Bugs in '95 Page


Windows '95(er... 98 now: so I was right?). What do we think about it so far? Ho Hum.....

I don't think that even Microsoft would claim that the product is bug free. I certainly hit the occasional problems. The difficulty is that the next time I load and run I no longer see the error. I used to pooh-pooh the notion of intermittent software, but realise that this was true only when one computer ran one program at a time and that program did not get involved with any sort of cross talk between itself and anything else. However now that we have multi-threaded, multi-tasking programs, accessing shared resources outside of the box, such as LANs etc etc, I think things have changed. We now have a situation in which it is very difficult to re-create the circumstances of the fail.

As I speak I have just had a message saying that Netscape is "out of memory"! In a 20 meg machine I only have 2 applications on the boil! The message has 'gone away now'. Netscape was effectively idle at the time, displaying this page as it was before I typed this paragraph. Last week I had "dangerously low on system resources", when all I was running was MSN. Several other one off crashes, usually in windows code, all as yet unexplained and unrepeated.

I dual boot this machine with OS/2 WARP and, as I never get any warped complaints I must assume that the hardware has no particular problem.

Not that I think '95 is a bad product: I see it best targetted for newly bought PCs and users not conversant with the older windows versions. For companies and experienced users it could be viewed as an expensive new toy, bought when the kid was perfectly happy with the old scruffy teddy bear. Give it two or three years though to get the bugs out and I expect that if you are not on NT you will be on '95.


.....Link to Windows 95 at Microsoft

I would be failing in my duties were I not to add my voice to the campaign to request that Microsoft and Bill Gates to reduce the UK charges for MSN. They are far too high.

(Stop Press: I have now resigned from MSN: free ISP's now abound.)

Beta testers T-shirt quite nice though, although dropping the anvil on that pretty little bug was a bit cruel Bill, and not in the spirit of these polinsectly correct pages.

I hasten to add that the views here are mine only and certainly not those of Microsoft.

Bladerunner @1995



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