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Win95 Lifecycle Draws to a Close
Mr_Perl writes "As many Everquest players discovered recently directx 8.1 is not being made for Windows 95, sending stores everywhere into a frenzy to slap little stickers over the words "Windows 95" on game box system requirements sections. Microsoft has picked November 30th, 2001 as the date that Win95 moves into the unsupported phase of it's career, making it even more useless to those who still keep it around for playing the latest games. Looks like Win98 is slated for execution June 30, 2003."
once Win2k is unsupported, it's product activation time for everyone
One of my old coworkers at a previous job supported WIndows for Workgroups 3.11. Really challenging from what she said. The support issues with that OS were ironed out YEARS ago. Nowadays it takes little more than a good support script to read off to satisfy the vast majority of Windows 3.1x issues. (She and her coworkers used to play Frisbee while on calls. Just a long cord, wide aisles, and hours of fun. Fun yah!) Plus the new software/hardware market for Windows 3.1x is dormant at best.
On the other hand, Windows95 systems have many more capabilities and require actual human beings to troubleshoot and whatnot.
So considering how much more money the must be losing to support Windows95, and how cheaply Windows 3.1x can be supported, it probably makes sense in a capitalist way.
Course, I could be reading too much into it.
"My God, this must be a truly remarkable corn chip, to be so widely and confidently touted."
Win95 was the last version of Windows I could make work the way I wanted it to.
It's also the last version I will ever have bought.
I don't blame MS for moving it into the dustbin of history, but I believe they should be asking themselves what it is about their later products that people would still be using Win95.
If Microsoft, as a corporation, were capable of asking themselves such questions, they wouldn't be Microsoft.
Newer! Slower! Bigger! Less Modular! More Microsoft!
Bob-
The Ludwig von Mises Institute. The reasoning individuals economics
I've reinstalled Win98SE twice because of registry rot, and now again there are weird things happening that are impossible to localise. You could assume I'm a moron, of course.
In my mind, the registry is better than a pant load of .ini files. Everything's in one place, so you know that if you need to find something, you just have to fire up regedit (and the trees are generally setup pretty logically, though
you can't fault Microsoft for idiot third-party developers).
So as long as you only install MS products you'll be fine. I CAN blame MS for creating a system that crashes if you dare to install products from other companies.
I'd MUCH rather have a pantsload of ini files. Then I can sort them by date and find the most recently changed ones and fix/delete/restore them. I use an installer tracker and find the average large app inserts hundreds of entries in the registry, many just cryptic strings. It's beyond human understanding.
People will bring servers to their knees to get the latest one-line change to the Linux kernel, and yet they'll run a mid-1990s version of the Windows lines and wonder why they have trouble.
Which points out one of my real peeves about Microsoft: at a certain point they stop releasing service packs and patches, and start releasing changes to the OS using all sorts of sneaky non-documented methods. If you were an OEM and had access to OSR 2.5, great. But if you were a home user of W95, after Service Pack 1 (W95 SP2 being basically useless) you were out of luck. Same with NT 4 today: where is Service Pack 7?
sPh