[Future versions of Firefox on Windows 98]

I'll keep my IE 6.

You must like s***.

as mentioned why they add more bloat is very puzzling

Which bloat? Cairo is not bloat.

Currently, they have to maintain three different librairies to get Gecko to render on the major platforms. GDI for Windows, and whatever they use for Linux and Mac OS X.

With Cairo, they'll have to maintain just one library to get Gecko to render on all platforms. Easier, less time-consuming, and makes for less code, so it's actually less bloat. As an added bonus, it allows for better rendering. Gecko passes the Acid 2 test since early December on trunk!

I'm sure we wouldn't be complaining about how Cairo seems to bloat Gecko if it didn't make Mozilla drop Win9x support.

[Future versions of Firefox on Windows 98]

There's more out there than Firefox using Gecko, dammit! I use SeaMonkey, and am a fan of K-Meleon.

I think some of the Cairo functions are going to be very difficult to implement.

So what? Difficult works too. No one said this was going to be easy.

[Open Sourcing Windows 9x]

I wonder, how do the ReactOS people do it? If I would do it, I'd decompile kernel32.dll, and then make my own code based on how it works.

[Windows updates shipped with IE]

Yes, most of it, thank you very much. What's missing is what's inside the IE_x.CAB files.

[Why continue to use Windows 9x?]

Now you even post several times in a row.

He's not our friend, but fair is fair. He explained why he posted several times in a row (I had to do it too since yesterday). There's a quote maximum on each post, which I've counted to be 10. If you want more quotes, you have to make a new post.

[Windows updates shipped with IE]

Anyone? Please?

[Why continue to use Windows 9x?]

What about MTASKS.exe?

Needed for multimedia support.

Because I can install windows from the same cd on completely different PCs and all would have the latest up-to-date drivers.

I'll grant you that. However, what you mentioned is a third-party tool, and it would be possible on Win9x too.

That easy? Have you read the tutorial?

Of course I did. Though maybe XPE didn't exist at that time...

But it prevents badly-coded applications from harming the OS. And like you may know almost all applications have bugs.

Only truly badly-coded applications harm the OS. Yes, all applications have bugs, but most don't harm the OS.

MS didn't remove DOS., MS removed from the NT the ability of applications to access directly to hardware like they could on DOS to increase stability.

And decrease performance...

If any application could directly access memory, CPU and all devices then an OS wouldn't ever be really reliable.

Another myth...

Tapisrv is used for dial-up connections (so if you connect through the LAN you don't need it at all).

I was under the impression that it's also needed for network shares.

[Why continue to use Windows 9x?]

But what about all the up-to-date drivers that can be integrated in a XP install with the driverpacks?

Again, why bother with that when you can just ghost a hard drive that already has all the drivers?

A mess? With just the XPE plugin you can have an almost completely working windows XP (where IE, explorer and many other applications actually work) all booting from CD.

Hah! If only it was that easy...

But an OS that can't be crashed or hanged by most applications is a step above the others, don't you think?

Yes and no. For one, it doesn't prevent you from using badly-coded applications.

There are some alternatives, like a sound blaster emulator for XP.

All this nonsense is really a laugh. Thousands of people migrating to XP, noticing that M$ removed all of DOS, and then people make all sorts of utilities to get it all back.

[Why continue to use Windows 9x?]

What if your PC power suddently goes off?

Then ScanDisk runs and fixes whatever is broken, which is hardly ever significant stuff.

What if the IDE/SATA driver messes up and starts writing everywhere?

Then it's a bad driver. Duh.

What happens if the power goes out and windows is updating for example the "last access" date of a file in a directory? The ENTIRE DIRECTORY could get corrupted and without journal all the file references would be lost.

Oh please. I'll lose just that one date. What a disaster... Again, ScanDisk does the job.

And? That doesn't change the fact that there are plenty of partition managers and recovery utilities that work perfectly on ntfs

By reverse-engineering, which on something as important as the file system, is not perfect. The actual inner workings aren't known, and things could break before you know it.

Everytime windows accesses a file it updates the Last Access entry in the directory structure for the file, during some boots windows back-ups the registry, etc.

Yet I haven't had any problems in 8 years that ScanDisk couldn't fix.

If there are people giving PROs about 98 there has to be somebody to point also at the CONs, don't you think?

Not in a thread that asks for the PROs, because CONs are off-topic.

http://www.gamespot.com/pages/forums/show_...pic_id=24525221 what about these games? Are they all coming to consoles?

Irrelevant. That doesn't disprove that games belong on consoles.

Marketing? I'd really want to see recent benchmarks of win98 with legacy drivers (because most hardware producers don't support 98 anymore) and xp with recent drivers.

You're bypassing what the actual comparison is about, which is OS performance, not driver performance. So the drivers have to be the same. Don't claim that XP is more performant when you're talking about your shiny drivers.

But that bloat can be easily disabled from the services console.

Software should come with good settings. I shouldn't have to turn off all the bloat, it should come without it! Defaults are important! Bad excuse.

Can you say the same of the hidden win9x processes?

There are no 'hidden' Win9x processes. They are all needed. Only 7 on my system at the moment that are not applications.

[Open Sourcing Windows 9x]

I don't get the point. How are you open-sourcing Windows (the OS) by substituting applications (which are not part of the OS strictly speaking) with open-source ones?

[Why continue to use Windows 9x?]

The important advantage of the NTFS is however that since it's journaled it's way more reliable than FAT.

That's a feature created to make crashes efficient. Your system shouldn't crash to begin with. And if you claim XP is nearly uncrashable, it's pointless.

Most people also seem to forget that NTFS is a proprietary file system, its implementation known only to M$ as a trade secret, while FAT is a partially patented file system whose inner workings have been documented all over. With NTFS, you need M$ to read your files, it partially owns them. With FAT32, I own my files and have full control over them.

that doesn't change that with ext2 or fat32 you risk losing more data if the O.S. crashes or the computer is suddently powered off.

Only the data currently being processed, which on my computer is only the browser cache.

If you didn't notice this thread is named "Why continue to use Windows 9x?" so I didn't come here accidentally saying that NT-based OSes are better without reasons just to p*** other people off. I answered in this thread because somebody asked why windows 9x should still be used and I gave my reasons not to use it, because it's unsupported and very unreliable.

Indeed, why use Win9x, NOT why NOT to use it.

And as you may know often newer drivers mean better performance on games.

Games belong on consoles. And if you really need your Oblivion fix on the PCs, you can run it with an older 32 MB graphics card while still looking awesome.

You can create a Windows PE CD to access your NTFS partition, fix the registry, restore your windows backup etc.

Great, a large boot CD-ROM, when a tiny DOS environment works just fine on Win9x.

Better performance than 9x was one of the things that MS continuosly advertized when XP came out

Marketing at work, M$ needing to sell their newer product. Moving on.

The common user usually doesn't need many of the services in XP.

Yet another reason to not use XP: it's bloated!

With nlite you can do a completely automated install cd of 2000/XP with applications, updates and, if you use driverpacks, all up-to-date drivers already integrated.

Doesn't beat ghosting.

On the recent games almost always you get better performance and more reliability with more recent drivers.

Those newer drivers come with newer graphics cards.

You can build it from a XP cd using bartPE.

I tried that before. Never again, it's a mess. Booting to DOS is much better and easier.

[Open Sourcing Windows 9x]

I disagree. Part of open-sourcing Win9x is open-sourcing drivers.

[Open Sourcing Windows 9x]

Windows 98 is the *first* M$ OS that people *loved*.

But for other people Windows 95 was the first M$ OS they loved. Especially if they don't want integrated IE.

[Open Sourcing Windows 9x]

You do not get my point here, windows 98 will not run on future hardware.

Unless you update it.

They make drivers for LINUX...

And if they made drivers for Windows or equalivent OSes, they would make it unstable. "Home-made" drivers are for 80%, less efficient then the ones you can get from the official hardware supplier.

Then we need to make drivers of higher quality.

[Notepad Replacement]

Wordwrap on/off in options for text settings?

Off. It's plain text after all.

What, a few hundreths of a second?

Notepad: appears instantly

Wordpad: 3 seconds

Keep in mind that I'm on a Pentium II 233 Mhz PC here.

I don't know what that means.

Try selecting exactly the letters you want when there are slashes or full stops nearby. You have to see it for yourself.

[Windows Jackhammer: The last update you'll need for Win98.]

Mozilla Seamonkey 1.0.7

Please don't call it that, as it's not an official Mozilla product. It's just SeaMonkey.

[Notepad Replacement]

When I open plain text files with Wordpad, I don't get a horizontal scrollbar. Plus it loads slower, and has a funky mouse selection method.

[A downloaded nudie pix destroyed PhotoPlus8...]

Anybody else think it's odd that he's being accused of stealing something that's free?

[Open Sourcing Windows 9x]

Just like the old hardware, software will also expire.

Not if you update it.

you will have to make your own drivers etc. etc.

What the hell do you think the GNU/Linux community does?

[Windows Jackhammer: The last update you'll need for Win98.]

For example: why not replace Media Player with skinned-VLC ?

It's playing an MP3 and it's still taking up so much space? Bah!

[Why continue to use Windows 9x?]

To solve the RAM problem I bought plenty of 64mb sticks so if one of my friends wanted to install XP on their ultra-old machine I just had to put 2/4 sticks of 64mb ram and everything would have been running fine.

ZZZOOM!

What's that? It's the sound of my point flying past your head, and you missed it!

[Why continue to use Windows 9x?]

As I told you you can buy on ebay very cheap 64mb sticks of ram (because nobody wants them). If your mb has 4 ram slots (like most) you can get 256mb on your mb.

There's no point in getting more RAM for your computer just so you can install a newer OS when the current one works fine. Clearly XP does not run well on older computers.

[Windows Jackhammer: The last update you'll need for Win98.]

What If I don't want Firefox, but like Maxthon?

Then you should be shot, as it's just another shell for IE, the most horrible browser in existence.

[Whats Missing from Win98SE]

Pre-Emptive Multi-Tasking support

I thought Win9x already supported this as long as it was a proper win32 application.

Security Access Managers (NT/2000/2003)

Better security regarding file permissions

No, please don't insert that s*** into Win9x! It only leads to headaches and more complexity.

[Why continue to use Windows 9x?]

true but the problem is that the nvidia supplied drivers need kernel sources and the compiler for it.

How's that a problem? The source is freely available.

I'm not bashing 98, it's a fact 98 is dead! Programmers are using their time on something they can't even write in the code, so they have to stack, wrap, glue and hammer on it, to get things working.

Not true. First, an OS is not truly dead as long as enough people still use it. Like the people here. Second, 98 already works, what the programmers are doing here is improving support for certain things, and NO, they are not stacking, wrapping, glueing, or doing anything else of that sort. They decompile code and fix as needed.

Your telling me to keep driving a 1998 windows model caddie when I can have a 2006 linux model for free.

If it was free, and the usage instructions were the same, I might consider it. However, Linux is a different OS. There's a learning curve. And who in their right mind replaces something that works just fine already? It's pointless.

i have to dissagree with linux resource hog

He was not saying it was a hog. The opposite, actually.

I have to say that KDE and Gnome were designed for newer systems, though, and thus are hogs on older computers. Our Pentium II 350 Mhz Linux box runs much better since I installed XFCE4 on it to use instead of Gnome.