The Horrors Of Windows 95 Program Installation Revealed

You’re On The List, I Guess You Can Come In

setup, install, inst, imposta, ayarla, and felrak.  According to one of our favourite Microsoft old times, Raymond Chen, those were the magic words that Windows 95 looked for when deciding if a file was a setup application or not.  One of the English magic words was redundant, you can’t have installer without inst, with the latter coming after the first as some companies would call their setup files ‘mynameinst’.  The other magic words are setup, just in what is presumably Italian, as well as Turkish and Hungarian.

Imposta actually seems to refer to a tax, so it’s unclear why they went that way, nor why the other two languages were on the list.  If that isn’t enough to terrify you, even if the setup file wasn’t on the list, Windows 95 would check the path to the executable for the word setup and give it a pass if it found that word.

The post at The Register also gives a possible explanation to the sometimes bizarre behaviour your system would exhibit simply because you had the temerity to update an audio driver.

On a somewhat related topic, does anyone else remember this site?