Why use Win 9x on new PCs in 2013?

[Destro]

3 hours ago, rloew said:

I can say 9x is faster with a "straight face" without any hesitation. I ran a Mathematical calculation last year using all 8 cores and about 29GB of RAM with far less overhead than would have been possible with any later OS.

With any later OS?  Or any other OS?  NT is as old as 9x as well as older distros of Linux and Unix and actually supports multiprocessing.  windows 2000 was conceived and was being developed during the same time ME came out.    in 1996 Linux supported multiprocessing.  I can't think of a single supper computer that runs windows 98.  They all run Linux or Unix,  

 

Like I said it's fine that people run 98 because they want to, but in lieu of facts opinions don't make supporting arguments true.  If we are going to make a case the 9x can be faster at certain things like I/o over Rs232 that is fine or whatever.  But it's flat out wrong that it is faster at 99% of other things in 2018, or capabale of getting past it's limitations to even have a chance of competing in certain benchmarks, or could even run those benchmarks.  You are thinking but ya if I could make 98 get past those limitations than it would be faster because i love 9x.  But you can't despite trying and succeeding to get 9x to run on some sata 150 that is good but it doesn't run from M2 so it will never be faster read and write performance.  Thats just example M2 is not even the fastest right now.  You might get it to run from a sata but you are not going to get full AHCI,  You may get it to run on a board but you are not going to get the chipset recognized to fully use all of the speed improvements and technology.  You cannot get past this in 2018

I know that you wrote an API for 9x that will allow very limited Multiprocessing, but I have seen no evidence at all that 9x with your hacks could perform faster than another Operating system with SMP in a wide range of various benchmarks.  On hardware not of your choosing, but on hardware the 9x wont even run on properly.  2018 hardware. which is what my point it. Taking some very specific hardware that you can get to work that in all fairness is old tech by todays standards and running 9x on it is not what the argument is.

Back when this thread was started it might of had a shred of merit but not now.

Edited February 1, 2018 by Destro

[rloew]

I have not worked with Windows 2000 to know how it performs. same with Linux.

I have a Driver for AHCI which should also work for M2 SATA Drives. Making a NVME Driver would probably not be that difficult.

I'm not sure what you are referring to by "limited" Multiprocessing.

I haven't purchased any 2018 hardware so far. The improvements over the 2016 hardware I already have is not compelling.

Windows 9x has so much less bloat than newer OSes that a lot of things run faster. When I install Windows 10, I can't even tell when it is finished without switching my Monitor back to it because the disk drive indicator is flashing just as much as when the installer is active. The speed improvements in the hardware are being eaten up by the increased overhead in the OS.

I can watch SD Videos in full screen mode on a 6200 PCI Card with 98SE, not with Windows 10 in the same computer.

Obviously software written to use newer OSes won't run on 9x, so of course you cannot make comparisons. You need to compare performance with programs that are compatible with both OSes.As far as difficulties with newer hardware is concerned, this is going to be a problem with any OS, not just 9x. The next generation chips will only support Windows 10 fully, so you will be playing catch up forever.

Eventually the incompatibilities will be overwhelming for 9x but I don't think it will be in 2018. When it does, a lot of perfectly good hardware and software will be wasted.

Attitudes like yours are why NASA cannot recover control of the IMAGE Satellite. They don't have the software or OSes they were using when they lost contact with the satellite in 2005.

Incidentally, this topic is about 2013, so if you want to argue about 2018, maybe you should open a new thread for your rants. Or better yet, choose a different section of MSFN appropriate for your preferred OS where you can post some more productive comments.

Edited February 1, 2018 by rloew

[Tommy]

Windows 2000 is the perfect replacement if Windows 98 becomes so far gone that nothing modern will work on it. Windows 98's biggest handicap is obviously online usage. But you can't really blame it, web "de"evolution has come so far that browsers need to be consistently updated. As far as I'm concerned, the web itself is almost unusable without an AdBlocker these days. When I'm forced to use IE11 at work, there's at least 3 or 4 ads that surround my content and it slows me down, even on a computer from 2014. It's just too much bloat, complicated code, etc. Windows 98 wasn't coded for this gosh darn modern web.

Other than that, running older applications on Windows 98 is indeed much faster than on newer operating systems. Windows 10 is a train wreck and Windows 7 gets more praise than it really deserves since the NT6 architecture is slow and there are times I have more crashes on Windows 7 than I do on Windows 98. If Windows 98 crashes on me today, it's almost always my fault. Now those COM Surrogate errors on Vista/7.....I see no reason for them as they pop up for no reason.

[rloew]

Megabyte or larger web pages are commonplace now. I am talking about the HTML, not the associated graphics.

Even the latest browsers with the latest OSes on a less than 2 year old machine can take tens of seconds to load.

The main page on my Website is about 3 pages, 4KB of plain HTML, loads in less than a second, and is compatible with every browser even Lynx.

[Tommy]

On 2/1/2018 at 4:54 PM, rloew said:

The main page on my Website is about 3 pages, 4KB of plain HTML, loads in less than a second, and is compatible with every browser even Lynx.

Speed/usability > Pretty/fancy

Your site is so easy to use, none of that other bloated junk. Even a dialup connection would be able to use it with no problems. Wasn't the internet always meant to transmit information in the first place? I prefer it to work so I can read what it says, not wait hours for junk. And one more thing I hate, these sites that have to hide their navibar in one of those stupid 3 lines buttons that don't work properly on older browsers, even FF9.0.1 and so it's always expanded over half the screen and you can't even read anything behind it. That irks me so bad! Stop imitating mobile garbage!

[Destro]

Run DOS and a superduper stripped down nlited 2000, that only operated off the bare essential files and services and you have the best of both worlds.  I have successfully stripped XP down enough that it runs with less in less than 50MBs of ram I had it in the 40s with all drivers loaded,  I think 2k can be even smaller than this possible in the range of 30 MB of ram maybe in the 20s.  Of course this will depend a lot on driver bloat and hardware, and would require real hardware, like using a SB16 as opposed to ac97 or hd audio.

Edited February 3, 2018 by Destro

[rloew]

The same can be done with 9x. I was able to run 32-Bit programs using a Windows 95 core and HX that fit on a Floppy.

[Dibya]

Wow 98SE can use 8 cores?

[pangoomis]

Only if the programs are made with rloew's API.

I'm still waiting for a 98SE source code leak, Russians, where are you?

We can add hacks, stubs, new API's on top of the existing 1999 files, but for how long?

[Destro]

On 2/1/2018 at 3:25 PM, Tommy said:

I have more crashes on Windows 7 than I do on Windows 98. If Windows 98 crashes on me today, it's almost always my fault. Now those COM Surrogate errors on Vista/7.....I see no reason for them as they pop up for no reason.

My win 7 box hasn't been restarted or shut down in over 6 months I don't run ms updates on it, and I play games and browse on it, run VMs and i literally treat it like crap.  I have never experienced a windows 7 crash ever no matter what i do to it it doesn't go down. I have experieced application crashes and even driver crashes but thats never enough to bring down the OS.  My experience with XP was pretty similar, on stable hardware it never goes down.

Edited February 3, 2018 by Destro

[Dibya]

Hi everyone of 9x community won't you peeps think that you people got a magician impossible.  Guess who is he?

rloew of coarse.  His disassembler can provide recompile able soarce code.  So why wait for leaks 

[Tommy]

Let's not start talking about leaks, guys.

@Destro You must either have a really good installation or the computers at my job really suck. My general operations are very internet based and of course, IE11 and I think despite this, most of these pages run in compatibility mode because if you force them onto Google Chrome that I managed to sneak on there, mostly all the pages are broken in one way or another. I guess this is what they mean by forcing IE upgrades makes company pages not work right which is actually true. Either way, even when I do other special projects such as video or even photo editing, many times it can be stable but then other times it just crashes and produces weird artifacts. Combine that with Citrix and it's a recipe for disaster. Our Citrix servers use Windows Server 2008 R2 so that's another NT6 based OS and sometimes I'm forced to do some of my operations through Citrix because of corporate restrictions on Windows 7 which is weird since they'd basically the same thing unless different group policies apply to each environment. If we want to go back to Vista though, COM Surrogate errors happened constantly on my home computers. I think the workaround solution was to place it as an exception through DEP which helped some of it, but not always. Windows 2000 will always be my main OS of choice, it's what I'm using to type this right now. Although Windows 98 holds a special place in my heart simply because it was the first OS I ever used since I got into computing a bit late in the game and so for me, it's not so much I want to use it as a main OS but rather I want to see what the heck can be accomplished in it and how usable it can become with some tweaks done to it.

[Destro]

I only use SuperMicro motherboards for last 20 years and I have never had one fail on me or be unstable.

[winxpi]

On 1.2.2018 at 9:25 PM, Tommy said:

Windows 2000 is the perfect replacement if Windows 98 becomes so far gone that nothing modern will work on it. Windows 98's biggest handicap is obviously online usage. But you can't really blame it, web "de"evolution has come so far that browsers need to be consistently updated. As far as I'm concerned, the web itself is almost unusable without an AdBlocker these days. When I'm forced to use IE11 at work, there's at least 3 or 4 ads that surround my content and it slows me down, even on a computer from 2014. It's just too much bloat, complicated code, etc. Windows 98 wasn't coded for this gosh darn modern web.

Other than that, running older applications on Windows 98 is indeed much faster than on newer operating systems. Windows 10 is a train wreck and Windows 7 gets more praise than it really deserves since the NT6 architecture is slow and there are times I have more crashes on Windows 7 than I do on Windows 98. If Windows 98 crashes on me today, it's almost always my fault. Now those COM Surrogate errors on Vista/7.....I see no reason for them as they pop up for no reason.

True. Like the thing that Flash is getting replaced with HTML5 just because mobile devices support it better.

And ofcourse older browsers dont work that well over years and the Javascript stuff and Ads everywhere play a roll. 
Regarding this topic I did suggest the virualization solutions since most modern hardware probably doesnt bring any drivers for Windows 9x with it.
So its more a question if the drivers will be recognized or not. When I had to install Windows XP on a system formerly running Windows 2000 I did run into such a case where the network card(NIC) wasnt recognized. So such situations or similiar will probably be the rule with hardware (year 2013 and onwards). 

However if one wants to run windows 98se on this type of hardware why not. There just a few obstacles in the way nowadays.

There still older software that wont run on the most of the modern operating systems of Windows. Especially the MS-DOS games and so.

Edited February 7, 2018 by winxpi