Oh, would’ve been so frustrating! I remember having a Pentium 4 laptop with an NVIDIA GPU and that thing unsurprisingly cooked itself, so I then tried 1NSANE (Codemasters’ soft body physics car game) on my crappy little netbook instead and it just couldn’t handle it.

It would be some time before I was gifted an Acer Aspire with dedicated graphics and a busted screen that I could play 1NSANE again

Colobot - don’t think it was “shareware” but it absolutely came as a demo on ceebot.com (still hosted there today I believe). Literally THE game that got me into computer programming and whatnot.

Otherwise for actual shareware, I loved Jazz Jackrabbit 2, Crazy Gravity and The Worm (found it!)

I really wanted to play a couple shareware games called Jetpack Joyride, and Hot Chix n Gear Stix as a kid, but neither of them would play on my Windows XP netbook as they had a hard check for if you were on either Windows 95 or 98, even with compatibility mode.

I still have mine as a secondary work phone. Love the size and format of it in general, although I think I’d still prefer a phone slightly bigger (~10%) and with a higher resolution (1080p?) display, mainly for media consumption.

Outside of that, I second the slow and buggy comment (although in my experience this has been mostly with Microsoft Teams, which is a buggy mess regardless)

Been a moderate user of Excel but started a new budget in LibreOffice Calc recently and so far it seems 1:1, including using commands like VLOOKUP and SUMIF