Absolutely loathed moving from 98 to XP. The stability wasn't much better, the resources were hogged more, and the default toys-r-us theme was an incredible eyesore (thank god for UX hacks). It was overall so much pain but Vista was even worse in many respects so I kinda weathered it until 7 came along, and that one was insanely good.
Windows 98 (from my memory) was not very stable and horribly insecure.
I recall a handful of tools that anyone could use (I was 10-11 and could figure it out) to break and bluescreen Win 98 computers remotely.
10-11 year old me liked the XP theme, the icons were so “fresh”, nearly everything that came before was grey and boring (and the beige boxes didn’t make that better) so it was a welcome change to me at the time.
Now I’m old, I see the joy of grey high contrast consistent UI: what I am doing is more important than the shell around what I am doing.
I remember our Windows 98 SE machine crashing two or three times a day just in normal use (and this was mostly light use by us kids, we were primary students at the time - I imagine it was worse if you were using it in an office eight hours a day). Moving to XP was a big stability improvement as far as I can remember.
From what I can tell, Windows Me was the most stable version of 9x for computers that were made with Windows Me in mind while older hardware with old drivers upgrading from 9x to Me was a minefield.
Windows XP forced driver development to a more modern standard that made things more stable. Still not stable enough (Windows Vista and up enforced that more and more in their APIs) but with XP the days of drivers assuming they could take complete control of the CPU and various buses were over.
Of course the companies that made shitty drivers for 9x also made shitty drivers for XP, so old hardware and hardware with shitty drivers was still less stable than other new hardware available, but things were moving forward.
These days, it's rare to see a full BSOD in Windows on any hardware but the very shittiest, especially with Windows 11 thanks to its artificial hardware support cutoff.
As always, I can't recommend enough a very thourough dig into the system and its history that was posted in multiple parts on ars technica. Really well put together.
I'd heard Vampire's compatibility can be spotty and you can obviously see why. My own 1200 is kept very barebones by design (just a spot of fast ram and a CF drive) to keep max compatibility with the software I do want to run there instead of trying to convince everyone it can still be a viable do-anything system in 2025. Although a TerribleFire (an actual accelerator, unlike the Vampire) is very tempting at times...
Yeah. I have an A500, and it pleases me very much to keep it at its base configuration, with the exception of a Gotek floppy emulator and maybe, eventually, an IDE card. I have plenty of modern PCs for modern PC tasks. The idea of being inventive with what the capabilities of the original-spec hardware were pleases me more than attempting to turn it into a more modern machine.
At a time like this I can't help but recall a Lem story - yeah I know there's a Lem story for any occasion - about Doctor Diagoras, especially his rant about a character from an earlier Tichy story, who made human-like AIs. The rant, especially his questions about why would anyone add just another human, except synthetic one, to the millions of existing biological people, and that cybernetics should be about something else, really resonated with me.
