The start menu, the '3d' windows and more comfortable and compact screen fonts and new tiny icon sizes for programs. This was 1995 and the state of Windows gaming wasn't all that great to motivate a gaming-driven upgrade. (most of the new 95 games were adventure games and early Kinesoft console ports heavily marketed on the 'play-in-a-window!' aspect. DId anyone ever upgrade just to play Pressure Drop?)

486DX4/100 build was a replacement for Packard Bell 286 that I had in late 95 I think.
Windows 95 came with the computer so I put up with that POS until NT4 came out. Can't remember if I played Diablo on 95 or NT4, likely the later.
First game I remember playing on the 486 was MechWarrior 2 but had to get a different video card for it, not a 3D accelerated one. I of course played MW2 in DOS and did so for as many games as possible.

leileilol wrote on 2021-07-22, 17:46:

This was 1995 and the state of Windows gaming wasn't all that great to motivate a gaming-driven upgrade.

I think one of the oldest Win95 games that I played was a port of Doom 2. Granted, I first tried it in '97, but it felt very sluggish compared to the DOS version.

IIRC, this was not uncommon back in the day, and games which had both DOS and Win95 versions often ran better in DOS. For that reason, I'm kinda glad that I waited to upgrade as long as I did. Native Win95 games like Diablo and Quake 2 were a different matter entirely.

None. I never used win 95 at home apart from when I was sorting out someones borked computer or at work. Blisfully using a highly customized Dos/win3.x setup on an Pentium 133 with 8megs of ram until I got my MS Windows 98rtm box. Netrworking , internet-ie the whole shibang....😉

I went directly from Windows 3.11 and a AMD 386 Packard Bell, to a no name clone K6-2 running Windows 98SE.

I never actually owned a PC running 95, but i did use my grandmother's PC running 95. I would say she upgraded from her Tandy 1000 series so that she could use the internet.

All I could think when watching the ads for Windows 95 on television was "That's great if you can afford a computer..."

I recall starting off on a 486/66 and DOS/Win 3.1, but then at some point having the family computer upgraded to a Pentium that could run Win 95. I remember loathing Win 95 just because it took so much longer to boot up and let me play my games. Although my sister and I had a blast goofing off with the multimedia functionality. Stuff like recording ourselves jabbering and saying we were doing radio. Or even messing around in Paint. It's amazing how easily entertained a kid can be.

Yeah, now that I think about it, Windows boot times have been a pain in my ass pretty much since day one of Windows 95. And even when drives got faster, a new version of Windows just had more bloat to load. Only recently felt like the hardware finally got ahead of Window's bloat with NVMe drives. Doubt that will last long though.

Postal, but it was 10 years after 95 came out, and it was actually 98 SE.

My friend bought a copy of Postal at E.B. Games, we found it and it was "so wrong" we bought it because of the dark humor of that game. I wanted it so bad I finally installed it on my 486 DX4-100 running Windows 98 SE. That's one reason my M/75 has that installed in Windows. It's also one of the games I'm trying to get working with HX DOS Extender once I get the resource files copied to c:\FDOS\BIN

Hm. Hover? Seriously don't know. I was more of a 3.1 person. Just loved that little system. Ran beautiful on my 286.

Win95 ran on my father's mighty 386DX-40 PC with 20" monitor, though.
I was allowed to play some Windows desktop games on it (loved them), I have a few fond memories of 95, too.

Also tried out these fancy new Win32 versions of shareware games like Hyperoid or EmPipe (Hyperoid32, EmPipe32).
GnuChess also had a Win32 port, I think.
They may have run on Win32s, too, not sure.
At the time, I was living in a friendly 16-Bit world mainly. Super NES, 286 PC.. A friend had a Mega Drive, too.

Hover.. That game was really fun, because it ran through GDI and was playable on a 486 class PC.
Oh, this was pre-DirectX and pre-IE/Active Desktop! My father's copy was the original Win95 release.
No USB, no FAT32. Ran on MS-DOS 7.0..

I was a soon after release day adopter of Win95. The nice thing about it I remember was the integrated TCP/IP networking. Yes, some people were doing that in WfW 3.11, but I didn't have that version. Win95 was even better at it, so it was a game changer anyway, to get on the thing called the internet. What I used on Win3.1 was Trumpet Winsock or something called that.

the3dfxdude wrote on 2021-07-23, 00:46:

I was a soon after release day adopter of Win95. The nice thing about it I remember was the integrated TCP/IP networking. Yes, some people were doing that in WfW 3.11, but I didn't have that version. Win95 was even better at it, so it was a game changer anyway, to get on the thing called the internet. What I used on Win3.1 was Trumpet Winsock or something called that.

I still use Trumpet Winsock on my Zenith 286LP Plus to visit IRC channels from time to time.

I bought it (halvies with a mate) on release but yeah it wasn’t about gaming for me - I think the first thing I mastered in Win95 was booting to DOS to get my stuffs to run. Anything new was great - the Weezer clip alone made it worth the effort 👍

We got a P166-MMX in 1996 and it came with an OEM copy of POD (and a shitty Eraser game), that might have been the only Win95 game I had for a while. I can't remember if I played Doom/Quake using their Win95 versions.

Probably Red Alert 1, I remember watching my cousins play C&C1 and Wolfenstein3d on their PCs.

At the time, we were still using a handed down 8088 XT machine with a green monochrome monitor, then in 1997, we got a PC for school work but soon Red Alert, Diablo, Warcraft II found its way 😜 I fondly remember POD being one of the first games on that Windows 95 PC, and later Diablo 1 on Bnet with a 56k modem!

It was a Pentium 133, also with a S3 64V+, a big leap from the 'slow' 8088 XT that used 5.25" floppies and games like Wheel of Fortune, Prince of Persia with PC speaker, as a kid who knew nothing about hardware back then, it was given away soon after, much to current regret 🤣.

I guess it was mere hysteria, you couldn't imagine nowadays:
https://rarehistoricalphotos.com/windows-95-launch-day-1995/

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I didn't transition to using Win95 much until KQ7 was released and I didn't have a choice if I wanted to play it fully.

My family's first PC came with it. If I don't count the old Arnstad... I still remember being quite comfortable in DOS though. (Transitioned from an Amiga 500).

For me it was Simcity 2000 Special Edition. My dad had a Dell laptop with Pentium CPU, but because his company used Win 3.11, so did he. He used to bring it home and I'd dock it. I bought Simcity 2000 Special Edition and found out that it only ran on Windows 95! Had to wait several months before we got a proper "home PC", which was the Compaq Presario 4766 (Pentium 166MMX) and that came preloaded with Win95.