It took the world by storm in the early 90's when Windows 3.0 came out. It would run on a 286 and have all the friendly feel of a Mac. So much so that Apple took Microsoft to court over it. This was a bit rich really in that they in turn had pinched the "feel" of a system developed by Rank Xerox. This had a GUI, tool  bars and drop down menus. No code had been copied, only the "feel" by writing the software from scratch. Made easier when the programmers know what they are aiming at.

    Rank Xerox to be fair had simply shelved the technology. They apparently could see no market for it back in 1976. They were, after all selling all the photocopiers they could make and didn't need to gamble any investment money into such a dubious venture.

    Apple had nothing to loose, so after seeing a demonstration at the Rank Xerox lab in Palo Alto they set to work, and the rest is history.

    With Windows 3.1 came "Enhanced Mode" whereby "virtual" memory could be created on the hard drive as a swap file.  Enhanced Mode could only be run on the newer 32 bit (internally at least) chip the 386. The 486DX with the built in co-processor soon followed. We now had a serious contender to the Mac.

    All was not rosie however, as anyone who had such a PC will testify. Even with a 486DX running at the blistering speed of 33 MHz and with a colossal 4 Mg of RAM, GPF faults were frequent and high powered graphic programs were very slow.

    The Pentium would have been a god-send if Microsoft hadn't decided that it was too fast. They therefore had to invent a totally new OS, Windows 95. This would maintain the onward tradition. This ensured that no matter how powerful the hardware is, the PC  will always be unstable.

    The answer of course is to make the hardware faster still but it is to no avail.    Windows XP on a Pentium 4 running at 1.4 GHz with 256 Mb of RAM, seems no faster than Windows 95.

  Click here for my solution to the problem.