Why run 98?

[jondercik]

There is no good reason to run windows 98 anymore. It cannot take advantage of modern hardware and was buggy and insecure from the day it was written.

[Lunac]

To atomizer: Hell? Hardly.

To all: I am not some sort of neo-luddite, going around verbally and physically assaulting XP users. It simply comes down to economic factors. It's a difference between a "user" and a "consumer". I've got nothing against consumers. I may not think highly of them, but it is people like them that keep the economies of their respective nations afloat. With all their consuming that is. Like the people that buy new cars every few years. They might be mindless consuming drones, but they are human too. Just dumber and opulent.

Now, like I said at the beginning, I'm not some kind of neo-luddite. I had a chance to test out WindowsXP in late 2001. (Courtesy of a friend who got his hands on a copy.) I tested the heck out of WindowsXP you could say. I did both extensive benchmarks, as well dual booted for nearly four months. Now driver support was very shaky back then, as you know, but even so, performance was sluggish (not to mention shell looked clownish) If I remember correctly, I used PerformanceTest for most of the benchmarks (I am pretty sure I got the test results archived on some CDR), and they were awful. Win98SE outperformed XP in every benchmark, especially in 2d/3d tests. Although, I feel poor drivers were cause of that.

Nevertheless, even today, XP remains what it was when it came out. Junk for the everyday consumer. It runs about the same speed on a 500mhz Celeron with 128mb ram, as it does on a system with latest CPU, and a GB of ram. (I can vouch for that.) It would have never reached the user base it has now, if it weren't for all the OEM pre-installs (Courtesy of DELL, HP, and the rest) But OEM preinstalls probably have a hand in propagating WinOS regardless of version. It is worth noting that Microsoft dropped some serious buck in promoting XP. Unseen since the days of Win95. If I remember correctly, back in 2000-2001, nobody really gave two s***s about WinXP. Most users had Win98, few had ME (in lower and lower numbers every day), and "powa" users had Windows 2000. Then we started seeing actual WinXP commercials. I think that was the first time I ever saw TV commercials for an OS. That right there was a pretty good indicator of the situation.

Edited January 11, 2006 by Lunac

[Link21]

Oh, you chose the wrong thing to say that time! Alright, I googled the release date of the ATI Radeon 9000 series. According to my "sources", Radeon 9000 was released in July, 2002. Guess what? That also happened to be the time when there were approx. 54% of the entire population using windows 98 as their computer OS! The stats for windows 2000 and XP COMBINED were less than 22%. And you think support should've been dropped then? You really ARE crazy! Also, windows 98 is still the third most commonly used OS, and it is now 2006. It's been 8 god **** years since the release of windows 98. 8 years after windows 95 was released, 2% of people were using it, and as I recall, most support for windows 95 was dropped completely at about that same time. As long as there's still pleanty of people using the OS, it'll be around for a LONG LONG LONG time!

Ok then, that makes sense. But support for Windows 98 should have been dropped with the Radeon 9600 series video cards or higher. As for NVIDIA, support should have been dropped with the GeForce FX 5900 series video cards and higher. At the very latest, support should have been dropped with the GeForce 6200 series video cards and higher. I just cringed in disgust to see Windows 9X support for the GeForce 6800 series video cards. A video card that high end never had any place in a 9X machine. In 2002, things were different as 54% of the population was using Windows 98. Statrting in 2003, Windows 98/ME support should have been dropped for the latest video cards and motherboard chipsets.

Also, in 2002, I bet 99% of that 54% of the population using Windows 98 had slow systems with CPU speeds less than 1GHz. The Radeon 9000 series video cards and higher and especially the Radeon 9600 series video cards and higher were meant to be used in PCs with fast CPUs. By far the majority of systems with fast CPUs were already running Windows 2000/XP even back in 2002. The majority of the population was still using slow systems back in 2002. Of course most of them were going to be using Windows 98 on them.

Hardware designed for only fast systems, had no place supporting Windows 9X as far back as late 2002 or early 2003.

Edited January 12, 2006 by Link21

[atomizer]

i see where you anti-support for 9x guys are coming from, though i think you're going overboard (kinda like i usually do ).

if i spend money to buy the latest & greatest hardware, i sure don't want the software to bottleneck it. having said that, a lot of the hardware manufactures offer downloads for specific platforms, in which case your point is at least partially moot. of course some don't. but another thing to factor in is that even if you do get the very best, latest, platform specific driver, that driver may STILL bottleneck the hardware anyway. for instance, creatives drivers, notorious for bloat and bugs, don't give you full control of the hardware. that's why i use the kxProject drivers. ATI's drivers are not as optimized as well as they could be, which is why i use the omega drivers. my "single layer" DVD burner only required a firmware upgrade from the codeguys website to make it a double layer burner.

point is, there's often 3rd party drivers that enable more features and are better optimized for a particular platform. so instead of griping about how people shouldn't be using 98 (which is their choice, regardless of how much you dislike it) and how vendors should stop supporting a particular platform, yada yada yada, look around for what you want because in many/most cases better options exist. the same is true for a lot of software as well.

BTW, i use XP, so that kills the "he's a 98 fanboy" arguments.

[kartel]

There is no good reason to run windows 98 anymore. It cannot take advantage of modern hardware and was buggy and insecure from the day it was written.

2000/Xp isnt buggy or insecure ?

[Jlo555]

@Link21: I've got sort of an interesting comment here. There's a well known company that dropped support for windows 98 on just about all of it's products in 2003. This was Adobe. When they did support win9x all the way through XP, there software was really not bloated, and it ran perfectly on just about all platforms (i'm referring to Photoshop 7.0 and Acrobat 5.0.) Now, at my school we have *snort* highend Dell computers, that have XP Pro and Photoshop LE, which I'm pretty sure only supports 2000/XP. On every other copmuter in our computer science lab at my school, that one program that was "optimized" for the NT series crashed (and I mean BSOD'd) at least half the computers. Don't think for one second that just because a company supports a different OS series, that the support would be compromised on a different OS series, because that's simply not true.

[LLXX]

Hardware designed for only fast systems, had no place supporting Windows 9X as far back as late 2002 or early 2003.

??? You mean, as hardware gets faster, the software should get more inefficient and slower so that it balances out? I thought computers were supposed to get faster over time... not slower!

Win98se already runs quite well on a P166, but with the newest and fastest hardware it gets even better. In 1999, Microsoft never envisioned 98se would be run on 4GHz machines, so they made it work well on much slower hardware. With the available of faster hardware, they did not care for speed as much, and so it resulted in Win2K and then XP, which are monstrous compared to 98se and have higher system requirements. But, by running 98se on a system "designed for Microsoft® Windows XP" you can have much better performance - just compare the response times between 98se and XP. 98se is responsive and almost instantaneous to respond, XP feels slightly sluggish (I've booted both 98se and XP on a 4.17GHz P4, and the difference is quite dramatic).

As long as we're still using x86/PC architecture, 98se will still be the best balance between performance and usability (e.g. Windows 3.11 on my system starts in < 1 second, but its capabilities are very limited; Win95 has some memory leaks; 98A is more unstable than SE; ME wasn't even finished; and 2K and up, the NT series, are too slow but have many features, but 98se is just right.)

Regarding drivers and the like, FYI some hardware manufacturers actually still have realmode DOS drivers for their latest products, available for download from their website!

Edited January 12, 2006 by LLXX

[atomizer]

...There's a well known company that dropped support for windows 98 on just about all of it's products in 2003. This was Adobe...

if you 9x peoples need PDF support, check out:

http://www.foxitsoftware.com/pdf/rd_intro.php

their Foxit Reader is blindingly fast and has worked for every PDF i've thrown at it so far. it's free, but the free version does display a small, unobtrusive button in the toolbar that links to a version that can also edit PDF's. no installation either - just unpack and run.

[jondercik]

98 gives any program that wants it access to any memory location it wants, all it has to do is ask. This means that any program can easily overwrite the OS itself.

98 CANNOT take advantage of HT processors or dual core. Sorry it just cant be done.

Getting it to use over 512 MB of memory efficiently is just a joke.

No NATIVE NTFS support. FAT32 just plain sucks.

Very weak security.

These are all the things I can think of of the top of my head and I know there are plenty more.

[atomizer]

No NATIVE NTFS support. FAT32 just plain sucks.

remember that when you need to have read/write access to an NTFS partition from outside the OS. don't get me wrong, i use NTFS as well, but it can be a big fat PITA at times.

also, NTFS is the only filesystem i'm aware of that allows the installation of 'root kits'.

and as far as speed, FAT32 and NTFS are supposedly neck and neck.

[jondercik]

root kits are not a function of the filesystem. It is a function of the OS. And speaking of them it is much easier to get them installed on a 9x box than any NT kernel based OS. Why you ask? Every user has complete control of the machine. NT kernel the user has to have admin rights for this to happen.

Speed they are neck and neck but NTFS can support MUCH larger volume sizes and has error correction and security built into it.

[miko]

Why run 98?

because i want to.

EOD

and Link21, next time i offer you an olive branch remind me to beat you with it

PS. and i'm buying a 6800 next month so

[RainyShadow]

But why support two completely different OS cores made by the same company for way too long after the newest NT core came out and was intended to replace the old completely different OS kernel for the Microsoft computing world?

Actually (if my memory serves me well) NT platform was not intended to replace 9x.

There were supposed to be two different OS lines, NT (Daytona) based OS for server applications, and 9x (Chicago) based OS for client-side.

But then M$ decided to megre both (probably to reduce development costs) and made one bloated OS with just cosmetic differences between client and server variants. This was the point when all this sh%$t started...

If there were still two separate OS lines developed, our computing experience would have been much more efficient (and simpler;) )

Edited January 12, 2006 by RainyShadow

[wizardofwindows]

next link21 will tell us that making apps that run on a mac is slowing down nt development on xp apps.he just doesnt get it the companies make apps for the comsumers that buy their products if research or cumsumer input demands wants drivers for 9x mac os/2 etc then it will make.nobody suffers because of this in fact more benifit and then theirs 3rd party apps that fill a hole when others wont make drivers for certain oses.i often wonder why adobe doesnt support 9x anymore yet avg does?

[Thunderbolt 2864]

I like Windows 98 because it can run older applications. And it loads much faster than Windows XP. But I still like XP better. At least Windows 98 is better than 95 and crappy ME.

If this was the 9x vs the NT kernel, I prefer the NT kernel. It has more options and advantages to choose from.