS
and Windows 3.1 occupies - nostalgia! Plenty of enthusiasts have
DOS/Win31 running on a '486, many even connect to the net and do a
variety of serious work with them. I quite like DOS/Win31 too for
various things.

Still, fewer and fewer home users have 9x installed yet it still has a
few of key advantages - namely:

1. running of DOS applications (and Win16 usually works better on 95
than XP)
2. running of early Win32 apps and games, which don't always tick along
on XP as well as they might
3. sits comfortable on a pentium 1/2 machine, which XP doesn't.

Also, just as Win31 enthusiasts put on the latest (often the last!)
releases of 16 bit browsers and apps to get the best from their 486's,
so Windows 95 users can make the best of their Windows 95 machine with
the addition of IE 5.5, DirectX 7 or 8a & USB support. I've noticed
that software supposedly only for Windows 98 or later will often run
fine on 95 once IE5 is installed.

Although Win 98 is said to be a better 95 i've noticed that it seems
just a little more demanding of hardware, a little less responsive on a
modest pentium 1. I recently cleaned up and reinstalled the W95osr2 CD
that came with a powerhouse P166 (with 64mb ram!), added IE5.5 & dx7.
I had to chase up a couple of drivers, but it wasn't too hard - not
like trying to get drivers for Windows 3.1!

It will make the perfect home for that early Win32 software of the
1995-1998 period, including games that don't require a 3d card! It's
really snappy and responsive on that machine too!

To make this post have some kind of point - a question: what were
you're early memories of windows 95, first impressions etc - and would
agree it can take on a nostalgia/enthusiast role like Windows 3.1 & DOS
seems to?

Archived from groups: microsoft.public.win95.general.discussion (More info?)

Smiling face wrote:
> My first encounter with 95 was at University. As I wrotte my essays
on word I
> realized that the look of windows is not the same as before. I was
not into
> computers back then and I could not understand by the computer did
change its
> look. Then I realized the difference || 95 and 3.1. I am lover of the

> venerable dos and the holy command line. I also worshipped batch
programming
> and played with additional programs freely available on the
internet. I
> killed three computers during that time. Too bad, I had such a good
time with
> 486 and 386. I never got a cdrom drive that four years ago. All the
software
> was copied from floppies.

i like MSDOS too (i still have an old 486 with DRDOS installed!).
it's the simplicity and smallness that i like.

I would say that i've become very used to CD's and CD burning to store
large amounts of programs or data, and more recently i've grown to like
those USB flash memory things. The floppy disk still has a role to
play though, especially when used with older machines that don't have
USB and with data that only takes a few disks at most. I tend to find
that one can caught out easily with floppies - the one last disk of 10
being faulty, that kind of thing.

Windows 95 can be bought into CDRW & USB modernity with the right
drivers, but would more commonly be found without such hardware.