Windows 95 lives!

Before I moved here to Colorado in 1995, I visited a large circus tent in a Seattle suburb parking lot. The tent said, "Start" in large letters at the entrance. Once inside, I was greeted by extremely cheerful, almost giddy, representatives from Microsoft. I estimated about 30-35 computers were setup with twice that many Microsoft reps showing curious visitors to the tent what Windows 95 was and how it would change the world of computing. One enthusiastic rep gleefully showed me some shortcuts with the Windows key that did impress me and stuck with me from that day until I purchased my first Windows 95 machine nearly a year later.

I don't run across to many Windows 95 machines, but today I did. The machine was a 166mhz Pentium (today's slowest machines operate in excess of 2000 MHz and up to 4000 MHz) processor with 16 megabytes of RAM (the standard today is 512 -1024 megabytes of RAM), and a 2gigabyte hard drive (today's computers have a minimum of 80 gigabytes of storage space). My long time client functions perfectly well with the almost 10 year old IBM Aptiva using it primarily for email and word processing.

She, however, was wooed by an Earthlink salesperson to convert her dial-up account to DSL. I was skeptical that we could get it work, but after shopping around, I found an Ethernet card with Windows 95 drivers. Knowing that EarthLink's Total Access software bogs down even the newest of computers and that it was incompatible with Windows 95, I had to access the DSL modem directly through the browser...and in a few minutes, the Internet was purring along at DSL speeds. The computer, however, moans and groans and seems to be pushed to its limit with the new speedy Internet connection.

The bottom line is that even a 10 year old computer with a now ancient operating system can still perform well enough for basic computer use.

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