Comment by tom_
8 days ago
With Windows 9x, I recall the crashes being manageable, but it was advisable to give the system 15 minutes to settle down after rebooting. Windows would start multiple things at once on startup and it was a bit risky to overstress it.
Windows NT 4 seemed OK, but a lot of software didn't run.
By the time of Windows 2000 the tradeoff was much better.
(Allowing a settle down time remained a good idea, in my experience. Even if Windows 2000 and later were very unlikely to actually crash, the response time would still be dogshit until everything had been given time to settle into a steady state. This problem didn't get properly fixed until pervasive use of SSDs - some time between Windows 7 and Windows 8, maybe? - and even then the fix was just that there was no longer any pressing need to actually fix it.)
In 1997-8 I met the first person I knew to have a CD-R burner.
He dual-booted 98 and NT 4. He joked that NT was his 100+ MB CD burning software. He used 98 for almost everything else, but it couldn't keep that steady stream of data going.