Why Windows 95 Crashed So Often

Windows 95 was a revolutionary operating system...but it was also very buggy. Here's why it, along with Windows 98 and Me, were so unstable.

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[wolfmobile]

Surprised you did not mention Registry Rot. The more you installed or uninstalled on Windows 9x, the more unstable your PC became. And the only fix was a full reformat.

[rLgxTbQ]

Dave Plummer, a developer on Windows back in the day, has a youtube channel "Dave's Garage" where he goes through a lot of old Windows stuff like this. Would love to see some sort of collab

[rantsfromcanada]

I loved Windows 98SE (the "best" version of 95). That being said, when I switched my 98 machine to Win2K I went from a few crashes per day to one or two per month. Loved Windows 2000.

[ronmaximilian]

USB support didn't occur until Windows 95 Service Release 2 and often needed updates from Microsoft and vendors to work. Winfow 95 was largely written in 1994 and USB was not introduced until 1996.
Windows 95 also introduced plug and play, or plug and pray, which made it much easier to install new hardware. For all its many faults, Windows 95 was a dramatic improvement over Windows 3.1. And to be honest, widows 3.11 and earlier also had memory issues.
As for running dos applications in a 32-bit environment, the best way to do so was an OS/2.

[alexanrsousa]

I think a few details are slightly off here:

- Win95 didn't really share code with DOS the way some people might think: Win9x is part of the "Windows" line (a lineage separate from the "Windows NT" line), which ran on top of DOS. With its predecessor (Windows 3.11) you needed to install DOS then install Windows on top of it, but in Win95 DOS was assimilated and an updated DOS kernel (7.0) was bundled with it. There was nothing stopping a "true" 32-bit OS from starting from DOS (as it did little to nothing to prevent itself from being completely replaced), but Win9x had too much Win3.x in it, and things like the GDI subsystem were basically still 16-bit deep down.

- DOS was not built for cooperative multitasking. DOS was not built with ANY multitasking in mind. The closer to "multitasking" DOS provided were TSR (terminate and stay resident) programs. It wasn't really multitasking as an interrupt would cause the processor to execute whatever interrupt handler the TSR installed. Some softwrare used that as a sort of VERY primitive task switching, but the logic had to be done by the software itself. Windows 1.0-3.11, on the other hand, had cooperative multitasking, with Windows 3.x having a hybrid multitasking scheme in 386-enhanced mode which was improved on Windows 95.

- 16bit DOS software was subjected to preemptive multitasking if executed withing Windows. This had been the case even in Windows 3.x running in 386-enhanced mode. AFAIK every MS-DOS window had it's separate V8086 virtual machine based on a copy of the DOS environment that existed, and all 16-bit Windows applications shared a single V8086 VM and cooperatively multitasked among themselves, whereas the VMs themselves were preemptively multitasked. They could still wreck havoc, though, as things like sound and graphics drivers could allow them to directly access the hardware to mantain compatibility (and performance).

- Windows XP had, surprisingly enough, better DOS compatibility than Windows 2000, which was already much better than Windows NT 4.0. So not only the world had moved on to write 32-bit Windows apps, but the NT line itself became better at running legacy software. It was, for example, the only NT version that had some DOS sound support out of the box, through partial Sound Blaster 2.0 + MPU401 emulation.

[Bedwyr]

Man Jake has come so far finding his own voice. From those watching since the house days, we’re proud of you man.

[pirategirljess]

But at least with 9x your computer doesn't restart at 2am and loose your work because of a windows update you didn't know was there

[DeadOnToilet]

Lot of little misses in this article; failing to mention Windows 2000, the high impact of poorly written third party drivers impacting Windows (particularly printer drivers, even into the NT kernel days).

I was a sysadmin when 95 came out. Talking with colleagues at various companies including Microsoft, Usenet chatter and many IRC conversations, many more technically inclined people kept very stable Win9x builds going for years and years by avoiding the worst offenders in the third party space.

[seanplace]

Bad drivers caused BSOD's well into the Windows XP+ days. The biggest problem was drivers unnecessarily running in kernel mode. Which meant any errors they encountered could crash the entire system. Things are better these days as most drivers run in user mode. Also improvements in the Windows NT kernel have made driver issues more manageable.

[TheXev]

I remember Windows ME having a VXD mod that would split the kernel up into the individual components that Windows 95 and Windows 98 had.. it really increased the stability of Windows ME. It's also important to note that Windows 2000 was supposed to have a Home version (ME was never supposed to come out), but the backward compatibility layer wasn't finished in time.

When Windows 2000 came out, it became my main OS for me and my friends. It was unbelievably more stable then Windows 98, and I don't remember any compatibility issues with Win9x games on Windows 2000... there was really no reason to run Windows ME unless you had a 3Dfx card.. 3Dfx's Win2k drivers weren't quiet as good as their Win9x drivers.

[RaceSimCentral]

Thanks for doing more retro content across LTT channels! I enjoy these trips down memory lane. :)

[matthewb]

This was a really good one. Loving these deep dives into the older tech that was predominant when I was a young kid. Any chance we could look at the various different DOSes that were available through the 80s and 90s, as well as all the different Windows OSes that were available to run over these DOSes? Could make for an interesting Techlonger series.

[scytob]

No. By far the larger issue was that while the OS was pre-emptive 32bit to some degree the shell was 16bit and not re-entrant. What this meant was the shell would hang and people would think (legitimately the machine had crashed. Oddly it hadn't, plenty of the OS was still running. It was designed IIRC that you would press clt+alt+del once, wait, do it again, wait and IIRC it would restart explorer and you would find your apps still running. The design flaw was if you do did ctrl+alt+del 3 times quickly in a row it would reboot the PC. This was documented in all the internal MS training material we used to support win95 on day one - but of course this was a silly design decision and no where did the OS tell users there was a way to keep the PC running. This was not an issue caused by running on top of DOS. #iwasthereonday1

[qstudiomusicandproductions]

Great vid! I went from "a do everything tech" engineer, lab tech, company computer guy with 12 users, to being an IT manager at a company (1999) with 70 users... all running Windows 98 with Novell 3.x. OMG what a nightmare! Phrase of the day was- when in doubt, reboot it out! Sometimes we forget how far we have come 🙂

[sireuchre]

Windows 95 runs rock stable for me, once I fed any Win95 system enough ram, namely 4 or more megabytes (yes, megabytes, not gigabytes). With 8mb, it is great. The only step beyond that to help stability and performance was creating a dedicated partition for the page file. If you had multiple hard drives, you put the page file on the non-Windows system drive. You could prevent a lot of bottleneck issues that could cause instability that way. Programs being on yet another partition helped, too. All of this was possible if you spent some money on RAM (granted, it wasn't cheap then), and time to set up the partitions and set the locations (environment variables) for your Program Files directory, and the page file. My Win95 boxes would stay up and running for WEEKS. Couldn't say that about Win98SE. Only MS OS that finally beat it for stability was Win2k, with its rock solid NT base.

Edit: Oh, and Win95 did NOT require 4mb of RAM. It recommended it, for now obvious reasons. My father's system with its EDO RAM was running only 2mb, and when I swapped in a couple of 2mb sticks, suddenly it ran superbly. Every system I built after that had 4mb minimum.

[Bob.martens]

my first real PC was a win98 machine, and it was magical. Watching tv, recording and editing music, watching 700MB divx rips, all on the 19' CRT...

[phillscott]

Win95, and especially Win98se were always very stable for me. Mind, the fact that I wasn't anywhere near a power user at that time, plus they were never connected to the net, may have something to do with it.

[explorer]

Thanks for not being one of those long and drawn out video I loved it

[orionred]

This was nostalgic! I remember hitting all of these problems as they were invented. i even had the issue where the hardware was so fast, the system would time out before the disk could spin up. There was a patch to make the loop longer.

[jameslewis]

With this piece it just points out to me how ahead of their time the Amiga line of home computers were. They had a colour graphical interface for their operating system (Workbench) which included features like pre-emptive multi-tasking as far back as the late 1980's. Unfortunately Commodore (who made these computers) went bust due to mismanagement issues back in 1994 which caused the end of this computer line just before the rest of the world started to catch on to these features.