Comment by acuozzo
Memory and storage were far more expensive and limited in 1996 than they are today.
Go a few years earlier and you find that Microsoft introduced a boot-time menuconfig system mostly to enable people to select which *drivers* to load because, if you weren't careful, you could wind up leaving too little memory for the game you were trying to run.
That makes sense! I was a kid in the early 90s so I enjoyed "default" Win95/98 without having to have needed to do any sort of fiddling. I was too young to have used earlier versions of that outside of once or twice.