Gammitin (Ben) 💾Thursday evening Windows 98 install on a Pentium II, my kind of Zen 🧘♂️😊
DesertFOX
ilpalazzo@dfx @Gammitin I have an Abit BH6 + PII 450 Klamath box that has: Voodoo 3 2000 AGP for windows games, some Ati PCI card for DOS VESA games, original SB Live for protected mode DOS and Windows games, AWE64GOLD for old DOS games. It all works together well astonishingly including custom sound font libraries in DOS. Except that I have to switch graphic output between cards in BIOS.
Those were the best of times. We had a 10Base coax network with neighboring homes with cable thrown over telephone poles.
Nazo@Gammitin I think I ran Windows 98SE still well into something crazy like 2005 or something. 😆 When XP came around it was great, but so high on resource usage! (It feels so weird to say that today since XP is about a billion times more efficient than 10 which in turn was probably about a billion times more efficient than 11. And really, if you turned off extras like themes, XP was barely more than 2000.)
Stuart Longland (VK4MSL)@nazokiyoubinbou @Gammitin I preferred Windows 2000 at the time.
Even on a Pentium MMX 166MHz and 48MB RAM, Windows 2000 Pro RC2 had better multitasking than Windows 95 and seemed to run better.
I didn't get a machine with Windows XP until some years later… and yeah, I turned off a lot of the visual effects and just had it plain Windows 2000 style. Even later on Windows 7 I did the same.
My desktop today? Latest Gentoo, with FVWM3 as the desktop doing its best MWM impersonation. I've tried a few Wayland compositors, I think LabWC is the closest, but it's missing a lot of things I use from FVWM3, so for now FVWM is where I stay.
@stuartl @Gammitin I was a gamer and had lots of issues with 2000 and games. It just wasn't there yet for me. Really even XP, as I said, left me dual booting for a little while and it was a bit more ready by then (or I should say games were more ready for it.) In fact, I had issues like lockups from my sound card drivers (SB Live I think? Might have been the AWE64. Either way, a standard Creative Labs card!) in 2k...
Windows 7 was perhaps Microsoft's best OS in a lot of ways (stability, features, etc etc) but yeah, I still had to use Start Menu Classic or, as it later became known, Classic Shell. I was so sad to see how shockingly quickly every single developer abandoned it. It has been downhill FAST since 7's death.
Les Lore@nazokiyoubinbou @Gammitin XP was boss!
@leslore @Gammitin Until 7 became pretty viable, it would have pretty much taken a battle to pry XP out of my hands. Even then I still considered XP better for legacy stuff and dual booted for quite a while.
I'll never forgive them for having made 7 so good and then throwing everything they had developed all that time away and so successfully convincing devs and users that no one should ever want to stay on an older OS. They even tricked gamers into think 10 was faster just by having it fake booting up faster (it doesn't actually, just the normal shutdown hibernates, so booting up is loading hibernate data. Which caused problems... But it was an effective trick in the end.)
Don't get me started on 11.
MS has fallen so far... I'll never use Windows again even if they reform.
Darren@nazokiyoubinbou @leslore @Gammitin I wish I was around to see the the good days. I have only been around for the late Windows 10 and early Windows 11 days.
@darrenverhage @leslore @Gammitin MS was definitely never perfect by any means, but generally speaking Windows was a mostly good experience. Ish. Microsoft's bad practices were... I won't say harmless, but a lot more of just trying to find ways to extract money that sometimes were questionable but generally were harmless to those who paid attention at least.
I don't know, maybe a lot of it is nostalgia glasses, but at least up until XP it made for a pretty satisfying system for things like gaming. Then they started a downhill trend with things like making each new DirectX version exclusive to the next version of Windows and losing a lot of legacy stuff. But 10 blew my mind with how horrible it was from day one. It was sickening seeing so many people defend it. No one defends 11...
@nazokiyoubinbou @leslore @Gammitin Whats funny is that Windows users today have become Linux users of the 2000s. They have to hack together random scripts and half working system utilities to make the OS do what they want. Its really ironic honestly. They also talk similarly.
@darrenverhage @leslore @Gammitin It used to be minor. With 7 and 8/8.1 we ran Start Menu Classic / Classic Shell. We had to find a third party file manager because Internet Explorer sucked as a file manager (seriously what the heck???) but otherwise no big deal.
But when 10 came around and every single aspect of it was designed to spy on you and phone home data I was positively shocked. I couldn't believe people accepted it... I didn't touch 10 until third party tools could hack the crap out of all that spying just as you say. I still can't believe how many people used it on day one without that stuff though... I never quite trusted 10 even with those tools, but had no choice since they murdered 7.
11 convinced me that I will never ever use Windows again. Ever.
@nazokiyoubinbou @leslore @Gammitin What do you mean "Internet Explorer .. a file manager"? The browser was how you managed files on the computer?
@darrenverhage @leslore @Gammitin With Internet Explorer 5 (or was it 6? I think it was 5) they replaced explorer.exe with something that essentially called Internet Explorer in file browser mode. They wanted to have "interactive folders" or something so they could actually have html for a folder (yeah, an actual thing. I'm not sure it has been removed even today? Possibly potential for exploits there, I don't know.)
It never entirely went away. Even as IE phased out, Explorer basically was just a modified subset of what IE was by then. It's still internally some of the same stuff, just simplified a bit.
Oh, and I forgot to mention that explorer is also the system shell...
The biggest downside is that it's insanely bloated, more likely to crash, etc compared to before.
spacebug@Gammitin I still know the win98 serial key from back then. Pretty useless thing to remember though 🤷🏼♂️😅
@spacebug how about Windows 2000: RM233******* 😂😂
☢️ Waschbär ☢️How can you so casually post a picture with about a trillion dollar worth of Ram just sitting on the side?! 🫠
@Kmachel if I had a time machine, those two boxes of RAM would probably buy me a house, not even kidding. 😂
Vysogota
Iznogoud@Gammitin That is really a computer of the future, able to work without the CPU connected to its socket and all. Well done!
🅵
Daniel Prindii@Gammitin sorcery! Nice sorcery.
Tormod
Rusty
Gamy
Sam Izby