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Sorry Dave, I’m afraid I can’t do that! PCs refuse to shut down after Microsoft patch
(www.theregister.com)
this post was submitted on 17 Jan 2026
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Yes... and no.
Microsoft's operating systems have been very hit or miss - certainly their consumer operating systems - with the classic rule being "every other one is decent":
The more business focussed OS's like Windows for Workgroups, NT4, and 2000 were rock solid in fairness.
Their business practices have always been shady as fuck too. Embrace, extend, extinguish is firmly burned into computer hobbyists minds.
10 is not good. Never was.
It's good when compared to 11, but it should be remembered as the point where Microsoft started pushing the Ads and offers to the max, along with the bullshit Settings getting reset between updates.
If you ever felt Microsoft owned your computer instead of you, remember this started on 10.
The last truly good OS was 7. 10 is only good in comparison to 8 and 11
95 was great. 98 was shite. 98SE was fine.
95 wasn't good. That's when the "just format C: and reinstall windows" tradition started. I had to do that to my computer at least yearly until 2000 came along.
I never had to do it once. And compared to Win3.11, it was revolutionary. Though Oregon Trail stopped working on it, which was a bummer.
95 didn’t even ship with FAT32 support originally. I agree with the original comment that it wasn’t until the OSR versions that it got good. But they never sold those in the box, you could only get an OSR version from a prebuilt computer. So a lot of people never experienced them or didn’t experience the original 1995 version of 95 that still required 8 character filenames.
This is the correct comment.
XP was the first one that had proper memory protection so that badly written programs would just crash instead of taking down the whole system.
It was a dramatic step forward compared to 98, where you'd be lucky to go a whole day without bluescreening. There's a reason XP hung on for so long. It was the first Windows version that was really good enough for most people.
It was the first commercial version, from the NT line that was user-friendly and capable enough for home users. Prior to that, it was difficult to get games to run on the NT line and permissions were more complicated than most home users wanted to deal with. After that, they were essentially the same product line.
Don't agree on websites 95 - sure it has issues but it was revolutionary. Also disagree on your ME blurb, we bought a PC with an OEM install of ME. What a miserable piece of shit that software was.
Vista was also fine once it was fully patched, early releases of it were garbage though.
Ah I remember upgrading from 98SE to Millennium Edition and it was just ass. That said, I reformatted and installed Me and used the 98 CD to pass the upgrade check, and I had very few issues with it. Shit like System Restore was gash - in fact, any of the new tools installed with Me were awful - but I just effectively used it as 98 Third Edition and it did the job nicely for me.
I agree that 95 was a big - if not monumental - step up in graphics interface driven OSes... but the first few releases were unstable as fuck. Whether it was horrendous shutdown issues because ACPI support was super flaky at the time, to trying to run com/com as a command to insta-bluescreen the system. The latter is so much of an edge case though that I almost cut myself typing it.
There was a famous bug that made it into 95 and 98, a tick counter that caused the system to crash after about a month. It was in there so long because there were so many other bugs causing stability problems that it wasn't obvious.
I will say that classic MacOS, which is what Apple was doing at the time, was also pretty unstable. Personal computer stability really improved in the early 2000s a lot. Mac OS X came out and Microsoft shifted consumers onto a Windows-NT-based OS.
EDIT:
https://www.cnet.com/culture/windows-may-crash-after-49-7-days/
It was certainly pushed on many PCs that had no business trying to run it, especially laptops. But honestly I've used both XP and Vista and even on a computer that could run it, I didn't see anything that justified how much more resources it required.
And apparently on launch it was quite buggy in part due to poorly made drivers
The OS was kinda buggy, but vista changed a lot with drivers so probably most of the issues vista had were drivers. I bought a laptop with vista on it in 08 and it was rock solid.
I'm afraid I can't speak authoritatively on the subject, however taking a step back - MS do have a record for driving hardware uptake with their system releases.
In theory it's not a bad thing - Unreal and Quake II (among many) requiring 3D accelerator hardware largely drove PC gaming into the lead for cutting edge graphics - but the type of hardware MS have been requiring has always been a bit of a clusterfuck - a prime recent example being the supposed requirement of a TPM board in a Win11 computer.
My anecdotal experience is that Vista - while pretty - is a bit of a bloatfest regardless of what hardware you run it on.
I use Linux, so I haven't personally run into it, but is that just because of the Aero interface stuff? IIRC a lot of that can be disabled.
I'll be honest, I used Windows XP fairly extensively then switched to Lubuntu while learning about Windows 7. My workplace moved from NT4 to Windows 7, and then to Windows 10 which is the only versions I've had serious exposure to.
My only real experience of Vista and 8 has been installing it on folk's devices, patching them to a current state, and Ninite-ing them full of handy applications.
Vista was good eventually, but certainly not on launch. It launched with absurdly aggressive popups about for User Account Control and backwards compatibility was somewhat spotty, largely due to the security changes. By the end, though, it was actually really solid, to the point that Win7 essentially launched as Vista Service Pack 2 with a new taskbar skin.
The main issue with that is MS made a million different versions of Vista and some of them had significantly higher requirements than others. So you had OEMs selling machines that were ‘Vista Ready’ in the lead up to launch but they barely made the requirements for the basic version. Then you had people going to Best Buy and getting the premium version and having a horrible experience.
I had Vista on my MacBook Pro and it was a a solid OS, especially if you needed 64-bit support. In fact the Pro was PC Magazine’s #1 pick for Vista machines which caused quite a stir at the time when Bootcamp was still new.
DOS and win2000 (debloated) was the only ones i could stand.
XP debloated was almost tolerable, but 2000 was nicer for reasons that i cant remember.
I'm not sure about calling windows the OS before me/xp though (whenever they put the NT kernel into consumer) - i think before that it was still effectively just MS-DOS as the operating system. Windows was more like a desktop environment in linux terms.
For example i think I used the same windows 3.1 or 3.11 across several operating systems, dos 5.0, 6.0, 6.2, 6.22. Windows 3 never really seemed to do any basic OS stuff , like configuring memory or disk drives or setting up IRQs for like soundcards and stuff.
Win95/98 never actually bothered me; it was easy to opt out of the gui (which i didn't like at all).
Long was it known fact: Windows versions and OG Star Trek films. Every other one was terrible.
... but I note there are a few important releases missing there. 3.0, Win2K and 8.1 especially, and we might argue for 3.1 and 98SE and maybe even the unreleased Longhorn too.
Nah I agree, but if every incremental release was included then you'd need a 55" monitor in portrait orientation to see them all!
I've not really thought about the Star Trek films. I enjoyed them all (even Nemesis!) with the exception of ST4: The Voyage Home.
It's funny because my first PC was a Compaq from Best Buy that came with 98 and my pattern with windows has always been every other one so I've used all the ones with check marks and none of the "bad ones". I wonder how much more I would hate windows if I had started a year earlier with 95...