The 20 Worst Windows Features of All Time

Today, it's hard to imagine living without USB. Back in 1997, it was hard to live with it. Windows 95 predated the USB standard, so support was added via a patch known as Windows 95 OSR2.1. When we tried it out with early USB peripherals, they worked only sporadically, and sometimes trashed the PC--and OSR2.1 managed to trash our Win 95 machine so badly that we had to reinstall the operating system from scratch. Twice. (That's a photo of PCW editor in chief Harry McCracken back then, from our article.) Win 98 did add built-in USB support, but in a form that was far from fabulous: Bill Gates famously managed to crash a PC during an onstage demo when he plugged a USB scanner into it.