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Windows 95 let installers trash its files then fixed the mess behind their backs
(www.theregister.com)
this post was submitted on 29 Mar 2026
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Windows 95: Fixes itself when you aren't watching Windows 11: Fucks itself up when you aren't watching
Oh, every windows has fucked itself up silently. 95 was famous for needing a reboot at every mouse movement and a reinstall regularly.
Defragging monthly, fixing registry values and hoping windows 98 would fix things this time was all I remember about Win95.
But windows 98 came out about 3 months after I built my own first PC. It was still full of problems, but I eventually ended up ok NT/2000 and things got better. Then I quit windows for good when apple went to Intel.
The BSOD was a digital wellbeing feature, to make sure you didn't use your computer for too long.
Being the guy who had to feed the whole 32 floppy disk stack to the wretched PC every time the user broke the Windows 95 installation pushed me to the *nix camp quite early, I can tell you that.
Each floppy had a good 10% chance of being faulty, so imagine the fun.
Oh, I'd actually forgotten how flaky 3.5" floppies were. That's very true.
A 5.25" you could probably send in a letter and stick the letter on a fridge with a magnet so your remember to mail it and it would still work when it arrived.
Well, maybe not, but it was quite a difference.
3.5" was still better than zip disks. At least you couldn't break your floppy drive with a bad disk. Zip drives would break due to a bad disk such that they damaged any other disks you used. Then those broken disks would break any working drive, etc. First and maybe only communicable hardware bug.
Even Windows 98SE gave me a long habit (only somewhat receded after moving to Linux) to, as much as possible, not even move the cursor without a clear purpose. Every event could be the last before everything hanging. Probably not as often as with 95 or plain 98, but.
I managed 100s of days of uptime on 95.
It really helped if you replaced the shell, imo.