Mmmmm, yeah, you just reminded me of ConflictCatcher and extensions which would duel with each other....

There were (and still are) a legion of flaws with both systems.

But my big point was this:
If you wanted to, for example, add a new piece of hardware, say an external tape drive, on one system you just dragged a few files off of a floppy and plugged in the new hardware, not 100% of the time but as a general rule. On the other system, you would have to mess with IRQ conflicts, edit a bunch of files, and mess with it for several hours, not 100% of the time but as a general rule.

The point I'm trying to make is definitely not "System A was better than System B" but simply that the difference in convenience had nothing to do with whether one system had more Megahertz, more RAM, etc. I.e., the simplicity/useability difference was not driven by the hardware technology inside, it was independent of it and orthogonal to it.

Today's much more powerful hardware can hide a multitude of sins of the software. But I wanted to point out that continually upgrading hardware shouldn't have to be a requirement for things to keep getting better.

As a techie, complexity can be fun.
But sometimes, simpler is better.

Most often, the worst you had to do, was delete the preference files. Sane settings would be recreated by the software. Try that with a registery file.

Beyond that, AV software was the biggest cause of instability.

Quote:
I managed a whole network of Macs back in the System 7, Windows 3.11/95 days. Yes the Macs of that time where easy for newbies to use, but when the OS became unstable you ended up having to bin it and start again.