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Why Use Win 98/SE/ME?


jimc52

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(like lost clusters and so forth).

That's a problem with FAT and FAT32. Running FAT32 with Windows 2000 and later defeats that purpose!

If you're using FAT32, expect lost clusters to be common when not shut down properly!

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Some small nuisances like up to 4 GB file set size couter limit.
Isn't the same true for Win98?

That's not a Windows 95 limitation, that's a FAT32 limitation and you cannot use NTFS, thus, you're SOL. :(

Edited by RJARRRPCGP
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I said: set of files counter limit, not single file size limit.

Windows 95 explorer is not able to display how much space is occupied by a set of files. In case of a single file, everything works correctly.

When counting space taken by many files windows 95 counter wraps around at 4GB mark. So, this nuisance is not related to FAT32, as everything works correctly on Windows 98.

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Some small nuisances like up to 4 GB file set size couter limit.
Isn't the same true for Win98?

That's not a Windows 95 limitation, that's a FAT32 limitation and you cannot use NTFS, thus, you're SOL. :(

It is both a W9x and a FAT limitation. FAT uses a 32 bit field to define the size of a file in bytes, which makes a maximum of 4GiB - 1 byte. W9x uses a 32 bit filepointer to address the data to be read or written, which gives a maximum of 4GiB.

BTW, all flavours of FAT use a 32 bit filesize. So FAT12 can describe 4 GiB-1 file, while it cannot store it (FAT16 can, link)

/edit: I'm talking about the file size limit, not the file set size counter limit. Should learn to read.

Edited by Mijzelf
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Why use 98SE, or in my case, ME? Simple - speed. They are lighter and faster than today's OS' and for the vast majority of things the average user does on their computer, still perfectly current. I can still browse the web, do my email, balance my household budget, listen to my tunes, play games, edit my photos in Photoshop Elements...

About the only thing I can't do on my ME machine is video calling on Skype, which is a shame, but I also own a Mac (PowerMac G5) and I do video calling (plus iTunes and a few other things that ME is no longer able to do) on that.

This is a home built computer - I built it myself. I purposely put Win ME on it because I wanted the speed it would offer on this hardware. I have not been disappointed. This machine, with its measly 768 MB of RAM, is in all likelihood faster at all of the above tasks than a much beefier machine with 2 GB or more of RAM running Vista would be. Speed and low resource demands are good!

...PLUS, I just *like* Windows ME!! Now there may be the best reason of all!

Edited by mac57
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I remember that AMD made more sense to me in terms of dollars

when it came to price camparisons...at the time, I could buy a 500 Mhz AMD processor for $90 while Intel was charging $350 for it's Pentium III 500 Mhz and I could

see absolutely no apparent performance difference. Sure, if you ran SYSMARKS against both procs, you would see slight improvements in the

Intel hardware, but who cared???? The differences amounted to nanoseconds, not minutes. That meant I had over $250 to spend on memory, m/b and other

things I wanted....

Actually, it makes a huge difference when you're running heavy applications, like 3D games. Maybe if all you did was run win9x and check mails and play older games it wouldn't have made any difference, but for me it's a world of a difference.

I am at present on an AMD K6-2 400 (@450 Mhz). I was using a PIII-450 (512 MB RAM) all these years and let me tell you, there's absolutely no comparasion between the processors. The P3 was so good that I never really felt the need to upgrade. I feel that I could have continued even till 2009.. All programs ran well on my XP-SP2, I was even able to play games like Quake 3 and GTA Vice City without any lag. I could run virtual machines with XP in them, run multiple sandboxed environments, browse in Opera with around 80 tabs open, program in .Net, design in photoshop, edit movies.. everything. And then it was no more. After its demise, I switched over to this AMD, with 576 MB RAM. And let me tell you, its absolutely nothing like the P3. Everything is way slower, and even having more RAM than I did earlier makes no difference.

It's not surprising though, the numbers speak for itself. While K6-2 has no L2 Cache, the P-III (katmai core) has 512kB L2! Also, the L1 cache controller was way better than what was present in the PII. Infact, the cache in the katmai was so good that, provided you had the right hardware, it could be overclocked to 600Mhz!

Even though my AMD motherboard is finely tunable with small stepping VCore, Multiplier and FSB jumpers, my PIII (which was only overclockable thru the BIOS) was able to handle upto a 150 MHz increase with ease. Although it wasn't that stable, a 100Mhz oc was sufficiently stable. The K6-2 on the other hand can just about handle a 50Mhz increase. Anything above that is unstable and would require a high VCore that would be potentially damaging to the CPU, not to mention you'd be needing a very good cooling system. The PIII didn't require any extra cooling even though it was running at 100Mhz+.

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I remember that AMD made more sense to me in terms of dollars

when it came to price camparisons...at the time, I could buy a 500 Mhz AMD processor for $90 while Intel was charging $350 for it's Pentium III 500 Mhz and I could

see absolutely no apparent performance difference. Sure, if you ran SYSMARKS against both procs, you would see slight improvements in the

Intel hardware, but who cared???? The differences amounted to nanoseconds, not minutes. That meant I had over $250 to spend on memory, m/b and other

things I wanted....

Actually, it makes a huge difference when you're running heavy applications, like 3D games. Maybe if all you did was run win9x and check mails and play older games it wouldn't have made any difference, but for me it's a world of a difference.

I am at present on an AMD K6-2 400 (@450 Mhz). I was using a PIII-450 (512 MB RAM) all these years and let me tell you, there's absolutely no comparasion between the processors. The P3 was so good that I never really felt the need to upgrade. I feel that I could have continued even till 2009.. All programs ran well on my XP-SP2, I was even able to play games like Quake 3 and GTA Vice City without any lag. I could run virtual machines with XP in them, run multiple sandboxed environments, browse in Opera with around 80 tabs open, program in .Net, design in photoshop, edit movies.. everything. And then it was no more. After its demise, I switched over to this AMD, with 576 MB RAM. And let me tell you, its absolutely nothing like the P3. Everything is way slower, and even having more RAM than I did earlier makes no difference.

It's not surprising though, the numbers speak for itself. While K6-2 has no L2 Cache, the P-III (katmai core) has 512kB L2! Also, the L1 cache controller was way better than what was present in the PII. Infact, the cache in the katmai was so good that, provided you had the right hardware, it could be overclocked to 600Mhz!

Even though my AMD motherboard is finely tunable with small stepping VCore, Multiplier and FSB jumpers, my PIII (which was only overclockable thru the BIOS) was able to handle upto a 150 MHz increase with ease. Although it wasn't that stable, a 100Mhz oc was sufficiently stable. The K6-2 on the other hand can just about handle a 50Mhz increase. Anything above that is unstable and would require a high VCore that would be potentially damaging to the CPU, not to mention you'd be needing a very good cooling system. The PIII didn't require any extra cooling even though it was running at 100Mhz+.

The Athlon T-birds were good, IMO. It seemed that back when that was the only one I had, the 900 mhz one seemed good enough that I would had still still be using it into 2009! There was only one game that was way too slow.

BTW, I had bad luck with K6-2s also, I had a K6-2 450 mhz and when just OC'ed to 500 mhz, it freezed all the time when gaming! :realmad:

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I am at present on an AMD K6-2 400 (@450 Mhz). I was using a PIII-450 (512 MB RAM) all these years and let me tell you, there's absolutely no comparasion between the processors. The P3 was so good that I never really felt the need to upgrade. I feel that I could have continued even till 2009.. All programs ran well on my XP-SP2, I was even able to play games like Quake 3 and GTA Vice City without any lag. I could run virtual machines with XP in them, run multiple sandboxed environments, browse in Opera with around 80 tabs open, program in .Net, design in photoshop, edit movies.. everything. And then it was no more. After its demise, I switched over to this AMD, with 576 MB RAM. And let me tell you, its absolutely nothing like the P3. Everything is way slower, and even having more RAM than I did earlier makes no difference.

It's not surprising though, the numbers speak for itself. While K6-2 has no L2 Cache, the P-III (katmai core) has 512kB L2! Also, the L1 cache controller was way better than what was present in the PII. Infact, the cache in the katmai was so good that, provided you had the right hardware, it could be overclocked to 600Mhz!

Even though my AMD motherboard is finely tunable with small stepping VCore, Multiplier and FSB jumpers, my PIII (which was only overclockable thru the BIOS) was able to handle upto a 150 MHz increase with ease. Although it wasn't that stable, a 100Mhz oc was sufficiently stable. The K6-2 on the other hand can just about handle a 50Mhz increase. Anything above that is unstable and would require a high VCore that would be potentially damaging to the CPU, not to mention you'd be needing a very good cooling system. The PIII didn't require any extra cooling even though it was running at 100Mhz+.

Upgrade to a K6-III+ 450 (not a K6-III 450), if you can find one, and you'll be surprised how much better than the P-III it is. They keep turning out on sites like eBay, from time to time. They are fine to overclock and will work at reasonable temperatures if cooled by any common socket A heatsink/fan assembly (the K6-III+ IS a socket super-7, but mounting a socket A heatsink/fan assembly on a socket super-7 is straightforward and works well), even with a reasonably higher VCore (they're mobile chips, intended for notebooks, hence their normal VCore is 2.1V, not 2.3V). Here is one case where YMMV, of course.

Edited by dencorso
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I am at present on an AMD K6-2 400 (@450 Mhz). I was using a PIII-450 (512 MB RAM) all these years and let me tell you, there's absolutely no comparasion between the processors. The P3 was so good that I never really felt the need to upgrade. I feel that I could have continued even till 2009.. All programs ran well on my XP-SP2, I was even able to play games like Quake 3 and GTA Vice City without any lag. I could run virtual machines with XP in them, run multiple sandboxed environments, browse in Opera with around 80 tabs open, program in .Net, design in photoshop, edit movies.. everything. And then it was no more. After its demise, I switched over to this AMD, with 576 MB RAM. And let me tell you, its absolutely nothing like the P3. Everything is way slower, and even having more RAM than I did earlier makes no difference.

It's not surprising though, the numbers speak for itself. While K6-2 has no L2 Cache, the P-III (katmai core) has 512kB L2! Also, the L1 cache controller was way better than what was present in the PII. Infact, the cache in the katmai was so good that, provided you had the right hardware, it could be overclocked to 600Mhz!

Even though my AMD motherboard is finely tunable with small stepping VCore, Multiplier and FSB jumpers, my PIII (which was only overclockable thru the BIOS) was able to handle upto a 150 MHz increase with ease. Although it wasn't that stable, a 100Mhz oc was sufficiently stable. The K6-2 on the other hand can just about handle a 50Mhz increase. Anything above that is unstable and would require a high VCore that would be potentially damaging to the CPU, not to mention you'd be needing a very good cooling system. The PIII didn't require any extra cooling even though it was running at 100Mhz+.

Upgrade to a K6-III+ 450 (not a K6-III 450), if you can find one, and you'll be surprised how much better than the P-III it is. They keep turning out on sites like eBay, from time to time. They are fine to overclock and will work at reasonable temperatures if cooled by any common socket A heatsink/fan assembly (the K6-III+ IS a socket super-7, but mounting a socket A heatsink/fan assembly on a socket super-7 is straightforward and works well), even with a reasonably higher VCore (they're mobile chips, intended for notebooks, hence their normal VCore is 2.1V, not 2.3V). Here is one case where YMMV, of course.

Funny you should mention that- I was on eBay yesterday and was thinking of buying a K6-2 550 AGR. I quite liked the features of the K6-III+. Are you sure it it would work on a desktop mobo?

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[Funny you should mention that- I was on eBay yesterday and was thinking of buying a K6-2 550 AGR. I quite liked the features of the K6-III+. Are you sure it it would work on a desktop mobo?

If your mobo is a Socket Super-7, yes. On an older plain Socket-7, maybe. But 8prime8 has pointed you to the rigtht places. And if you don't find your board there, still it'll probably work, but maybe you'll need a bios upgrade. If you dont find one for free, e-Support (google for them) probably can provide you one at a reasonable price. However, in most cases the bios upgrade is only needed for the bios to recognize it correctly as a K6-III+. If you don't mind it being described as another chip or as unknown, all odds are it'll work all the same. If the bios thinks it's a plain K6-III, it is a pretty certain bet. YMMV, though.

A list of the characteristics of all known K6 exists here. The K6-III+ are at the bottom. There is a K6-III+/500ACZ,

which is the pearl of the K6, but it's harder to find than the 450. But, even the 400 would give your system a big boost. But now that I checked I see I remembered wrong, K6-III+ VCore is 1.9~2.1V. So 2.1V is the top of the range recommended by AMD. But with an Socket A heatsink/fan you certainly can go to 2.2V without damaging the chip. And do give it a good thermal paste, say, Arctic Ceramique, for instance. Mobiles do support higher temperatures than the desktop chips do, but good cooling is paramount to stablity and overclockability. Good luck!

Edited by dencorso
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  • 1 month later...

I run 98Se on athlon3200, 1g mem. I shall upgrade when i run to game title i really want and that runs on modern os only. So far i am happy with this and let the other 1g ram sit in box. But if i upgrade HW, it makes no longer sense to run98 since i wouldnt be able to take advantage of having multicore cpu/PCI-E and over 1g mem.

- And i still need 98 even in my work, formating pcmcia-card to our system won't work in w2k/xp. They do format, but not properly for the legacy systems we support (ms article 296117).

- And i use 98 also to remove extended atributes from files at copy operations (EA_DATA.SF), The systems we support do not like recycle.bin or ea_data. sf -file. ( i must be dump not to be able ot get attributes cleared otherwise, but 98/usb disk works as workaraound to clear em)

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