June monthly poll

[macdad-]

windows 3.1, on my ancient 286. It was in 2003, I had been running DOS 3.22 for quite some time after finally figuring out that I had to swap the 3 1/2" drive and 5 1/4" drive in order to boot from the 5 1/4" using some old boot disks that my step dad had with his XT. I remember I had to basically steal the disks and copy them because I apparently wasn't going to be able to "fix" the 286.

I had to work with it without a hard drive for a month or so, until I opened it up and discovered it had a hard drive. I had no clue what to do to get it working, but I was able to access the BIOS, and realized I needed the geometry.

I got the values from CH after a google search for the model number. But not after trying my luck with guessing  I entered geometry that made the drive into a larger, 50MB drive. The directory was intact, but appeared corrupted (my guess, in hindsight, being because the files were added using the drives proper geometry and I was accessing it with the wrong settings). So I formatted it... which took nearly 2 days. The entire time was FORMAT saying "recovering Lost allocation Unit ##" for quite a number of units.

The format succeeded and I was able to run MS-DOS for a month or so... then files started to degrade thanks to the wrong geometry. I got the proper geometry (finally) from CH, and was able to get MS-DOS 6, and I even installed Windows, which looked less then spectacular with a Monochrome screen.

Yikes...Two whole days for a format 

[BC_Programmer]

only took a few minutes when I discovered the proper geometry from CH so many years ago 

[BatchFileBasics]

windows 95.  pressed my first key and clicked my first button when i was 6 years old lol 1999

[wolfspiritp]

1991 in Korea. Air Force no internet. windows and dos. played dos gorilla throwing the banana.

[Fairadir]

Windows 3.x or Windows '98, not sure which one I used first.
I think Windows 3.x

 

[char65]

My first computer had Windows ME. It was ok but I never could get my computer to copy and paste and a few other issues.

[Broni]

Windows ME was certainly the worst Windows version ever

[Aegis]

Yeah, ME looked pretty slick, but I even uninstalled it after about a month! 

[BC_Programmer]

Well I'd have to say I prefer ME to, say, Windows 1.x or 2.x

[hot dog]

I clicked Win98, that is the first OS I remember using.......But back in elementary school, when it was computer lab day, I probably got to use Windows 1.0 or 3x..........but I seriously don't remember


Shoot, I think I remember some days in school when the computer bus came....basically a bus equipped with about 30 DOS computers.....          

[squall_01]

ME I found it okay for a while till I seen what my father done install wise which wasnt that hard after I figured out how to install OS after a while

[raj deep]

For the month of June we thought it would be interesting to see what the first version of Microsoft Windows you used was. Feel free to talk about your experiences with Windows, what you liked / didn't like about it and/or what you missed about it when upgrading to a later version of Windows.

All past monthly polls and results can also be found on the Computer Hope poll page.

[squall_01]

attucally there was an os that I used even earlier then this but that's the first I got of windows.

[awk]

Start with win 95
Current use XP

[macdad-]

Yeah, ME looked pretty slick, but I even uninstalled it after about a month! 

Came with Movie Maker(The old ver) 

But yea, if you used it beyond regular surfing, and normal computer things then it was kinda pointless