[Japo]

Leaving aside if modern games are worse gameplay-wise than old ones, what you got was a buggy videogame and moronic tech support. And these are as old as videogames and tech support respectively. As people have already said, old games were not bug-free, on the contrary. Think about UFO and many others.

In the DOS days there could be huge differences between machines whereas now a Windows environment is more standard and friendly to programmers, but on the other hand now a Windows machine has tons of programs multitasking whereas that didn't happen in DOS. So the bottom line hasn't changed that much. Back in the golden age (90s) there were many buggy games, and some of them were very good at the same time. Many people refused to make the game they had bought run (I for example did so with Syndicate which I bought abroad --now I can play it eventually L0L).

As for the programs that popup and make the currently active one minimize, well it's your computer so you control what runs. I myself don't have any scheduled tasks.