Windows Technology

I used Windows v1 on RM Nimbus 80186 not-quite-PCs at school


I suspect if the tills are on a private network and not the internet - the security concerns may be different?

My first Windows PC was Windows 98 - I still have lots of great memories of the noises turned on for everything from minimising windows to opening menu options in the start menu.

Windows Vista is often maligned, but with the appropriate settings changes (turning off UAC), it wasn't all that different to what Windows 7 became.

The look of Vista was so much nicer than XP, and it felt like a major upgrade at the time - even if you had the Media Center or Zune themes installed.

Windows 7 did optimise things over Vista, admittedly, but Vista gets a lot of undeserved stick in my opinion.

I had a similar experience with Windows 8 to Vista; once you got used to the invisible start button and full screen start menu (altered in 8.1), it was a decent upgrade to Windows 7. 10 was like a polished version of 8. At the same time, an upgrade to 8 from 7 wasn't quite the leap as it was from XP.

Neither of them are at ME levels of poorness (which was utterly pointless).

Windows Vista wasn't that bad after the service packs, and if you had a PC that was decently capable of running it. Part of the problem is Vista was a big step up from XP in terms of the specs needed and many computers when it first came out were basically still built to XP specs, and struggled terribly with Vista. By the time I had a Vista laptop, SP2 had just been released and the computer had reasonable specs so I never really had any problems, people who went straight into Vista back in 2007 weren't as lucky. Obviously the damage was done in terms of reputation by the time many of the bugs had been ironed out and most new computers were capable of running it decently.

The main vista performance issues were caused by Microsoft's marketing department wanting to keep the same minimum specs as XP so that people would upgrade their old machines. Which they would, then realise it was dog slow and didn't look anything like the marketing materials and then start demanding a refund and return to XP to make their computer usable again.

If the minimum specs had been more realistic then it would not have got the reputation it did. They fixed all that with 7, only for the marketing department to go all crazy about tablets for version 8, resulting in the utter disaster of a UI that launched with (and I say that as a fan on Windows Phone 7 (aka the version of Windows Phone before the marketing department got involved) ).

Sometimes I'm amazed that Microsoft are still going with the amount of self harm they have committed.

I don't suppose they were trying to avoid a repeat of what happened with Windows 95, with people complaining that the minimum spec was too high (4MB minimum, 8MB recommended).

The idea was to encourage people to migrate from Windows 3.1 to the new Windows 95, so by saying it would run with those same specifications as 3.1 did would make it more attractive. The fact it ran like crap afterwards is beside the point.

Computers were expensive back in the 1990s. These days you can add 8Gb of memory to your computer for about £40, but back in the 1990s it was relatively expensive and because:
https://web.archive.org/web/20150313102618/http://www.oempcworld.com/support/RAM_Technical_Perspective.htm#RAM_Price_Changes

To replace a computer to make it Windows 95 capable would probably have required a second mortgage. However after 1995 because of stockpiling the price fell dramatically, technologies changed and major changes came along, so a lot of it was flogged off relatively cheaply, this was in the days of 4Mb and 8Mb memory which would have been a lot back in the day, peanuts compared to today:

These days memory prices spike on occasion and its usually because a major supplier/company is building a new device, typically Apple.

It was rather. ISTR that whenever we returned one of our office PCs to the IT Department, the RAM happened to fall out on the way. I guess it was loosely fitted.

Can get it for a lot less than that!

Depends on the memory type you need, plus it looks like it and its solid state brethren will be cheaper than ever into next year:
https://www.techspot.com/news/86413-ram-ssd-prices-soon-plummet-due-oversupply-weak.html

The first SSD I bought was a 120Gb, and it cost me £90, that was quite a few years ago now though, and now you can get 1Tb SSD drives for about the same price, and the 2Tb variations are dropping too. SSDs make all the difference.

Very true. I use an external SSD for my mac mini and the difference is phenomenal.

You'll get more value out of it if it was inside your Mac as a boot drive.

I can replace the RAM and have read guides on how to install an SSD inside a Mac but I'm not that technical