Microsoft heightened the anticipation by repeatedly hinting at and then delaying the release date. Whether these various features would even work on many machines or would make an immediate difference in how the average user worked seemed irrelevant in the mad rush to own the hottest OS in town. Many of them heard a busy signal or, if they got through, had to wait up to two hours before being helped. That prompted a lot of hate mail on the Internet, where there is already a Usenet newsgroup called alt.os.windows95.crash.crash.crash. To be fair, for every new user with a problem there were probably many others who loaded the OS in their computers without a hitch.
Most problems seem to be caused by insufficient memory, disk space, or other system inadequacies.
Another cause is that Windows 95 is not compatible with Windows 3.1 utility programs, such as memory managers and certain 16-bit applications. If I hadn't had a tape backup of my hard disk, it would have been really embarrassing. In fact, it would be a miracle if there were no rough edges in the first release of an OS that is complex enough to need more than 40MB of your hard disk space. However, as 32-bit upgrade versions of your various applications begin to replace the old stuff, the promised stability of Windows 95 will be realized. Besides, ensuring complete compatibility with every available driver, peripheral, and application in the world is probably impossible anyway and certainly caused most of this year's delays of Windows 95.