OEM Windows 95 came with a Weezer music video and Hover! That was amazing.

Windows 2000 gave me lots of memories like 2,048,000,000 of them.

95 was a whole new world so that was memorable (+ Weezer of course!) but after that all I ask of Windows is to get the hell out of the way and let me play games.

Back in 2000 I had a Pentium III machine that came with Windows 98 SE. I was starting to mess with designing web pages and stuff, and between loading IE, Paint Shop Pro and Dreamweaver the system would just run out of resources and need rebooting every hour or so.

One day I upgraded to Windows 2000, and suddenly I could keep my computer on for literally weeks without restarting it. This was around the time that unlimited dial-up internet was new, and there were many MP3s to be downloaded. To me that was the day that the modern era of PCs began.

well, having the the Windows 95 CD delivered on the mail at launch (thanks to buying a Compaq PC with 3.11 a few months earlier), and installing it with my father, brother and uncle all watching it and booting for the first time was memorable, it really was a new era, and I used 95 until April 2000 (couldn't find 98 drivers for the sound card 🤣) as my main OS.

Anyone who isn't using Windows 95 is dead to me.

My best memory of Windows 3.1 was the reaction I had the very first time I used it, twenty-odd years ago: "Wow, it LOOKS like a Macintosh! Except...it's in COLOUR!" Up to that point, every Mac I had seen had been a black & white machine and every PC had been a boring text-mode device.

My best memories of Windows 95? Probably all the times I ticked off techbros in the mid-'00s for using it a minute longer than necessary.

Are you still using it daily?

oeuvre wrote:

Are you still using it daily?

Actually, yes!

AIX while in college, introduced me to UNIX systems which was invaluable as a couple of my employers were UNIX based.

Moving to Windows XP from Windows 98. Not that 98 was bad, it served its purpose well, but XP was more stable with better hardware compatibility.

Deleting my Windows 8.1 VM (memory of great satisfaction, it was really getting on my nerves)... what? Oh come on we all know Windows 8.x was never well received and I gave it more rope than most to prove its critics wrong.

Andrew T. wrote:

oeuvre wrote:

Are you still using it daily?

Actually, yes!

Proper. I praise you for your legendary actions.

So many memories with all of them. MS-DOS 2.11.13 and 6.22 stick out among the DOS versions. OS/2 Warp 3.0 as well.

Cut my teeth on Win 3.0. Fascinated by the upgrade to 3.1. I was really, really into computers as a kid. Learned QB, then VB, and coded the first 10% of a lot of applications back then.

But, Windows 95 was huge for me. I loved everything about it, even how the floppy drive was like twice as fast as in DOS. So cool! My dad was nice enough to buy the floppy version because my 486SX/25 didn't have a CD drive. Then later he bought the CD-ROM version too. 😉 That's when I also discovered the Weezer video, discovered Edie Brickell, played a little Hover, and went out to rent Rob Roy. (Good movie. Or at least at the time I thought so.) I must have watched those artsy Windows interpretation videos a thousand times. My favorite was the Monet one.

Win 95 really bust the doors open on computing for me. Multitasking, multimedia, the WWW, my AWE32, IRC, VB 5 (Compiled EXEs?? From BASIC? Wow!), Plus! themes, the beautiful design language of clouds and colorful flags and 3D dialogs with a classy new non-bold font... Loved. It. And then used it until I couldn't hold out on not having USB support anymore. I tried the Win 98 beta (not terribly stable), went back to 95, and only briefly used 98 SE before switching to ME when it came out.

By then, I had discovered BeOS and fell in love with an OS all over again. Win 2K came out shortly after, but... meh. It used tons of memory and driver support sucked. BeOS was so lean and agile on the same hardware. It wasn't until Be, Inc. closed up shop and then XP came out that I went back to Windows.

Browsing through System32 on Windows XP. That never gets old to me. The winlogon icon is the symbol of my life. 😜

Also, the sample music that came on a Dell Dimension desktop (can't forget the model, likely a 2400 with a P4) was great. I remember most of the songs - Surely Justice, The Best Of Us, and Dynamite Walls. There was another one, but I sadly forgot what it was. Then, of course, I had Like Humans Do. Great memories. Anyone else remember this set of sample music? I can't find anything online about it. It was all labeled as eMusic, so perhaps Dell was advertising eMusic. Who knows.

Seeing all the legacy stuff in system32 (as well as showing XP how much of a badass I am by clicking "Show the contents of this folder anyway") was - and still is - magical. I'd be damned if I didn't sit down at my XP rig from time to time and bask in the glory that is the super sssssecret Windows folders. 😀

Many years has pasted since the funeral
Missing the blood of human throats
so many years, ages ago
I must await, feel my body's stench

Windows XP... T'was a rock solid OS, even with the botched drivers I threw at it (long story short, I had to fickle the drivers to install them manually... unfortunately the INF file provided with it was partial corrupted garbage, so I had to hack and slash another INF file from older drivers) it didn't crash. Even with all the malware I got (always have a good antivirus, you'll see what I mean!)

Another one is Windows 7, it was the pinnacle of the best Windows, I'm a bit sad that it's going to be axed, but c'est la vie... I managed to get again mangled drivers working (blame Adaptec for not making Vista 64 drivers for the 2940U2W... All of that because I needed to use a old SCSI scanner) with a bit of problems but easily ironed out.

Then Windows Vista (sure it may have been unstable when it was new, but, with the Service Packs, I felt it become more stable, albeit not perfect, but let's stay real: Perfection does not exist.), not for its stability but the UI.

Windows 8.1 also gave me lots of memories (in fact, it was the first OS I somehow managed to install on a USB drive 🤣 I shit you not!)

Most fond memories are from Windows 3.1, even though I used 95 and 98SE for much longer than any other Windows version. Win95 on my 486 was major, really liked it at first but had trouble with DOS games (didn't know as much back then), which I didn't have with the Win3.1/DOS 6.22 combo.

It was definitely OS/2 Warp 3 which hosted my BBS between 94 and 97. MS-DOS 6.0 is probably a close second. I loved MS-DOS 5.0 too, but to be honest the memory management tools of MS-DOS 6.0, oh screw that, the DELTREE command alone made the upgrade worthwhile.

Windows 95, definitely.

I got my dad's old Toshiba laptop with a 486DX2, 8 megs of RAM, 512MB storage. No CD-ROM, no network and only a handful of games, including LHX, Prince of Persia, Supaplex, Pentix and Blockout. Of course, when your entertainment is that limited, you start finding it in the weirdest places. WordArt effects in Word 97, learning keyboard shortcuts, that kind of stuff.

I distinctly remember one evening on the New Year's Eve when I tried to "trick" Windows 95 into thinking I had a modem. I tried adding various network devices via Control Panel and messing with whatever "Internet" stuff was installed. Somehow I thought I could overcome the fact that I had no wired connection to the telephone line. Or, you know, an actual modem.

I was six years old at the time. Life was good.