Back in the day, I really liked the Dangerous Creatures theme (the one with the mountain lion). I have it installed on my current Win95 retro rig as well, but without the sounds.

Anyway, Microsoft Plus! was certainly one of the highlights back when I first moved away from DOS 6.22/Win 3.11. For kid me, Windows 95 felt so much more alive than the plain old DOS prompt. The hi-color themes in particular were fairly impressive for the time.

Not me. Eye candy like that is fine for when you hang around in an environment all day (i.e. the daily driver), but since my retro machines only get fired up with a specific purpose in mind - mostly gaming, most likely in fullscreen - I'm unlikely to see it so can't be bothered.

I installed 95 Plus! (and continue to do so) for mostly the desktop icon color icon upgrade from 256. I also like the Microsoft Pinball game (which was available out of the box with Windows NT 4.0 only at the time.) The themes were gimmicky, and I puttered around with them for only a short while. I still use the Mystery/Haunted House screensaver, though.

Actually, I still install the Tomb Raider theme from time-to-time, but just for the screensaver mostly, as well.

But some of the best screensavers we’re the 3rd-party 3D aquariums. I had forgotten about those until just now.

Backgrounds, screensavers and games like the space cadet pinball are very familiar and part of the nostlagia, so plus! gets installed.
But yeah I don't like my cursor being shaped like submarine or a tiger roaring every time I click on something so these parts stay unused.

I use some of the wallpapers and screen savers, notably the 'Inside your computer' (vacuum tubes, 🤣) and the Mystery one.
I don't really and didn't ever really use the sounds, cursors, fonts etc.

Currently, nothing. 😀

However, I loved much the "Inside your computer" theme with those sounds, icons and cursors back then.

I stil use Plus! on both my Windows 95 and 98 machines. On the Windows 95 machine, which I have for experimentation and period games (but mainly experimentation), Windows 95 Plus! is what my family had on our original PC. We played a lot of Space Cadet pinball!

I didn't have Plus! on my original Windows 98 PCs, so I wanted to try it and see what it looked like and what it added. I mainly use it now for the background to make the computer look "spiffy." I particularly like the Rock N Roll theme with the psychedelic guitar wallpaper. I did not change icons, cursors, sounds and more...just the wallpaper and theme colors. I was very impressed on how good the theme and Windows 98 overall looked on a modern widescreen LCD display (though I don't use one all the time when I'm using my retro PCs).

Jasin Natael wrote on 2023-01-19, 14:43:

... notably the 'Inside your computer' (vacuum tubes, 🤣) ...

Funny you should laugh, but my "holy grail" is a AOpen AXB-533 motherboard with the tube amp with the onboard sound! Not because it had great sound, but because of the uniqueness and rarity -- it had a tube -- in a computer!

(Off topic, I apologize, but that's what the background reminds me of.)

I always use plus themes on my retro 9x builds. The one exception is the 386sx16 I have running 95, it's just too slow for any window dressing

Nope, just more crap to slow the system down and confuse things. Black background ftw.

I still install Plus on my Windows 95 retro machine because I liked the OS enhancements, and I use the themes every now and then. But two things I never want to lose: the original Windows 95 loading screen, and the Windows 95 startup sound. I immediatelly revert to those after installing Plus95!

I've always ran Plus! since 1996. Started off with Science and that began my preference towards blue desktop themes. Luna and Aero were ignored for consistency. I've only stopped using "Plus!" since my forced Win10 downgrade. 🙁

Even if you don't like the themes part, that high color icons and smooth fonts are cool to have. and space cadet's dumb face of course

Plus! 98 was too messy and Plus XP missed the point so I never really felt compelled to install those. WinME has the good parts of Plus 98 anyway

mvm916 wrote on 2023-01-19, 15:08:

Jasin Natael wrote on 2023-01-19, 14:43:

... notably the 'Inside your computer' (vacuum tubes, 🤣) ...

Funny you should laugh, but my "holy grail" is a AOpen AXB-533 motherboard with the tube amp with the onboard sound! Not because it had great sound, but because of the uniqueness and rarity -- it had a tube -- in a computer!

(Off topic, I apologize, but that's what the background reminds me of.)

That is pretty cool. I still have tubes in my main guitar amplifier, but don't have any in my PCs sadly.

My two fave XP machines run MCE 2005, which I believe adds some of the extras from XP's plus pack (I'm thinking of the dancers, aquarium screensaver, etc).
That's about it though. Everything else -- 95 to 11 -- is bone stock.

I just use Plus! to show that the hardware acceleration of my ET4000/W32 ISA is enabled on my 386SX/20 when dragging full windows in Win95B.
Just enabling the reg key did not work.

I was also mostly a no eye candy kind of guy. It's why I ran XP in classic theme as it would free up around 2% of system resources compared to Bliss and as mentioned above most the time the OS is hidden behind programs anyway.
Vista was the last time I changed the desktop to a solid colour though, I guess by the time Windows 7 became my daily driver PC's typically had enough resources in reserve that I no longer felt any benefit.

Standard Def Steve wrote on 2023-01-19, 20:08:

My two fave XP machines run MCE 2005, which I believe adds some of the extras from XP's plus pack (I'm thinking of the dancers, aquarium screensaver, etc).
That's about it though. Everything else -- 95 to 11 -- is bone stock.

When I saw that dancer on a review of MCE it made me think of similar dancers you used to get on no-cd sites I would visit whenever I got/patched games, only those girls typically wearing a lot less 😉
(I always tried to No-CD my games for convenience and stop the CD's getting damaged)

sometimes i create humorous fandom-themes on windows 3.1, otherwise though i like to keep a lean registry on the later os's

I have very fond memories of playing around with Plus!98's features, few things take me back like the colored "Plus!" letters in the splash screen. Installed Plus!95 for my Win95 build too although I don't remember having it at the time. Plus!98 is just a given, no Win98 or Win98SE is complete without it for me.

I'm always respectful of the startup sound themes in every Windows version as they're pretty great, I hesitate between Win95 or WinME for the best one, maybe Win95 but I love them all.

That aside I always remove all sounds (except for that oh so familiar Win98's "tick" sound on double click) and custom pointers, and for themes I nowadays use the SimCity 2000 Theme Pack in both Win95 (Commercial Wallpaper) and Win98SE (Residential Wallpaper), both with The Mad Zoner screensaver which I adore. Also installed Sonic Screen Saver off the Sonic & Knuckles Collection for PC but I never use it, some very cool wallpapers though!

WinME and WinXP I tend to leave them pretty clean as is, though I distinctly remember heavily modding XP's appearance with other programs back in the day.

There's a Command & Conquer Red Alert theme pack on the Aftermath expansion CD. Sometimes I enable it for a while, but turn it off because it gets annoying after some time. 😉