What was so wrong with windows 3.11?

[KennyH]

This OS was around before I got involved with computers. Everyone I know said that win 3.1 sucked. Could someone help me? Thanks.

 

[FOBSIDE]

this os was around before i really got into computers. i have the hardest time using it. i keep trying to use shortcuts that down exist and man is it slow.

 

[MGMorden]

It was slow, horrible at mutlitasking, had one of the worst shells imaginable (Program Manager) and apps didn't integrate well like they do w/ the newer windowses. Games also were limited to so average in a window solitaire type game. I had Win3.1 on my first x86 computer (my first PC was a Commodore ) and I spent almost all of my time in DOS. All my games ran in DOS, I had WordPerfect for DOS for when I needed to do that, and the closest thing I had to internet back then was logging onto the neighborhood BBS', for which a DOS terminal program (I used a freeware one called S_Term, which I could find it now) did everything I needed it too.

 

[perry]

Win 3.1 didn't multitask. Sure, you could have multiple tasks running at once, but it wasn't a true multitasker. Just fast task switching. I didn't think it was all that bad for early 90s technology... Preferred OS/2 tho.

 

[MrChicken]

Bad:
Memory management
Cooperative multitasking (still going in win9x)
A thousand differnet TCP/IP stacks. (3.11WFW had an add-on ms tcp/ip stack)
NO plug and play, even plug and pray was better than manually adding device driver assignments. Installing a new video card routinely be an all day deal.
Interface sucked.

Good:
fast, try running 95 on a 386-16sx with 4 mb of mem.
5 or 6 floppy install !!!!
you didnt need it to run DOOM

 

[ahfung]

But it worths a mention that Win3.11 is way better than Win3.1. The latter was always plagued by GPF.

For those borned in Win95 era, GPF = General Protection Fault, much much more dreadful than BSOD.

 

[BOFH]

ahfung

I dunno, I always wondered why I was able to kill progman.exe so easily. That and all MS os's still wait for a .wav file to finish playing when its associated with something before they'll do anything else. Its rather sad.

 

[DocDoo]

Ahh yes... Windows 3.1

This is the O/S I first started on. As I remember, I never added the comand line in my AUTOEXEC.BAT file to automatically load 3.1 on boot-up. Back then everyone "into it" was working in DOS and would occasionally type WIN

I remember buying one of the first true 16-bit sound cards and trying to edit/mix audio with it.... If I recorded in 16-bit at 44khz, it would crash everytime (in under 5 seconds). My friends on the Amiga's would run circles around me Windows PC. Back then, Amiga was the king on "media" (anyone remember the Toaster).

As for Windows 3.11... this was essentially the same but had 32-bit capabilities (geared for the business environment).

I remember when Windows 95 came out... Coming from Win 3.1, I was really intimidated (esp. the registry). Man have times changed.... Or have they

 

[BOFH]

The toaster was nice. I rather liked the Sun Sparcs I got to play on at the time too. I REALLY liked it when you ran Wabi and it said 'This is were the serial number normall would go'. That was so cute

 

[BlueIce]

Program manager was ugglyy. There was no plug and play. Everything was manual dipswitches. Buy a new modem, had to spend hours testing each and every combination and then find out it just "doesn't work".

There were hella bloatware before as today, Remember that program called RamDoubler or something like that that made millions and produced boat loads of nothings...

On the hardware side, overclocking was maybe a Pentium 100 to P120. Or worst yet, 486s, 386s machines. A 4X CDROM, if any at all, was considered "money". Or should I say cup holders? And everything had to be on floppy disks. 1.44MB of disk space nirvana. They were REALLY realiable, too.

 

[kw3i]

i liked how win 3.11 shutdown much faster than win9x does tho: )