Guys, Today I went in to school (I'm doing Radiology this month) and had a bit of free time. While I was there, I decided to check out the Pentium 120 clone running W95, since I'd never used it much, really.
First thing I noticed: I like the way applications look in Win 95. It's actually a pretty nice looking OS. 7.5 + Aaron comes close, and is in some ways superior, but many ways inferior.
Second thing I noticed: There is a big disjunction between what you see on the desktop and the actual file system, and you still can't really surf through your harddrive graphically using W95...at least not in the way we traditionally think. Their system is similar to the old Windows' file manager (kinda like a really clunky Greg's Browser). And files aren't located necessarily where you think they will be. I'm sure when programs install themselves, they just put their folders and files all over the place (at least that's what it looked like). I can't imagine manually removing installed programs from such a system.
Third thing i noticed: I used Netscape 2.0 on their system. They had an EXTRA SWEET ethernet or maybe even faster connection to the net...I downloaded some quicktime movies at 28.7kb per second! However, when netscape can't find the program to run quicktime movies, it's kind of a pain to find it manually, because there's no telling where it is. Also, there were two occasions where downloading quicktime movies ended up crashing the machine to the point where I had to turn the power off and on a couple of times to get the machine to boot back up....My friends, no matter what anybody tells you, Windows and Windows software are STILL flakier than the mac counterparts.
Fourth thing I noticed: while the machine did have a nice speedy feel to it in certain areas (scrolling in Netscape, file system stuff in general...browsing through HD, etc), in most respects, it still didn't feel as fast as my 7500/100. It also didn't play the QT movies as well as my machine does in general. (A friend of mine had a 486sx w/83Mhz Pentium overdrive and a 4x CD rom about a year and a half ago. We played a Sarah McLaughlin CD (full of QT movies) on his machine, and then brought it over to my puny PowerBook165 w/2x CDRom....the PowerBook was WAY better at playing the QT movies!)
Anyone else have any comments about W95? I need to know more about those systems. People are always asking me how to do this and that on their PC.
