My usage lead to 3-4 blue-screen crashes every single day. Keep in mind a system reboot took up to 10 minutes, and there was no such thing as autosave. Back then Microsoft’s victims were conditioned to think this was quirky and unavoidable. This was on a vertically integrated, pre-built product from Gateway (covered in cow-print but that’s a cultural peculiarity from a different time) so there was no unsupported hardware to blame.
I remember the cowprint logos on computers :) was just a bit too young to use ME but I remember seeing it around. Wild how they charged money for that. I feel like people are still traumatized by this at my work. They’re afraid that if they touch something it will break and crash.
A lot of that instability was just budget 90s prebuilts being garbage. Gateway was close to eMachines tier as far as stability went. You had to spend 50-100% more money for something like a Micron desktop if you wanted reliability, or just build your own from reliable parts.
