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Comment by krige | Hacker News Reader

Absolutely loathed moving from 98 to XP. The stability wasn't much better, the resources were hogged more, and the default toys-r-us theme was an incredible eyesore (thank god for UX hacks). It was overall so much pain but Vista was even worse in many respects so I kinda weathered it until 7 came along, and that one was insanely good.

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Windows 98 (from my memory) was not very stable and horribly insecure.

I recall a handful of tools that anyone could use (I was 10-11 and could figure it out) to break and bluescreen Win 98 computers remotely.

10-11 year old me liked the XP theme, the icons were so “fresh”, nearly everything that came before was grey and boring (and the beige boxes didn’t make that better) so it was a welcome change to me at the time.

Now I’m old, I see the joy of grey high contrast consistent UI: what I am doing is more important than the shell around what I am doing.

I remember our Windows 98 SE machine crashing two or three times a day just in normal use (and this was mostly light use by us kids, we were primary students at the time - I imagine it was worse if you were using it in an office eight hours a day). Moving to XP was a big stability improvement as far as I can remember.

it always depended on the hardware (being stable, security is another matter).

I've got friends who ran Windows ME and it was rock solid. My experience was very very different, same with Windows 98 SE.

With that being said my PC with Win95 OSR2 was super stable.

From what I can tell, Windows Me was the most stable version of 9x for computers that were made with Windows Me in mind while older hardware with old drivers upgrading from 9x to Me was a minefield.

Windows XP forced driver development to a more modern standard that made things more stable. Still not stable enough (Windows Vista and up enforced that more and more in their APIs) but with XP the days of drivers assuming they could take complete control of the CPU and various buses were over.

Of course the companies that made shitty drivers for 9x also made shitty drivers for XP, so old hardware and hardware with shitty drivers was still less stable than other new hardware available, but things were moving forward.

These days, it's rare to see a full BSOD in Windows on any hardware but the very shittiest, especially with Windows 11 thanks to its artificial hardware support cutoff.

> Absolutely loathed moving from 98 to XP.

Good gods no. But then in the business in the UK late-1990s, Wikn98 was known as "GameOS".

I ran NT 4 at home until W2K came out.

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