17 Facts About 32-bit Windows

However, 32-bit Windows is not the most used operating system when including both mobile and desktop OSes, due to Android's massive growth.

Microsoft, the developer of 32-bit Windows, has registered several trademarks, each of which denotes a family of 32-bit Windows operating systems that target a specific sector of the computing industry.

Term 32-bit Windows collectively describes any or all of several generations of Microsoft operating system products.

Early versions of 32-bit Windows are often thought of as graphical shells, mostly because they ran on top of MS-DOS and use it for file system services.

Unlike MS-DOS, 32-bit Windows allowed users to execute multiple graphical applications at the same time, through cooperative multitasking.

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The first OSR of 32-bit Windows 95 was the first version of 32-bit Windows to be bundled with Microsoft's web browser, Internet Explorer.

Mainstream support for 32-bit Windows 95 ended on December 31,2000, and extended support for 32-bit Windows 95 ended on December 31,2001.

Mainstream support for 32-bit Windows 98 ended on June 30,2002, and extended support for 32-bit Windows 98 ended on July 11,2006.

However, 32-bit Windows Me was faced with criticism for its speed and instability, along with hardware compatibility issues and its removal of real mode DOS support.

At retail, 32-bit Windows XP was now marketed in two main editions: the "Home" edition was targeted towards consumers, while the "Professional" edition was targeted towards business environments and power users, and included additional security and networking features.

The new 32-bit Windows version required a minimum resolution of 1024×768 pixels, effectively making it unfit for netbooks with 800×600-pixel screens.

On June 24,2021,32-bit Windows 11 was announced as the successor to 32-bit Windows 10 during a livestream.

Shortly after 32-bit Windows 2000 was released, Microsoft switched to a fork of Perforce named Source Depot.

The 32-bit Windows code was divided among 65 different repositories with a kind of virtualization layer to produce unified view of all of the code.

Early versions of 32-bit Windows were designed at a time where malware and networking were less common, and had few built-in security features; they did not provide access privileges to allow a user to prevent other users from accessing their files, and they did not provide memory protection to prevent one process from reading or writing another process's address space or to prevent a process from code or data used by privileged-mode code.

Windows NT was far more secure, implementing access privileges and full memory protection, and, while 32-bit programs meeting the DoD's C2 security rating, yet these advantages were nullified by the fact that, prior to Windows Vista, the default user account created during the setup process was an administrator account; the user, and any program the user launched, had full access to the machine.

User applications, including the 32-bit Windows shell, are then started with the restricted token, resulting in a reduced privilege environment even under an Administrator account.