/vr/ - Retro Games

My family pretty much skipped Win 95*; we went straight from WfW 3.11 to 98FE around the week it was released to retail. Overall, I think it was the worst Windows experience I've ever been through. The family PC in question:
- Gateway 2000 desktop built circa late '94
- 90 MHz Pentium
- 16 MB RAM
- 2x CD-ROM drive
- ~700MB hard drive
- 1~4 GB hard drive (can't remember the exact size, but I remember it needed EZ-Drive DDO in order for it to be useable)
- can't remember the video card, maybe an S3 of some kind?
- can't remember the sound card either, maybe something from Ensoniq
- 28.8K modem
Anyway, my dad (bless his heart) bought the upgrade edition of 98FE right when it came out, and pretty much slapped it on top of that 3.11 install that had been on that computer for nearly four years at that point. My god, it was slow! Slower than pig shit in winter slow. If you're aware of the minimum requirements for 98, then you'll know this computer barely met them. But that's not all!
Because of whatever version of EZ-Drive that was installed on one of the hard drives, it would constantly present itself as a yellow exclamation point in the Device Manager. As a consequence, both drives always fell-back to MS-DOS compatibility mode, which paired up with just those 16 megs of RAM made it disgustingly unresponsive. My dad was never able to figure out how to solve that problem in a way that wouldn't involve blowing everything away and installing 98 from scratch (which he never did because 1. upgrade copy and 2. couldn't find the original restore disc for 3.11). He eventually bumped up the RAM to 48 MB, which alleviated some of the sluggishness.
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