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That is not how I remember it, from *extensive* use at the time, but I would have to spin up a VM to try it. I don't think you're right.

The OS was still running; you could switch to an app and keep working, for instance. But Explorer had only 1 thread, AFAICR, and a large file operation visibly locked that thread.

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I honestly can't remember about such details, but with IDE drives and 95A you were limited to PIO. You could enable DMA in 95B, it wasn't by default. It was in W98. That should make a drastic difference.

I think it depended on the disk controller, no? https://www.philscomputerlab.com/windows-98-dma-mode.html

I wrote about this in PC Pro in about 1995-1996. Because it had a true pre-emptive kernel, it could do other stuff while waiting for disk I/O, and on NT, enabling DMA made a big difference. As I recall, on 98, it just made disk access a bit quicker, that was all.

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