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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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

Man Jake has come so far finding his own voice. From those watching since the house days, we’re proud of you man.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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...

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.

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.

Not as buggy as triple A games

I really loved my Windows 2000 Professional back in the day.

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.

Amiga Workbench and SGI Irix also have Pre-emptive multitasking. And it actually worked

Everyone who had windows 95 saw the buddy holly video

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.

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.

"Good Times, Bad Times"... by Edie Brickell ...loved that little video that came with Win95 !

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,.

Techquickie: Why Windows 95 Crashed So Often Everybody: It was not yet Windows XP

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.

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.

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.

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).

I am so sorry, but wasn't Windows 2000 earlier than Windows XP and used NT-technologies, too?

Thanks for not being one of those long and drawn out video I loved it

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.

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.

I'm glad that you quickly addressed this timely issue.

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.

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

drivers are sometimes still a nightmare makes you wonder if its because windows is still awfull

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.

02:12 nice edit in the tv reflection

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.

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

Wow, that Jake reflection in the monitor at 2:11 is sweeeeet! And the memory graphic at 4:06. Neat editing!

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

I always built my own systems and had very few problems with window 95 or 98.

Awesome video & very well said. it's funny because I knew this back in 90s lol

2:13 I really liked the reflection effect. Well done 👌🏻

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.

windows 95 crash speed run: con/con in the run command your welcome

I knew exactly when to jiggle my mouse for windows to boot without crashing..

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.

The integration of Explorer.exe as both a file manager *and* a web-browser left it extraordinarily vulnerable in '98 also.

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

This reminds me of the days with IRQ setting issues and more fun win 95 stuff.

AmigaOS in 1984 Pre emptive multi tasking. Windows 95 smoke and mirrors. 17 Years later microsoft caught up.

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.

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.

Very cool presentation Jake!

Win98SE was the "just right" version. WinMe went too far.

To this day I have not forgiven ID Software for forcing me to upgrade to XP just so I can play Doom 3.

I’d like to see some videos on pro audio, and recording studios: like audio interfaces, microphones, headphones, studio monitors, cables, mixers, etc…

Ah… what nostalgia… Having Jake present this… way before he was born… 🤔

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

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.

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.

95 and 98 didn't crash much so I dont know where your getting ur info from!

Jake is quickly turning into one of my favorite hosts at LMG.

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

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.

Back in the day during the short time it was relevant, we called Windows ME Windows MEstake.

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.

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

Windows 2000 used the NT kernel and was a brilliant OS, it also came before XP, come on guys get the facts right

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.

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.

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.

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.

Memory leaks were the main issue that caused the OS to crawl over time.

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?

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.

Great overview. Thanks

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!

So much Jake today, makes me happy 😊

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.

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.

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...

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 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..

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 loved that Space Cadet pinball lol Forgot that existed until this very moment

I remember there was also a hardware limit of cpu clock speed in the early versions. Something like 300-400mhz

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.

Man remembering mid to late 90s Windows versions, quite a time.