this post was submitted on 01 Jan 2024
117 points (83.1% liked)

Technology

59594 readers
3131 users here now

This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.


Our Rules


  1. Follow the lemmy.world rules.
  2. Only tech related content.
  3. Be excellent to each another!
  4. Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
  5. Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
  6. Politics threads may be removed.
  7. No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
  8. Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
  9. Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed

Approved Bots


founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
 

Microsoft keeps shooting itself in the foot with Edge::Microsoft Edge is full of fantastic features, but the tech company makes it hard to appreciate them.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] [email protected] 2 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Windows NT 3.5 (and later 3.5.1) was far more stable than the desktop versions of Windows (Windows 3.11 and early Win95). If you need help remembering NT versions visually, NT 3.X still used progman.exe so it looked like Windows 3.1. Windows NT 4 was the first one to use explorer.exe (with the Start button) like Win95.

Win95 gold release was a hot mess of crashes and shaky drivers. The "stable" version of Win95 didn't arrive until OSR2 (aka Windows 95B).

[–] [email protected] 1 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Yes admittedly Windows 3.5.1 was more stable than DOS/Windows. But I still hated the design of it, and the lack of ability to boot into console in particular.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 10 months ago (1 children)

I'm thinking back to those times fixing broken NT 3.5 machines. I can't think of many times a console was needed that didn't have alternate methods to accomplish the same thing. There's really only two times I can think I'd need what we use a console for today.

  • display drivers wrong/bad - VGA mode existed for this where you could get a very ugly 640x480 16 color display that worked on all VGA cards irrespective of driver. You could get into the OS (even authenticate!) and make any changes to the OS needed.

  • mass storage controller change/ driver fix - Running through the setup again from floppies (F8 to use new driver) and you'd be back into the OS.

What else did you need a console for?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

I think mostly for correcting config files, and because I didn't like VGA mode, it was a waste of time to have to boot into.
To read logs and disable drivers that caused problems.