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Comment by koyote | Hacker News Reader

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 feel like it was 20 disks, at least for my installation).

This worked fine until one re-install disk 15 decided to fail on me. I managed to hack it back together by copying the files that were still accessible to a different computer and then copying them to a blank floppy together with the missing files from the running system's Windows folder (I think it was a couple of dlls that were unreadable). I was surprised that it worked.

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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.

Every once in a while since I switched back to windows a couple years ago I’m tempted to fresh install… then I remember my machine still runs perfectly fast

I stopped doing it around Windows 7 and have not really seen an issue. I have Windows 10 installations that date back to the original Windows 10 release (and have been updated with Windows Update all the way up to the current) and they are running perfectly fine.

That being said, I feel like I install much less software than I used to. They used to hand out CDs with computer magazines that were basically dumps of random quality freeware/shareware. The amount of registry items and other such crap that kind of software left lying around is probably a large reason why a re-format was required so often.

Pretty sure it stopped being helpful with Windows 2000.

Reinstalling Windows XP SP 2 on my computer growing up was one of the first things that got interested in what was going on at the operating system level. I found Windows XP Inside Out around the house, read it over so many times, and eventually re-installed it on my computer for fun.

I was floored to realize how much faster things were. No wait time for a Windows Explorer window to open. Everything was snappy, even after reinstalling games and antivirus. It blew my mind.

I still think it helps, but with a much longer tail on the frequency required. Windows XP definitely grew slow over time though, whether that was due to installing programs, caches I could’ve cleared with CClearner, or more incremental updating. We leave a lot on the OS over time.

I had the same experience with Windows XP growing up. Very few months I would reinstall my desktop computer that ran WinXP, and I did the same with the laptop I had after that which was also running WinXP. During that time I used to install a lot of random freeware and shareware and trial software and games and game demos. And probably those things were leaving stuff behind like you guys said.

The very first time I reinstalled WinXP was shortly after I got my first computer of my own for my 12th birthday. I was tinkering with some of the files, and discovered that I could open .cur cursor files in MS Paint. I edited one of the cursor files, saved it as a bmp and renamed the file to .cur under the assumption that this would work. Set my custom cur file as cursor and logged out. When I tried to log back in I couldn’t. Whoops. Freaked out for a second thinking I had broken everything. Remembered that there was a red floppy disk with an ambulance on it that came with the computer. Rebooted the machine with the red floppy disk and reinstalled Windows. Lost my files but had nothing valuable at the time anyways. Have lost more valuable data since then. And expect to lose more data in the future still :p

My most painful data loss was when I tried a Windows "alternative" called "Lindows" [0]. Touted as "Linux, but easy like Windows!."

So I put the disk in, and it says something like "Do you want to install Lindows?" with no options, no warnings or anything. So I hit Yes/Okay/whatever the single button on the screen was, and without zero warning, it proceeded to wipe my entire hard drive.

It's been 17 years and it still hurts :)

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linspire

I would say vista. Many programs would go out of their way to mess with the windows\system32 folder. MS locked most of that out. WinSxS fixed many of the issues where you needed to play around in system32. They also added in a huge chunk of 'compatibility' they would ship in the registry of programs they know are messed up with particular combinations of dlls. The downside of winsxs is cleanup. It was not until late in the lifecycle of win7 they added some way to purge old junk out of it.

Unless abused, Windows 2000 was pretty robust, but it was nowhere impossible to bork it, especially with subpar drivers.

That being said, I think many people underestimated increased processing power over ages.

1gb of ram on win 7 equals 4 times of 256 mb win 98 era. With 8gb it's 32 times larger. That's just ram though, not to mention processing power between pentium 3-4 with multicore i series.

The difference in ram caching and cpu processing is big that some additional process won't give much problem.

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

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.

Why not just reboot the read-only VM? ;-) Fresh install on every boot!

many things like low level gaming api wouldn't work, and FYI we talk about ages when virtualization was at its infancy at best (Windows 95 era there was none that I am aware of for consumer PCs, XP era still super basic, quirky and resource hungry)

People running VMs aren't trying to play games on them though, are they? Seems like the best reason for VMs and refreshing back to start each time is perfect for freedom fighters and others web surfers that don't want their host system polluted by bullshit developer's and their internet games.

I have to think that at least with modern phone OSes, apps are so compartmentalized, that there really isn’t an opportunity to pollute your entire phone.

But feel free to look at all the extensions and bullshit you have in your browsers and bash shell

Oh man, Homeworld was an absolute treasure of 90s gaming

If you moved the same installation between different motherboards, the decay happened alarmingly fast. After 2 or 3, you're lucky if it doesn't bluescreen every hour or two.

This is why I would create a c:\wininst folder and dump the CD worth of files. When I needed to do an OS reinstall, I'd boot to DOS mode, cd \wininst, and do the install from hard drive to hard drive. Much MUCH faster and much MUCH less painful.

Protip: Windows 95 (and 98) installs much faster hdd-to-hdd if you start smartdrv.exe in your config.sys/autoexec.bat even with minimal write cache.

Thanks, that would have been really helpful advice a quarter of a century ago :)

funny fact - freedos does not support smartdrv even in 2021

Wow. Why not?!?!

...Hmm, probably undocumented API stuff :/

You could run smartdrv.exe later, I believe.

Smartdrv.exe was a vital utility on DOS systems.

You had to unload it to play some games, though, otherwise they wouldn't fit into memory (DOOM on 4 MB systems, Duke Nukem on 8 MB systems).

God, I am old.

the good old day when 4mb of ram would cost an arm and a leg. first upgrade on my old 486dx4 100mhz

Having the CD dump on the hard drive was a must in the Windows 9x days because every time you would want to add a device, a network protocol or whatever it would ask you to insert the CD. I rarely ever installed from the actual CD directly but always copied it to the hard drive first. Obviously there there were exceptions because some computers just had too little of HDD space so you had to save it for your user files and the apps to be installed (this also is the case with 120 GB MacBooks nowadays - I can't afford a Windows VM on it).

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

I bet a sealed 38 floppy edition of Windows 98, in mint condition, would go for a million USD.

What’ll ya give me for an unopened copy of Win 3.1 on 5.25s?

How much do you need to keep it in its current state? :)

You can get Windows 95 on 15 discs on eBay here for £50.

I’m only seeing one sealed Windows 95 floppy retail box on eBay at the moment, and even though it’s sealed it looks to be in poor condition. Plus I am skeptical that it’s even the original sealing. Could have been resealed. And they want about $200 for it plus shipping.

Nah, but maybe if you take a picture of it and sell it as NFT!

I wonder if you could build a modern-ish browser on Windows 98 and use it as a minimalist daily driver? Give me a modern browser, bash shell (perhaps an old version of cygwin?), and a decent text editor and I probably could for the most part. I'd have to really get in the '90s spirit and break out the cassette deck though because running an obese Electron app like Tidal would probably be difficult.

I guess you're limited to 3.5 GB of memory too what with Windows 98 being a 32-bit operating system which might be a pain, and perhaps a bigger problem is that no drivers have been written for a couple of decades.

IIRC Windows 9x could address only up to 1 GB of RAM. If you had more memory, you had to use the NT family to use it.

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"

Does the hard drive click of death count?

it comes close, but it's not as visceral to me. I guess it doesn't happen often to me, and considering how cheap storage has become, I can always download what was on the HDD or recover from backups. The data I had on floppy disks were more often than not, the only copy I had access to.

The CD drive repeatedly spinning up and down, then heading the head repeatedly seek to the same place.

I once had a CD shatter inside the drive, followed by sounding like a cross between an angle grinder against metal and a blender full of rocks. It was hideous.

CD-ROM was a thing though by then

Not always - especially on laptops

I once had to install a Unix system that came on over 90 floppies... and failed about two before the end :-(

One time I wanted to tweak my graphics on Windows 3.1. Normal VGA with 640x480 was no problem to configure since it could use some kind of generic drivers. So eventually I choose one of the SVGA modes with 800x600 and after restarting the screen was just dark. Luckily I managed to undo the settings with the keyboard and a blank screen. IIRC the settings for that were quite exposed and it worked. However, countless times where I lost my system setup.

> usually the system would get into some kind of bad state after several months of usage (or at least mine did)

Sometimes some part of the bad state would go okay again for me after some more months of waiting. E.g. the system would only go past the Windows 95 loading screen after opening and closing the CD-ROM drive but at some point that problem would disappear.

I remember the same eventual "system got into broken state" issue on a laptop with XP. After reinstalling everything the third time (including wireless network drivers from a USB drive and at least a billion service packs shudder) I figured out how to take a disk image with a linux live-cd and save a clean iso of a fresh install with updates and my preferred programs pre-installed onto a separate partition where I also carefully mapped all my user data directories. If windows started being screwy I'd pop in the LiveCD, run some commands to format the OS partition and reimage it from the iso on the data partition, and after applying a couple of patches I'd be up and running again. I think I got the whole process down to like 30 minutes at one point.

This is still a part of my process any time I set up a new machine, although I haven't had to use one of the 'fresh setup' images in a long time.

After several months of use? One summer around that time I used to remember my w95 serial key by heart :) It was not only that windows would eventually get in some kind of bad state, it was also me: a young kid learning on his sole computing capable device (ie no spare laptop/smartphone) with no internet connection to search google/youtube/so/etc for solutions to problems

You mean ppl don't still reformat the computer every couple of months?

> 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 actually still do that with Windows 10, about once a year I start over. I have a chocolatey command to re-install 90% of my software.

At least Windows 10 has built-in functionality to reset it. No longer do I have 10 separate DVDs of Windows 7 in random places in my house.

>I believe I only had a Windows 98 'Upgrade' CD, which could not be used to install on a bare system.

As I recall it, there was actually a minimal set of files needed to trigger the CD to install and you didn't actually need a full 95 install. I worked at a shop at the time and remember doing a lot of reinstalls from those upgrade disks and we definitely didn't spend the time to reinstall both OSs.

I tried searching and the closest I could find was that win95 upgrade would do a full install if you told it to find the old win3.1 on the win3.1 install floppy. I vaguely remember doing something similar, so either it was those versions (unlikely, but possible) or later versions had the same trick.

We definitely did a lot of full windows installs from the upgrade disks without installing the full previous OS first.

Yes, I believe you only needed to insert the old install disk to prove you had the original.

22 floppies if I remember correctly. I was in charge of our high school lab, and the floppies were old. No 14 was prone to the dreaded: retry, abort, ignore dialog box

I babied mine extremely hard, and didn't re-install for some years. But then I needed to and I could no longer install my sound card drivers (at which point I was forced to migrate to XP)

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