Was it REALLY that bad (for its time)?

Yes, but most of the more annoying bits were fixed in RG.

It was terrible and crashed all the time. Every time a crashy version of windows comes out everyone blames "drivers." If windows knows a driver is crashy it should freaking tell you.

Also it was crashy on brand new computers being sold by microsoft "partners" or whatever. I don't remember microsoft explicitly blaming Gateway 2000 or Packard Bell or whatever, but maybe they should have? I dunno, above my pay grade. I was happy sticking with win98 osr2 which didn't crash (hahahahah yeah right).

For a second there I thought you wrote that you were an OS/2 user. :downs:

I might be misremembering things terribly, but...

Microsoft was contractually obligated to deliver a new home edition Windows to OEMs in 1999/2000. Originally this was supposed to be Windows 2000, but there were a lot of software and hardware incompatibilities. The big one was that Windows 2000 couldn't use drivers written for Windows 95/98, so any consumer grade hardware more than a couple of years old wouldn't work anymore. (I remember my Voodoo 2 wouldn't work in RC2, for example. Those cards were only a year old at the time.) In order to satisfy their obligation, Microsoft hacked together a new version of Windows 98 with some Windows 2000 icons and threw it over the fence.

Windows XP was released a year later.

I remember using it from about 2000-2002 as the PC I had at the time didn't support XP for some reason. For me it really wasn't any worse than 98 that I had installed on that PC a bit earlier. The UI was definitely a bit more polished and i seem to remember it being a bit faster in some ways. At the time I remember wondering what all the complaints were about. I guess I was just lucky with my hardware configuration.

I'll also say the same thing about Vista. I had Vista from pre-release (as my university was in the insider programme) until 7 came out. From what I could tell, most of the complaints about vista were down to people running it on older hardware and complaining that it didn't work and/or was slow. Having just bought a high spec PC right before release I found it perfectly fine.

I remember on a LAN party that we helped a friend install 98 or XP because we couldn't get the network running reliably with ME.

The really annoying thing about Vista was the UAC. It was a learning curve to go through and setup your games and other application to always run as Administrator so that they would work correctly (or at all), which then of course meant that every time your started the application and you had to click to allow it to run. Really, all Win 7 did was made this less annoying (and developers learned to add the /runas administrator command switch to their setup files and applications).

I guess you never tried to suspend a new Thinkpad with Nvidia drivers, then.