Upgrading through every version of windows (video)

I saw this video over at www.tomshardware.com today, figured it would be an interesting watch for those as technology-minded as myself He upgrades through every single major version of Windows, from 1.0 all the way through to 7 with various comments about remaining applications and settings and the like.

People bash Microsoft and Windows all the time, but seeing this kinda makes you think... maybe they're not quite so terrible after all

Holy S#!+!! I've often wondered about this very thing. I would never have believed it if I hadn't seen it with my own eyes.

It's a sad and torrid tale. I started with Windows 98, you have to have an install Floppy with CD drivers on it, and the ability to format the drive. Slow and unreliable, I happily went to Windows 98 SE, and ran it it for several years. Much faster, and I was able to install the Windows ME defragger and several other tools that made my life easier. I finally upgraded to ME, and it was a POS from the start. I happily accepted a copy of Windows 2000, which I ran for several years. XP had just came out when I first tried Ubuntu. After that, I was hooked on Unix operating systems. I ran Fedora for years, it seems, started with FC6, and went up from there.

Then one day, not long ago, I upgraded to a brand new motherboard. This one:
www.outletpc.com...

Nvidia onboard graphics on this baby, and Fedora did not like it. the screen would flash, and installing the Nvidia drivers was a pain in the booty. I had tried and ran PC Linix OS a few times, until the so called "big upgrade" when KDE-4 came out, so I left it, but with this Nvidia problem, I downloaded and installed the newest version of PCL 2011 KDE and have been running it for several months now without a single problem The Nvidia drivers were installed by default, and work beautifully, even with desktop effects, if you desire these. I personally do not. Happy surfing!

Wow. WIndows 3.1 brought back some bad memories. Lol. My grandmother was running that when everyone had moved on to NT and 98, etc. She used to call all the time (or wait for a visit) and then have us try to fix computer problems. It was so "ancient" by then, it was really hard to remember anything about it.

I luv the nostalgic value in the vid. The first version of windows I clapped my eyes on was Win386, it came out before win3.1. It looked just as awful as win1.0 imo.

I'd like to see these upgrades done on the original hardware of the period rather then on a virtual machine, then you'd see just how flakey and fragile window really is / was (pre NT).

reply to post by yizzel


That wouldn't be Windows being flakey, that would be the hardware being flakey. We wouldn't see any problems he would have between upgrades though because he could just take a snapshot before each upgrade and retry if something goes wrong.

reply to post by warbird03


Yes I take your point with the hardware. In the days of Win3.1 (the 1st usable version of windows), there was no such thing as plug & play. If you wanted to add peripherals like a soundblaster card or internal modem etc, you had to manually configure the irq's by changing jumpers or dip switches on the motherboard and then configure it in windows. Ahh those were the good 'ol days

With Windows 95 -> Win98/ME, Windows would degrade over time to a point were it would gradually run slower and slower and become increasingly unstable where bluescreens became the norm and eventually forcing you to reinstall windows from scratch. This had nothing to do with hardware.

So yeah, early PC hardware could be described as a bit flakey (though primitive would be more accurate) but so was Windows...

Having said that, kudos to Microsoft for (somehow) making it all work (sort of) while retaining backwards compatibility with older software.