Jump to content

Why Use Win 98/SE/ME?


jimc52

Recommended Posts

Perhaps you are right. But, trying to persuade the whole world to do something other way is like changing a direction of a river with a stick.

You can always try. And it is definitely possible. Firefox certainly is doing a good job of persuading people to recognise web standards.

If the author says his solution is untested, and possibly unstable, I will not argue.

The key word here is "possible". Again, you can't know if it's untested.

Roman, the WinSock 2 update is what I'm using. The update shipped with DUN 1.4 is more recent, though.

Link to comment
Share on other sites


But, trying to persuade the whole world to do something other way is like changing a direction of a river with a stick.

<offtopic>In the summer of 2003 in the Netherlands several (small) rivers were reversed in direction by a penstroke. Because it was hot and dry the groundwater level was becoming too low, which should cause great damage. So the water of Lake Marken was directed to South Holland to compensate for this.</offtopic>

Link to comment
Share on other sites

jimc52

W98SE unstability can be fixed by:

-Newer hardware (if compatible): More ram, more processor speed, faster HD etc

-Updates: windows updates (officials and unofficials), IE updates, multimedia codecs etc

When this is done, XP offers very little advantage for a home user PC but adds some disadvantages:

-Less safe against viruses and hackers

-Slower (except for internet based activities)

-Obligation to use "safely remove hardware" when removing devices (not on W98)

-More complicated to manage services, manualy modify systen files, tweak/hack etc

-Useless services and features

-No boot batch script (Autoexec.bat) (An advanced feature but realy useful sometimes)

-Wannabe "intelligent" interface is in fact very dumb and irritating

-Default settings realy suck (that can be fixed easily)

Finaly XP has its instances of BSODs, driver issues, installation incompatibilities etc. If at least it was good in this respect, but it isn't.

HTH

Link to comment
Share on other sites

No newer Flash Player support. (Some sites do require this plugin)

IMO, those sites can go to hell. No site should require a third-party plug-in to be viewed

FWIW, the only site I visit regularly that uses Flash for a meaningful purpose is YouTube, and that works perfectly with Flash 7. Flash 8-only content, in any case, is still largely the exception to the rule.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

For me the most important thing on 9x is good compatability with older, especially DOS SW which needs some level of HW access - there NT gives no chance. Compared to pure DOS it gives me nice light GUI with multitasking ability allows to run DOS sessions, 16 and 32bit win apps with support of most newer HW. On my current PC 98se runs pretty fast and small sized (without any garbage I wouldn't never use). When I'm doing something with system I usually backup entire windows directory in few tens of secons (under other OS) so I can return back quickly. Try this on 8GB Vista, hehe.

But big issue is fading (nearly dead) HW support which will make impossible to run this OS on most current/future HW :( R.I.P.

Edited by xrayer
Link to comment
Share on other sites

If the thread was titled "why use Win98/SE/ME as your primary OS?" Id have trouble putting together a post.. Since 98 really doesnt play with today's hardware/software and the tasks they are used for. However what 98 does perfectly is the same stuff it did nigh on ten years ago, and with todays blisteringly powerful hardware its not too much trouble to have a little VM running 98 for thos odd tasks it comes in handy for... (incidentally my main box is a C2D 6600 w/4GB RAM.. Vista Ultimate is a joy to use and I cant contemplate switching back to an older OS for -everything-)

Link to comment
Share on other sites

with todays blisteringly powerful hardware its not too much trouble to have a little VM running 98 for thos odd tasks it comes in handy for...

What do you exactly mean by those odd tasks If may ask ?

Maybe you mean I should be using my Jasc Paint Shop Pro, Adobe Photoshop, Corel Draw, Ulead Media Studio Pro as well as reading my mail, surfing the internet, etc... in a Win98 VM under Vista ?

Link to comment
Share on other sites

My computer dates from 2002 and is almost on par with 2005~2007 machines as soon as performance is concerned.

The reason is that my 2002 PC runs on w98se and the new PCs runs on XP or even worse, Vista.

IMO you realy need to have your brain examined if you believe Vista is an enjoying experience or has a technical advantage over XP or w98.

I would even say that the technical regression we are withnessing with Vista gives me one more reason to stick even longer with w98 or at least, to think in the future about an alternative OS.

The main issue with W98++ is hardware compatibility (more than software compatibility IMO) but that's relatively new: one and half year old or so.

As long as compatibility runs fine, w98 is superior to XP and of course Vista for every task (except internet browsing in my case, I don't know why).

Last month I bought two DVD drives: runs fine on w98. My w98se PC is now converted into a double-decked DVD copying machine with the most recent DVD burning devices. So w98 is still relevant today. If only manufactureres would let us install their drivers on it, it would be limitless.

Softwares which are realy uncompatible with a w98SE fully updated are rarer than you think. It seems that most of recent softwres are not running on w98 because the big names (Adobe, DivX etc) have disabled installation on w98 but most of the software community have not put this limitation on their installers and often their programs install and works fine on w98 eventhought they sated it wouldn't. Most of the freewares still install and run perfectly on w98.

99% of the softwares I use are either W98 era or freeware. And believe me the reason is not money.

Edited by Fredledingue
Link to comment
Share on other sites

I bought my first notebook three years ago. It was a low-end HP ze4900 with the weakest Celeron M and 256MB of memory and XP home as on OS. From the start it was OK to use, but installing virus scanners and such it quickly became slower than my very old computer with 98SE. So I installed the 98SE (all the drivers were available) on that computer and it was working very quickly. However, there was this shutdown issue that was never resolved and for some other reasons as well I mainly used XP (I guess because I had already installed all the software I needed on it and couldn't bother do it all over again, there were also storage space limitations since I had a Linux (and a DOS partition) running on a 30GB hard disk.

At some point I got fed up with the slowness of XP and bought an extra 256MB. It gave the XP a really nice boost but for some strange reason (which I never bothered to investigate) 98SE boot time got longer, as if the computer was running some extended memory checks.

Recently I sold away my trusty old HP and bought a new one, NX7400 with 1GB and Vista Business. At least Vista wasn't slower than XP on the older notebook, but since the computer recommended turning off some features of Aero, I decided to turn everything off. Now Vista is OK, but XP is almost like 98SE on the old computer, except for slower booting (even with the extra memory delay). I tried to install 98SE on it as well, but this time I haven't been able to find the drivers like I could for the previous computer. It is really a shame, because 98SE boots in 10 seconds or so and for the first time I really would feel like I had a super-powerful system.

Trying to look for the drivers for 98 I came across this forum. Since none of the gurus of this forum have replied to the thread I started I may have to start to believe that there really are no drivers for my system. On the other hand, maybe I just keep the 2GB partition for 98SE waiting for some homebrew all-in-one driver! And let's face it, at least the older people remember the times that the VGA with 640x480 with 16 colours was a really good resolution, and to have games running on that was a giant leap from the CGA (320x200 with 4 colours if I remember correctly).

Anyway, I agree with the previous poster about the "technical regression", I think it should be for the user to decide what features of the operating system to choose. Actually, I'm slowly but surely trying to learn more about Linux because if you know how, it lets you build the OS by yourself. And for the same reason I would like to stick with the "good old" 98SE, because it is not that bloated, at least not by modern standards.

Edited by piete
Link to comment
Share on other sites

jimc52

W98SE unstability can be fixed by:

-Newer hardware (if compatible): More ram, more processor speed, faster HD etc

-Updates: windows updates (officials and unofficials), IE updates, multimedia codecs etc

When this is done, XP offers very little advantage for a home user PC but adds some disadvantages:

-Less safe against viruses and hackers

-Slower (except for internet based activities)

-Obligation to use "safely remove hardware" when removing devices (not on W98)

-More complicated to manage services, manualy modify systen files, tweak/hack etc

-Useless services and features

-No boot batch script (Autoexec.bat) (An advanced feature but realy useful sometimes)

-Wannabe "intelligent" interface is in fact very dumb and irritating

-Default settings realy suck (that can be fixed easily)

Finaly XP has its instances of BSODs, driver issues, installation incompatibilities etc. If at least it was good in this respect, but it isn't.

HTH

I second this...i use 98se on a daily basis and if you got a decent system lets say a beefed up p3 you get no bsod or stuff like that....and if an app crashes maybe is poorly coded (which are many these days)...i haven't reinstalled the os in 2.5 years and it works great.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Althought system based on DOS layer has some disatvantages one major advantage is possibility to use Dos based drivers, apps and TSR to change whole system environment as you want.

Also full compatibility with Dos apps is very good reason...

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Althought system based on DOS layer has some disatvantages one major advantage is possibility to use Dos based drivers, apps and TSR to change whole system environment as you want.

Also full compatibility with Dos apps is very good reason...

One can always cook up a DOS disk for that, too (I did, and ended up with about 168MB or so). One thing I found surprising is how many good useful DOS apps there are out there even for today's machines, etc. Even drivers - there's some I use on my DOS disks today, that would have been a fantasy to have back in the days when I was using DOS/Win95 regularly. Pair that with all the memory these modern machines have compared to those days (there's programs that will create huge RAM drives bigger than most people's hard drives back in the DOS days), and it makes it quite nice to do.

Edited by Glenn9999
Link to comment
Share on other sites

Can these NT/XP guys try stopping to tell that it's not good to use 98/ME.

You can write much longer negative text but nobody will read it.

Please let it in peace.

Not to go off on yet another tangent, but I get the impression that ironically a lot of "NT/XP guys" don't look highly on Windows NT 4.0, either... :(

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Create an account or sign in to comment

You need to be a member in order to leave a comment

Create an account

Sign up for a new account in our community. It's easy!

Register a new account

Sign in

Already have an account? Sign in here.

Sign In Now
  • Recently Browsing   0 members

    • No registered users viewing this page.
×
×
  • Create New...