Winner of the Dallas Morning News' Golden Pen, a monthly award for letters to the editor, judged on clarity and style. This was written on the fateful day Windows 95 was publicly released.

By Cynthia Edwards - August 24, 1995

had a bad day today. I dyed my hair an awful color, and then I tried to install Windows 95 on my PC.

Both disasters occurred "accidentally-on-purpose," if you know what I mean. I meant to change my hair color, but not to a brassy, unnatural hue. I meant to install Windows 95, but not to crash my PC repeatedly and fail to get past disk 2 (out of 13) of the setup.

My Mac friends are going to have a feeding frenzy over this, if I ever get up the nerve to tell them.

Windows 95 wouldn't install on my computer because of a possible conflict with an anti-virus program. Oh boy, conflicts! - just when we thought Microsoft was bringing us desktop nirvana and system conflicts were a thing of the past. Thing is, I'm not running an anti-virus program. (And if I were - would I turn it off because of an anonymous message displayed on my screen from some unknown software? I think not.)

If Windows 95 doesn't know why it can't be installed, how should I know? Oh yes, of course, I can call Microsoft Technical Help and add $35 to my phone bill to find out how to solve the problem. If I could get through, that is. Take a number and try again in October.

Well, I stripped out the ugly hair color and reapplied my standard brown. I returned Windows 95 to the store and got my check returned.

I don't think I'll tell my Mac-fanatic pals about my aborted foray into Windows 95. If they say they saw me buying it, I can just pretend it was someone else. "You saw some person with brassy red hair," I'll say. "You know that couldn't have been me!"

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