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Comment by TazeTSchnitzel | Hacker News Reader

Perhaps the closest thing to this remaining in 95 is that the setup lets you choose the “Windows 3.1” GUI, which means the old Program Manager is the shell instead of Explorer. Quite a different experience though.

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Program Manager had quite the run. It was included in versions up to and including Vista. I took a quick look for progman.exe on Windows 10 but looks like they stopped shipping it.

I think they ditched it in XP SP2.

For anyone who ever needs to search for files on Windows, try one of my favorite utilities, Everything by voidtools:

http://www.voidtools.com/

I set it up with Ctrl+Shift+Space as a hotkey so it's easy to open. I have about two million files on my C: drive. When I open Everything it displays them all, and then as I start typing in the search box it filters the list as fast as I can type. Highly recommended!

It just searches filenames, not content, but often that is enough.

"Everything" is an amazing utility. I have it setup on a windows server as well and can seamlessly search my desktop as well as everything on the server pretty much instantly. I'm at just under 4 million files with it.

The installer also uses a pared-down version of Windows 3.1. If you look carefully, you can notice the older Win 3.x window styles.

Yes, I think this remained the case up through Windows ME. It's interesting they didn't use a pared-down 95. Maybe they were worried about Protected Mode causing trouble?

Windows 3.1 always runs in some kind of protected mode, either in 16-bit PM on 286 or as a process inside 32b hypervisor-ish layer on 386 and up.

That was also used when compressing the drive with DoubleSpace or whatever it was called on 95. Windows would reboot into a mode where the windows had win3.11 style and perform the drive conversion.

DriveSpace. And yes, something similar to Windows 3.1 standard mode was used for both, often called mini-Windows.

If I remember correctly it was called DoubleSpace in Windows 3.1/DOS 6.2 and then due to some patent or licencing issue was renamed (and the compression algorithm modified) to DriveSpace in Windows for Workgroups 3.11/DOS 6.22.

AFAIK it is part of DOS not Windows.

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