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The 20 Worst Windows Features of All Time

From Windows 95's Active Desktop to Vista's UAC, a loving tribute to the tools, technologies, and applets that drive us absolutely bonkers.

20. DriveSpace

In a day in which half a terabyte of hard disk costs $99, it's easy to forget that megabytes were once a rare and precious commodity, and disk-compression utilities felt slightly miraculous. Microsoft's DoubleSpace was introduced with DOS 6.0 in 1993; after a patent suit by competitor Stac Electronics, it was replaced with a non-infringing twin, DriveSpace, which was part of Windows 95. DriveSpace did indeed squeeze about twice the stuff onto a disk, but the risk was immense, since data recovery was much tougher if something went awry. Windows XP was the first version without DriveSpace support of any sort--by then, nobody noticed or cared.
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