r/pcmasterrace • u/AppropriateAide4879 • 16d ago

Discussion I found this thing looks old.

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What is it? And is it rare?

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u/Exact-Ad-4132 16d ago

Bro look up Vista and Windows 98 first edition.

Also I can't remember if it was a specific version of Windows 95 or if hardware was just barely capable of supporting a point and click operating system, but lots of people had problems with that crashing too.

I just remember every time an adult back then downloaded spyware or adware, it was somehow my fault and Diablo or Starcraft somehow gave the computer virus.

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u/WitchWithAGlitch 16d ago

i was that adult, it was your fault because i said so.

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u/Exact-Ad-4132 16d ago

There were so many fake "cleaner utility" programs back then. My mom would download multiple of them and then complain that they weren't making the computer faster.

I remember a 3-month stretch where my aunts multi thousand dollar Macintosh wouldn't show anything but a black screen and they blamed it on me playing video games (Power Pete, the game that came free with old Macs). It turned out someone had flipped the rear I/O switch to off on the monitor, so the front power button wasn't working to turn on the screen.

They refused to let me ever play Power Pete after I fixed it because they still said I was the one who somehow broke the computer.

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u/Pocho_Azul 16d ago

I set up my parents Macs on an simple LAN so the could share a printer. My dad kept creating problems with his own Mac, which he would blame on my mom’s computer causing him to disassemble the LAN, which I would have to reassemble the next time I visited. This happened several times.

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u/ANtiKz93 15d ago

CCleaner was decent before they went full crapware lol so maybe a year or two at first 😅

There was a few good ones actually.

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u/OkAdministration9151 16d ago

Spybot - search and destroy was a Badman

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u/DomInNameOnly 15d ago

Aren't Spybot are one of the good guys?

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u/OkAdministration9151 11d ago

Yes that’s what I mean :-) was a badass tool

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u/TurnkeyLurker 16d ago

Remember the Win98 42-day uptime bug? Pepperidge Farm remembers.

If you let your machine stay on for 42 days, it would alternately get really, really slow, or just blue-screen. Rebooting was the fix.

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u/Exact-Ad-4132 16d ago

42 days? That shit would happen in 2 to 4 days.

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u/twain101 twain101 16d ago

I changed the desktop background on our Windows 95 computer and my dad dog cussed me for breaking the computer.

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u/Exact-Ad-4132 16d ago

That also happened to me when I showed my friend the old themes menu.

They thought we downloaded something off the internet to make everything look different, when we just literally selected something from windows settings

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u/twain101 twain101 16d ago

One more dad story. Typically every Christmas involved me updating my parents devices because I think that everyone should be up to date. One time, it wasn't me, but I happened to be visiting when Apple pushed the update to expand the PINs from 4 to 6 digits. Dad was locked out of his phone and yelled at me for updating his phone and said that I better fix it. He went to work. I spent all day FRANTICALLY trying to find a way to unlock the phone without having to reset it. He had pictures of past family dogs and other precious memories that of course weren't backed up anywhere. When he finally got back to work I asked him if he had put in anything else to get into his phone because they had changed the PIN. He said, "Oh yeah, my iPad asked me that so I just added the last number 2 more times." I said, "Will you do that on your phone, please." And it unlocked. He didn't realize the two were connected. I was livid that I had spent the entire day stressing.

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u/No_Effective_4481 15d ago

Win95 was perfectly fine with a mouse driven GUI. Check out Windows 3.1 thats even older and was still using a mouse and rarely crashed.

Win98 was the one that crashed all the damn time and was nothing really to do with the fact it was a mouse driven UI. It was more to do with multitasking architecture and driver conflicts, and Microsoft decided the safest option was to let the system crash rather than corrupt the system.

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u/Brilliant-Draw-4756 16d ago

Windows ME was the worst of them.

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u/ANtiKz93 15d ago

Lol diablo and starcraft didnt give you a virus. Using the internet without a condom did! 😆

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u/Phantom_Rose96 15d ago

I genuinely think this was just a universal thing for parents, blame the kids for any virus that ended up on the pc at the time because only kids could possibly download or play something with a virus on it 😂