Going to Windows 95 was certainly a big change. For me, I didn't heavily use Windows prior to Windows95. While I had Windows 3.1, I preferred to do as much stuff as I could within DOS. Yes, I said DOS. For example, I used Word Perfect 5 for DOS and it was like a GUI, but was text based.
The beauty back in the days of Windows 3.1 and DOS was that system backups were unbelievably easy as you didn't have a registry or anything complicated like that. Literally, you could backup your C:\windows directory (~30MB) to another folder, external device, tape drive, etc.... Then, if your corrupted everything in Windows, you could simply replace C:\windows with your backup copy and it was all back to the way that it was.
Another great thing was fact that you could boot to DOS for fast boots. If you wanted to run windows, you ran win and it would boot up Windows.
A good friend of mine in college got Windows 95 when it first came out. He installed it onto his Pentium 66 computer, with 16MB of RAM and a 540MB SCSI hard disk (was approx a $4,000 system) in 1995. This machine at the time was an absolute beast.