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Osiris | 8 months ago

Or of just a power outage or driver causing a loss of write back cache.

95 and 98 and ME crashed on a regular basis. I specifically remember upgrading from ME to XP and being so happy with the massively improved stability of the NT kernel over the 9x kernels.

If you think that's 9x was stable and reliable, you may be thinking very nostalgicly.

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ht_th|8 months ago

I am not so sure. I've ran 98 on bad hardware, and it crashed regularly. So much so, that I installed linux on it already in 1998, and that was much more stable. It only crashed now and then. No doubt in both cases the poor hardware was the cause of it.

Anyway, two years later I got a brand-new laptop with good hardware that was running 98se. As far as I remember, it didn't crash during normal usage. By then I was studying computer science, and would sometimes write or run programs that would make it crash, but that was on me. I did dual boot in Linux, and that didn't have any problems on that machine either.

Fun fact, I still have that laptop, it's over 25 years old now, but it still works and runs Windows 98se!

justsomehnguy|8 months ago

Or a modem driver reading the stream and writing shit - I still have some of those burping mp3s. But if you blame this solely on the OS then you may be thinking very nostalgically too.

Hell, it most of the time worked on some combo of the cheapest parts - modern systems wont even get to UEFI boot part on the parts of the same quality.

throwaway2037|8 months ago

    > If you think that's 9x was stable and reliable, you may be thinking very nostalgicly.
I agree. Remember Plug'n'Play? It was so bad that we used to call it Plug'n'Pray. It frequently caused PC crashes. Modern OSes are a miracle in how stable they are with drivers.

M95D|8 months ago

Win9x was stable and reliable. It was the drivers that were not. WHQL wasn't invented yet.

I'm sure ATC systems were properly tested, including the drivers. Don't compare that with cheap consumer PCs that we had.

chadaustin|8 months ago

Windows 95 allowed programs to disable system interrupts. No protection on cli instruction. Careful with those rose-colored glasses.

userbinator|8 months ago

It's stable if you have a controlled environment.

I've seen enough stories of power outages permanently damaging SSDs, that if you have bad power from your utilities provider and can't get them to fix it, then I recommend investing in a UPS.