this CANNOT BE EMPHASIZED ENOUGH. computers are as fast as they were the day they were first used. actually faster when you tune them up by configuring them correctly & have unnecessary system processes weeded out & not running in the background. anyway, it’s peoples crap on the computers that show them down, not the computer itself.
you can test this theory by putting 50 extra pounds in your car every week. you won’t notice it at first, but before long the on ramps & hills aren’t going to be as doable as they were previously. eventually you won’t be able to maintain speed on the highway.
not your cars fault here, it’s all your shit.
on computers it’s services running in the background, tool bars & other crap add ons. spyware. browser’s not set up correctly. not managing JavaScript by blindly allowing it to run everywhere. not running ad blockers.
I’ve tuned up peoples computers that were about to get another one. they were blown away by the speed gained. the problem is the same person ignorant of how & why to do these things will have their computers back in the same mess in no time.
I’ve vowed to never spend the time helping people out with their computers for that exact reason. it’s just time wasted.
computer stores love these people. they’re good, frequent customers.
Win 98 only had a couple flaws. The drivers weren’t very good. I remember having a lot of trouble upgrading clients from Win 95. Half the time the sound card or video card wouldn’t work with the default drivers. Had to search the manufacturer’s web site for drivers.
Plug N Play used to be called Plug N Pray. I was building custom pc’s then. Getting PNP to recognize and install a card was challenging. Sometimes I’d get it working and deliver to the client. A week later they were seeing “new hardware detected” every time they booted. I’d go out there and fight with it to recognize the card again. Cost me a lot of man hours for work that I had to do free under my shop warranty.
It’s amazing pc’s survived those early rocky days.
I think Windows 98 in its original 1998 version may have had a few problems but the SE release in 1999 was one of the best things Microsoft ever released. It was very stable for games and many people preferred it well into Windows XP’s life for the gaming performance. Guess you were just unlucky.
Windows 2000 and Windows XP were the same thing, they had the same kernel just a different explorer. Microsoft just tidied up the 2000 explorer and released it as XP. Many people rightly felt the XP improvements didn’t add anything and stuck to 2000 but being the same under the hood all programs and drivers were interchangeable.
The problem now is that AMD and Intel are selling processors that won’t work on Windows versions prior to 10 thus forcing your hand. Windows 10 really sucks, the “engine” may be very good but the UI is terrible. Its scheduling seems off, so it drops mouse clicks and animations to suit itself making it feel laggy even on modern hardware. By comparison 8 and 8.1 were masterpieces. You just know that it’s all marketing anyway, Vista/7/8/8.1 were all exactly the same apart from the explorer. 10 just added a start button back in and mandatory updates. The new features are just explorer add-ons not actual operating system changes or improvements.
My only beef with Win 95 was the lack of support for Word Perfect. It was the dominant word processor. The university where I worked used it throughout the campus with Win 3.1 and Windows for Workgroups. We migrated to Win 95 and suddenly Word Perfect was crashing. I was in Computing Services at the time. The help desk phones never stopped ringing. The entire campus had switch to Word within three weeks. That was over 1200 licenses lost to Word. Plus a lot of students would have updated their pc’s at home.
Coincidence? Microsoft wouldn’t sabotage their biggest Word Processor competitor? no comment
I do know Word Perfect never recovered from the Win 95 meltdown. Ms Word has ruled the market ever sense.
aceplace57: I have no idea where you got any of this.
MS-Word had won before 1995. WordPerfect was running on fumes before that in the US. (But was still doing well overseas.) It was their late and buggy release for Windows 3.0 that first hurt them.
I taught computer literacy classes in that era. We deliberately used non-MS-Office programs like WordPerfect to expose students to a bigger world. They were dumbfounded. They just knew that word processing meant MS-Word exclusively! No other word processor existed in their minds.
We ran WP perfectly fine on Windows 95 and beyond. No problems whatsoever. (I still have WP 8.0* from 1997 running on my PC under Windows 7.)
When they give profs some software for free, you just keep using it.
My experience was different. We used Word Perfect on our staff computers. I wrote software documentation with it. Running Windows for Workgroups.
The whole campus upgraded to Win 95. I don’t remember what went wrong with WP. Might have been the dreaded blue screen with a memory dump. Or it just locked up. I can’t recall.
I do remember going from pc to pc removing WP and installing MS Word. All the staff in computing services got called in to get the campus upgraded.
WP probably issued a patch. But by then we were on MS Word.
I think there might have been one or two changes to the kernel between Vista and Win 10.
As for the UI, I had Vista at home (big mistake, the reason I skipped 8) and Win 7 at work, and there was almost no learning curve going to Win 10. My wife, who does not handle changes as well as I do, was amazed that she had no issues.
The lack of support for old OS’s seems like a business, not technical decision. One I don’t blame them for. Now they’ve got an OS most people don’t hate, why not stop supporting the old ones for new machines. It costs a ton to verify for probably very few customers.
Usability. If it’s running well enough for you, don’t worry about an upgrade for that reason.
Security: Are you still getting security updates for the software you are running? The OS, browser, whatever. If you’re running Windows XP, for example, the standard security update process halted quite a while back. This leaves many folk running that OS in an insecure position. And many programs, e.g., Firefox, no longer issue new versions for XP. And you don’t want to be running an insecure version of Firefox.
On the startup crapware issue I mentioned upthread. I installed Windows 10 on my new computer a couple days ago. I ran hijackthis to see what’s running at startup on this fresh install. It goes on for pages and pages! On my Win7 box it’s not even a single page and I have all the programs/settings memorized so I notice right away when there’s a change.
And of course doing a Google search on a mystery program leads to a ton of useless websites that say “veeblefitzer.exe is a component of Windows needed by some programs. Do not disable it if you use those programs.” Umm, which programs? And what does it actually do???
If someone only wants to go online and do basic office tasks, wouldn’t a smartphone with modest accessories be sufficient? Would it be possible to hook up a smartphone to a keyboard, mouse and monitor?
As for when computers are too old: As noted above, a gamer may want to upgrade their GPU every few years, replacing HDDs with SSDs or hybrid drives is also nice. Aside from that, the mechanical parts of your PC will likely fall apart before the electronic parts. Make sure to clean the dust in your PC once in a while. You might not believe the amount of dust in there if you’ve never taken a look.
My PC isn’t particularly slow but if there were sneaky startup programs that slowed it down, how would I find them? I checked the Startup tab of my Task Manager and didn’t find much. I also recently had problems with Chrome slowing down, disabled a bunch of extensions but I still get slowdowns sometimes.
I’ve done it using Wifi and Bluetooth, but not for general-purpose use for any length of time so cannot speak to how that goes. You can also buy a Raspberry Pi type of computer (small, single circuit board) with 1 GB of RAM for a few bucks
and plug peripherals in via HDMI and USB.
There is a sticky thread with links to scanners like Malwarebytes and HitmanPro; have you tried them to weed out any malicious crap?
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