This is my take on the 'Why Windows 95 Sucks' theme. I'll try to be objective as possible and not remember than I've reinstalled Windows 95 a total of four times now in the past six months and crashed it once already this morning.
First, Notepad sucks. Microsoft actually put a somewhat decent version of Notepad on Windows NT that has customizable fonts, find and replace, no 32 KB file size limit, and it actually remembers the settings the next time you start it, features seriously lacking in Windows 95 Notepad. (I just found out that there is a variant of Notepad called 'Notepad 96' that simply adds features to save fonts and the word wrap settings but loads just as fast as the original Notepad. Unfortunately, the page where I found it is outdated and no longer provides a valid link to the file. If you know where I can find this program, please don't hesitate to contact me.) Just consider how many notepad replacements have been released and are being released, and you'll realize that it's definitely majority opinion that Windows 95 Notepad sucks. Then think again how much work you do is with plain text? You can tell a lot about an operating system about its included text editor, e.g. Unix and Vi.
Second is that there is practically no documentation. Most Windows 95 users don't know that there's telnet, ftp, trace, and ping applications included in all installations. And the applications that are obviously accessible aren't very well documented. For example, there a number of very useful shortcut keys in WordPad that are completely undocumented. This is, unfortunately, also the case for the majority of the applications.
Next, there's the registry. Yeah, who's convinced that keeping all the configuration, both hardware and software, in memory all the time is a good idea? Evidently enough people to make Windows 95 as popular as it is today. There are two things I know. First, this is at least a serious waste of resources. And second, if Windows 95 doesn't start, there's a 99.9% chance that it's the registry. Okay, with Windows 3.1x or DOS configuration problems are relatively easy to fix since there's at most four files you need to look at. But when you combine all these files plus all the other INI files, then you get what amounts to the Windows 95 registry. And if you need to fix something, you're not looking at a couple of hundred KB's of configuration files [at most], you're looking at a couple of MB's. And who has the skill to sort through a couple thousand lines to find a problem that may be in just one of those lines, especially when Windows 95 won't start in even Safe Mode and you can't use RegEdit? Not very many, and there certainly isn't a way for the majority of users to even learn how to hack the registry since there is practically no documentation readily available to them [in the form of Windows Help files].
Okay, this is probably the best case for claiming that Windows 95 sucks. In real multi-tasking operating systems such as Unix or BeOS, when one application crashes, it cannot take down other applications with it, or, in the case of Windows 95, the whole operating system (in this case we'll assume Windows 95 is an operating system). I know this is a new concept to those of you that use Windows 95 and don't think there's anything else out there, but, believe it or not, when one application 'misbehaves' it doesn't have to crash the whole operating system. This is actually the standard for multi-tasking operating systems - to have what is called a protected memory - no application should be able to crash any others - each one runs in its own memory area. It makes one wonder why Microsoft claims that Windows 95 is a multi-tasking operating system. In reality, inside Windows 95 guts is DOS, good old DOS, that was not originally designed for multi-tasking. I guess Windows 95 can't help it if the whole OS crashes because of one misbehaved program since, at its core, it is DOS.
Here's a company that says Windows 95 doesn't have any bugs any significant number of users want fixed. Yes, Bill Gates said that! This arrogance of Microsoft with its bugs puts end-users at least at a disadvantage and at most, in rage. Why is it that Windows 95 is so riddled with bugs, even OSR2 (MS' third 'attempt' at getting Windows 95 right), that third party developers are releasing bug fixes? What service pack number is MS Office up to? What about Windows NT, not to mention the numerous hotfixes, which were less than 'hot' (consider that the Linux community was releasing a patch against the Tear Drop attack three hours, not three years, three weeks, or even three days, after the vulnerability was found?). What's really funny, however, is that Microsoft has already announced Windows 98 and NT 5.0 and released what they call betas [which, I may say, weren't because betas actually start - there were a number of reports among Microsoft beta testers that they were unable to install the respective betas - this should never happen in a 'beta' test, maybe 'alpha,' but not beta] when Microsoft still hasn't gotten Windows 95 and NT 4.0 right!
Copyright © 1997 Mark Santos. All rights reserved.