[distcs]

> Can’t imagine how these Windows engineers feel about the enshitification of their baby.

I think people are forgetting how unreliable Windows was in its early days. If you were doing anything complex (programming, editing pictures, ...) Windows couldn't run for 2 hours without crashing every so often.

If anything, the core of the Windows operating system has only gotten better with time. Yes, they keep adding fluff to the desktop environment but that doesn't take away the progress they have made in stablizing their core operating system.

[deelly]

> Windows couldn't run for 2 hours without crashing every so often.

I`m really curious, which version of Windows you mean?

Because I don't remember this on win 3.11, win XP, win 95, etc. etc. Of course there sometimes HW/drivers issue, sometime some programs corrupt system files, etc. etc. But crashing every so often.. thats strange.

[bayindirh]

Windows 95 and 98 loved to crash because a fly at the other corner of the room moved an atom which hurt the OS' feelings momentarily.

Ran out of memory? BAM. An official driver from Intel or nVidia or ATI did something slightly off-time because silicon decided to wait a clock for something, BAM. You had a professional capture card with high bandwidth for that time, and you wanted to capture a video, BAM.

A blue screen because of a spinlock access violation, a Windows bundled driver, or any high-end software was common back in these days.

[NovaDudely]

Oh yeah it did. The amount of times when you are writing something in Word, then figure it has been 15 minutes, I should save. Only to move the mouse to the save icon only to have the entire system just stop. No error just a total lock.

This is why you can tell if people grew up in that era, you have muscle memeoy of CRTL + S every few minutes burned into your soul.

[bayindirh]

> you have muscle memeoy of CRTL + S every few minutes burned into your soul.

I'm honestly afraid that my child will born with it and do that pinky-midfinger combo on air like playing air guitar on day 1.

[smcl]

I didn't quite suffer from anything quite this severe, but Windows PCs definitely needed a restart once a day for sure. The weird one for me was installing new software requiring a restart. Some applications would insist on it, presenting you with a modal saying something like "Your computer will now be restarted, save your work and click the Ok button"

[lasereyes136]

Windows NT 3.51 was a big milestone in terms of stability. Windows NT 4 got even better from a stability point of view. I can't remember the last time I got a Windows blue screen of death when it used to be common to see one but on a decreasing basis as new versions of Windows came out.

[dreamcompiler]

> I think people are forgetting how unreliable Windows was in its early days.

Not to mention being as easy to attack as a house made of butter.

[deelly]

And some people still use WinXP, Win 7, Win 8 etc...

[jabroni_salad]

At least you had a decent host firewall by then. Pre XP-SP2 you'd get malware just hooking up to the internet.

[rightbyte]

Later Windowses are full blown spyware with ads. If I had to use Windows for some reason it would be 7.

[AussieWog93]

It's not difficult to de-shittify 10/11. There's a tool that automatically does it call ShutUp10.

It's arguably a bit shit from a business perspective, but has no real impact on power-users day to day.

[jeroenhd]

You need to be careful with ShutUp10/11. You can easily break automated security rules or system APIs if you carelessly enable all of those settings. You can't just apply these patches and forget about them, sometimes you need to undo your work to get updates installed or to resolve problems (for example, the "disable internet check API" privacy setting can cause some applications to display "you're not connected to the WiFi" popups).

It's also an uphill battle against the ever encroaching Microsoft Edge bullshit; every time you remove part of the bullshit, Microsoft comes out with an update that adds more.

If you're stuck with Windows I'd consider the safe defaults for ShutUp1x as essential but you do need to read the notes for every setting you enable, which may require some Googling so you understand what you're doing.

[rightbyte]

Does it work without a Enterprise install?

[jeroenhd]

Yes, I'd even go as far to say it's designed for use with Home and Pro; it's setting the toggles enterprise/LTSC users will most likely already be managing through their centralized group management software.

[sneed_chucker]

Was Windows NT ever that unstable? I know 95, 98, and ME were all notorious for stability issues, but was under the impression that NT was better.

[jeroenhd]

Windows 98 was unstable because its drivers and usermode software components still came from a time where they controlled every aspect of the computer.

NT solved that problem by not allowing a lot of that nonsense, breaking code in the process. This incompatibility is the reason new Windows 95/98 PCs are produced until this day (https://nixsys.com/legacy-computers/windows-95-computers, https://nixsys.com/legacy-computers/windows-98-computers): back in the Win9x days, programming your computer like you would program a microcontroller today was quite a reasonable thing to do for certain applications, like controlling production lines.

There is the uptime overflow bug to deal with, but a monthly reboot is easier than reverse engineering and porting control software.

[II2II]

> Windows couldn't run for 2 hours without crashing every so often.

That sounds like a Windows 3.1, where applications could easily take down the operating system. Windows 9x wasn't quite as bad. If I recall correctly, properly written applications could not take down the operating system though drivers certainly could. That said, there were certainly ways for developers to break the rules since there was little (if any enforcement) so some applications did take down the operating system. With the Windows NT series, there was sufficient isolation and enforcement of that isolation, that it was very reliable. Drivers could be an issue, as with bugs in Microsoft's code, but that was nothing in comparison to contemporary versions of 3.1 and 9x.

On the whole, I don't think it is reasonable to blame Microsoft for the reliability of their operating system. There were certainly design issues that resulted in it being unreliable, especially when running third-party code. On the other hand, the operating system was basically an evolution of a product line that started on the 8088 with very limited memory (I'm speaking of PC-DOS here) and a great degree of compatibility had to be maintained. Keep in mind, the computer industry did not work at the same pace: features had to wait until processors incorporated them, processor adoption had to wait for manufacturers to build them into their systems, and then consumers buy those systems in sufficient numbers. For example: the 286 was introduced in early 1982, but the IBM PC AT did not come out for another 2.5 years. Microsoft was also limited by the hardware their customers owned, even when it supported particular features. Life is much harder when you cannot throw memory at the problem because people had 2 or 4 or 8 MB of RAM.

On the other hand, Windows NT was a completely different product. There was much less concern over compatibility. There was much more intent to throw away baggage to create a modern (for the time) operating system. It did not crash every two hours.

[jabroni_salad]

I'm honestly not sure if that was windows's fault. In that time period we also had:

1. budget devices from OEMs that cut corners at every cost

2. capacitor plague with merchants unable to guarantee good capacitors from any source