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Why continue to use Windows 9x?


DukeBlazingstix

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OK here's some of my reasons for using windows 98SE.

Its margin for data/hardware errors is much wider and can cope with pre-thrashed hardware.

The direct support for DOS applications and the ability to switch to DOS mode on bootup.

Fewer resources to run.

Adaptability to different enviroments where driver support permits; drive imaging onto other pc's without lengthy repair modes etc.

Almost immune to all viri trojan and remote attacks.

Windows media player 10 can be installed with mods ive discussed.

Nero 7 premium works therefore allowing super mp4's to run - who cares about 4 gig limits lol.

divx works fine at insane quality and compression levels encoding faster.

Open Office works.

Vast array of games applications utils etc run smoother and more efficiently.

3rd party tools can have the aero glass effect.

3rd party chat protocols can be implemented through sourceforge open projects.

Windows based Front ends for pc and game emulaters get more cpu cycles - 25% for mame

personally and i have integrated graphics!

If everyone started with windows 98se for programming legacy based apps; they'd run more robust on newer systems - and they do!

Latest java distro is fully compatable.

These things are the tip off the iceburg for me but everyone probably knows the above and more.

The problems start with driver support though and this can cause heaps of headaches.

Drivers ARE the the number 1 cause of BSOD'S on all windows versions.

Drivers are getting hard to implement and seriously why isn't windows 9x open source .. it should be for the sake of community education understanding and accessability.

Lastly but not least windows 98se is ideal for embedding and complete stripdowns.

Edited by ZaPbUzZ
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Quote from LLXX:

"[...] we don't see any "Why continue to use Windows XP" threads in the XP forum even though there's Vista out there."

Although you're right about this discussion turning into a "who got bigger balls" thing, regarding the above quote I have to mention the big differences between 9x and XP:

• 9x official support from MS ended; XP is still being supported

• 9x support from hardware/driver manufacturers ended in almost all cases; XP is still being supported

• 9x support from software developers (commercial, freeware and open-source altogether) is rapidly ending; XP is still being supported

Taking all the above into consideration, you see there's no need for a "Why continue to use Windows XP" discussion, because nowadays it's still a viable operating system with full support. The 9x series has been cut off: their usage is being limited to older hardware and older software versions, which will become deprecated sooner rather than later. It has a past, it may have a present but it definitely doesn't have a future. And people wanna look towards something that has a future. That's all.

Have a wonderful year, everybody!

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It's only a matter of time XP become completely obsolete.

XP is at the same point today, as w98 was in 2002.

Let's see how the ready-to-use drivers imbedded in xp distros will perform in 2010. Given the difficulty to bypass the distor's driver automatic install and install the manufacturer drivers, we are in for some good jokes.

Then software will start using Vista component which don't exists on XP. History will repeat itself.

The only thing that can save XP is that Vista is a resource hog. XP will always perform better than Vista.

Then poeple will start to understand that newer is not better and eventualy look for even older OSes like w98.

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I just love this thread

U do learn a lot from here about WinXP and how useless it is, still coming out with updates and fixes BUT we are not talking about XP.

So why continue to use win98??? (my 3rd post on this thread)

1. A lot of programs works really fine on win98 like ms office 97 (Oh! I mention FOXIT as a PDF really and it works very well but then some say adobe lite, Why????)

We don't need the feature. When I mean to be a PDF Reader it meant just a reader, we don't need PhotoImpact or PhotoShop to view a pics.

2. Do we really need so much features in our programs??? Win98 have most of the programs we need for our daily uses of course not to mention professional ones. What I mean here is That we do our spreadsheets, database and word processing MS Office 87 is enough. Do we reallly use all the feature it have and how many percents of MS Office 2003 do we really use. What we get carried away is New programs R better and have more functions and features BUT really do we really need them?

If needed, think of writing Functions & VB.

3. I really change to WinXP (And a new computer to go with it) for only one thing. Games, Actually Gamer/Games m/c are the real power user.

U dun need a 128MB Graphic Card for any apps(except Video and Graphics)

But for games, it different. A turn base game like Civ4 need 512 Ram to run properly and it not even real time strategy or arcade game but looking back to the old computer which i give to my childern, they r so happy playing AOE, Dune, C&C in WIn98 really envy me.lol

Sorry, I not good at expressing my thought.

What I think I want to say if if win98 can do so much, Why change it???

WinXP stable??? My foot!!!

Just find out one of my prog which works umteen time in win98se now give gibberish in winXP

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Francesco. This is like your 20th post in only a few days. Now you even post several times in a row. You have to stop that.

Again, the question was to understand why we stay with Win98 and you're not helping.

Win98 is our chosen OS. We've explained why. You don't agree? Fine. But you've posted your opinion now so stop floading our forum !!! :angry:

I'm not flooding I'm answering to other posts.

So, according to what you say, people in this post should be allowed to contradict me as much as they want and I should just shut up and ignore them because if I answer them I flood? Oh yeah!

NTFS better than FAT? Nope.

So we should all give up using NTFS because you can scan and fix fat32 without rebooting and because it FAT is maybe faster in some operations (how much faster? 0-5,1%?)...

Who cares if:

1) ntfs has more security checks, has additional streams that can be used for example, like kaspersky does, to extremely speed up antivirus scanning

2) windows uses less ram to read ntfs drives because it doesn't have to keep all the structure loaded, like it happens with FAT32

3) ntfs can use the MFT to speed up accesses to small files

4) ntfs supports compression and encryption without needing extra software

5) ntfs has a rollback system that automatically undoes interrupted operations if for example your pc powers off while the ntfs is being written

6) ntfs doesn't have to be checked each time you don't shut off your pc correctly because as I told before it can automatically rollback interrupted operations

7) ntfs can have smaller cluster sizes on small (<= 8gb) hard drives

8) ntfs has a small storage of files data in the directory to speed up directory accesses making directory accesses faster because the OS doesn't have to read all the file record chains

9) ntfs supports sparse files that allows applications like emule to avoid allocating all the space for the files at once

10) ntfs is optimized for indexing while fat32 is not

11) ntfs can mark automatically the bad sectors while it's writing

12) ntfs usually gets less fragmented

Power down with you FAT32 drive writing? Just run scandisk and you're done. NTFS crash? chkdisk is no way as powerfull and it needs to restart your computer.

Chkdsk is more powerful and all the extra security feature for data integrity in NTFS are used to enhance the filesystem repair. Also chkdsk needs a reboot because it needs write access to the filesystem and you don't have to reboot if you just want to scan for errors, you have to reboot if you want ALSO to fix the errors.

And as BenoitRen mentionned, it's a closed proprietary format even if unofficial programs exist to read it under DOS or Linux.

And? Even if it is closed now linux has fully working read/write drivers (and even chkdsk-like utilities to scan and fix) for NTFS so I don't see where all this problems would be.

And when it really crashes, there's no way to recover (even Partition Magic can't even do anything about it).

Partition magic doesn't have recovery features. There are applications like getdataback and easyrecovery that support NTFS and work perfectly to recover your data. Did your partition disappear from the partitions list (it may happen when the partition table is corrupted (and that can happen independently from the filesystem you are using))? You can still use acronis recovery expert that detects and supports NTFS perfectly.

By the way, you can install XP on a FAT partition if you want. Nobody forces you to install XP on NTFS.

DOS: "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."

So you're ok with this M$ babysitting? Fine. Good for you. Obviously we're not. This was just the first step to Vista where you can't access anything without DRM checks.

And the alledged stability increase?

Yes I'm ok with M$ babysitting. Oh yeah sure, all the DRM in vista... really I'm scared if the windows DRMK.sys drives polls my videocard drivers to check their integrity 30 times in second ONLY while watching an HDDVD (because in those URLs full of FUD against vista they want to give the impression that vista constantly checks for driver integrity while in reality it does that only when playing protected media)! My usb laser mouse in comparison is always polled just a few thousand times in a second but who cares...

Oh by the way that DRM crap is needed by HDDVD and Blu-Ray (know anything of Protected Video Path?), you should thank the majors if all that mess is mandatory in order to reproduce that media. Hddvd/blu-ray probably won't ever come to 9x for the simple reason that newer video cards (with HDMI) don't support windows 9x or if it will come it will become useless when the majors will activate the Image Token Constraint protection (that forces the content to be played over HDMI).

About stability... Vista has user-mode drivers this means that many drivers that have problems can be restarted without system crashes and not even linux and OS X have this feature.

Vista also lets you send crash data for microsoft and thanks to the application "Problems reports and Solution" you can check for solutions to your crashes (and not only system crashes, even application crashes). In my case it solved some crashes with firefox (asking me to update), media player crashes (telling me that there was a newer xvid codec version that was vista-compatible) and video driver crashes (that made aero restart) telling me to upgrade my catalyst drivers. This feature makes vista probably the best-supported MS OS ever, because if you have crashes finally MS can get in contact with you to investigate the problem and get it fixed without you having to scream for help on MS forums: for example the application can ask you to make extra operations (memory scan, gathering system data etc) and send back the results. And they don't only support their own OS, they also support third-party applications (in my case xvid and firefox).

Oh and XP? I have some PCs at home that have been running CPU-intensive (seti@home and folding@home) applications in background for entire months without ever being rebooted (because all of my pcs shut down with hybernation) while my parents and my sister were using them to burn dvds, browse the web, listening to music and using media center most of the day. Entire months without being rebooted, all the CPU constantly used and not even a single crash, slowdown or any sort of problem. On 2k and XP I haven't seen a BSOD for ages. And if you don't believe me you can ask in the XP forum if people had problems that weren't related to faulty hardware or drivers because that's pretty hard.

XP more stable? lol

Oh yeah, "lol", what a great argument! The only fact that the NT kernel has memory protection makes it way more stable than 9x. If OS X, BSD, linux, beos, solaris and pratically any other decent OS have memory protection while 9x doesn't there must be a reason, don't you think? Even Microsoft's own OS/2 (an amazing OS that was planned to be windows 3.11 successor) had memory protection back in 1992!

The reason why MS didn't add memory protection immediately was because of retrocompatibility (because many DOS applications used direct hardware access) however any developer can tell you that an OS without memory protection won't never be as stable as an OS with memory protection because any application could make the system crash. And as you may know bugs may exists in almost every application.

You're comparing it to the original 98FE without any update? Updated, I've never seen a BSOD on 98SE. But I've seen quite a few on XP. And then, you're good to reinstall.

All the bloat that comes with XP is not good for stability anyway (Only a few features are usefull on GBs of install)

Since I fix PCs I have installed and use all the editions of 98 (FE and SE) and even windows ME. I've used windows 98SE for ages before switching to XP (I didn't switch to 2k for reasons similar to many other people here: bad boot times, bad games performance because of early drivers) however after seeing XP stability I never went back.

I still have all the win95 discs (a,b,c) 98 (fe, se) and ME since I keep them for very old PCs (or for people that don't want to upgrade) and when I install them I always install the latest updates but surely all those updates can't help for 98's lack of memory protection that is the main source of the crashes.

The only stable win98s I have ever seen were the ones used by people running only office applications, sometimes a web browser and nothing more.

All the XP crashes that I have seen instead were caused by faulty drivers or hardware but once fixed the problems nobody has ever come back complaining again of crashes for now (except 2 cases of broken HDDs).

BTW If you say that you have crashes on XP and then you're forced to format it probably means that you have problems with your ide/sata controller.

And personnaly, every program that made my win98 crash made XP crash the same way (bad programs are just bad programs).

Applications can't make XP crash unless you run them with real-time priority or unless those applications install kernel drivers or simply are applications designed to make XP crash (for example by eating up all the memory). On 9x any buggy applications can make the system crash just by writing in the wrong memory spot, because on 9x the memory is not protected.

XP safer?

Install Win98 with just the internet and get online: no open ports -> No risks. Install Firefox and get a firewall and you're safe.

Now install XP: millions of services and open ports begging for an attack. In less that 30 seconds you'll be infected.

XP has a firewall turned on by default that just closes the ports (and because of that its cpu usage is ridicolously low). Unlike some third-party firewalls that you are forced to install on 9x if you want one, because 9x has no firewall.

Sure, you can disable useless services, get a powerful AV, use nlite to get rid of all the bloat that comes with XP, use BartPE instead of DOS... but if you have to do all that to make XP usable, what's the point?

XP is already usable out of the box: you need to disable the services only if you have a PC without much ram. Also removing stuff with nlite is mostly useless unless you have a very small HDD, because you can obtain similar results by disabling services by hand.

You don't need to keep an AV running because like you do on 98 you can just install firefox and install an antivirus (like the free AOL virusshield that is a rebranded kaspersky KAV 6) and disable realtime scan and use manual scan for the files you've downloaded.

Unless you're forced to have XP (like I am for latest games), don't use it.

The point is that XP is more stable and since it's mainstream hardware and software producers support it more than they do with 9x, giving you more updated and stable drivers and applications.

This thread is getting really anoying. So we had a 2k fan, a linux defensor, now a XP lover? What next? an OSX friend?...

OS X runs only on Macs (unless you use OSX86, but we'd better not let anybody here know) so we're safe for now.

Edited by Francesco
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>>1) ntfs has more security checks

Slowing access to files. And easy enough to bypass.

>>has additional streams that can be used for example, like kaspersky does, to extremely speed up antivirus scanning

More often used by viruses. Oh and have i said that kaspersky is crap?

>>windows uses less ram to read ntfs drives

Oh? NTFS wasn't included in 9x, because it eated too much RAM. FAT32 structures are never loaded into memory completely while MFT do.

>>4) ntfs supports compression and encryption without needing extra software

Which noone in right mind uses.

>>5) ntfs has a rollback system that automatically undoes interrupted operations if for example your pc powers off while the ntfs is being written

Oh, i remember XP SP0 rolled back my entire work day.

Oh yeah sure, all the DRM in vista... really I'm scared if the windows DRMK.sys drives polls my videocard drivers to check their integrity 30 times in second ONLY while watching an HDDVD
Better read: http://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~pgut001/pubs/vista_cost.txt However, it is paranoid enough.
In my case it solved some crashes with firefox (asking me to update),

There is no crashes in current Firefox versions which are solved by upgrading. Oh noes, i recalled: Mozilla had to release a Firefox 2.0.0.1 just to make it work with Vista...

media player crashes
O RLY?
video driver crashes (that made aero restart) telling me to upgrade my catalyst drivers

Again, there were no Catalyst updates. And that means they've included buggy driver into RTM.

I won't tell how ugly Vista is and how pathetic it comes perfomance-wise.

Oh and XP?
I'll tell you funny story:

Recently, i had to install XP on a modern Sony Vaio.

After installing it and fully updating, it kept hanging on shutdown or standby.

After several support calls and mass hysteria i've found a fix that must solve this problem.

And guess what? It does not exist for Russian XP version (however, it was found 2 years ago), nor it was available for public.

I had to hack file in Safe Mode just to install 'hotfix' for an 5-year-mature OS which hanged on shutdown.

The only fact that the NT kernel has memory protection makes it way more stable than 9x.
Applications can't make XP crash
Oh, and didn't you heard a recent story where one simple MessageBox caused memory corruption, privilege elevation and BSOD on 2000-XP-Vista?

(It is still not fixed)

On 9x any buggy applications can make the system crash just by writing in the wrong memory spot, because on 9x the memory is not protected.

Mac OS < X didn't have a decent memory protection too.

Edited by Tihiy
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>>1) ntfs has more security checks

Slowing access to files. And easy enough to bypass.

I didn't mean permissions, I meant extra checksums that allow windows, for example, to detect for example if the file is corrupted.

Haven't you ever noticed that if you shut down your pc without shutting win98 at the next reboot windows scans the partition for errors? That doesn't happen on XP if you use NTFS (it happens if you use FAT) because NTFS has some extra integrity checks.

Obviously none of this protections can save the file data if it gets corrupted but they were planned to make it easier for windows to detect problems and repair a broken ntfs volume.

>>has additional streams that can be used for example, like kaspersky does, to extremely speed up antivirus scanning

More often used by viruses.

Would you please explain me why would viruses add useless metadata to the files?!?!?

Oh and have i said that kaspersky is crap?

Guess what? It's so crappy that on many tests it blows the other AVs out of the water.

http://www.virus.gr/english/fullxml/defaul...d=82&mnu=82

"1. Kaspersky version 6.0.0.303 - 99.62%

2. Active Virus Shield by AOL version 6.0.0.299 - 99.62% (this is a rebranded KAV)"

this says it all. The only other decent AV is nod32 because of the heuristics but surely it isn't brilliant when we're talking about real-life virus detection.

>>windows uses less ram to read ntfs drives

Oh? NTFS wasn't included in 9x, because it eated too much RAM. FAT32 structures are never loaded into memory completely while MFT do.

MFT is loaded in memory? what? Maybe the MFT index may be cached but I don't really think it is always kept in memory.

>>4) ntfs supports compression and encryption without needing extra software

Which noone in right mind uses.

Why not? It's completely transparent and pretty fast. Or do you think that win98's doublespace is better?

>>5) ntfs has a rollback system that automatically undoes interrupted operations if for example your pc powers off while the ntfs is being written

Oh, i remember XP SP0 rolled back my entire work day.

Oh yeah, sure. I imagine you saving your entire work only 1 time a day, especially in the same exact moment your PC shuts off.

>> Oh yeah sure, all the DRM in vista... really I'm scared if the windows DRMK.sys drives polls my videocard drivers to check their integrity 30 times in second ONLY while watching an HDDVD

Better read: http://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~pgut001/pubs/vista_cost.txt However, it is paranoid enough.

It is more than paranoid, it's pure FUD, like all that palladium and TCPA stuff. I'll tell you a few things:

1) XP had already some kind of DRM support built in the audio drivers and I haven't seen people screaming everywhere about that feature.

2) The new audio stack has its advantages, for example now it natively supports 5.1/7.1 (multi-channels) without the need to buy expensive audio cards. It also features some microsoft filters to enhance audio and also has many cool features like microphone-arrays supports (for better voice recognition) and automatic input/output detection and configuration (you plug a jack and windows recognizes what kind of device it is: nothing new but now it's built in).

3) HDMI is required in order to play what your txt describes as "premium content". If MS didn't add the HDMI (and HDCP) protection then vista wouldn't have had been able to play HDDVD/blu-ray movies ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image_Constraint_Token ).

That URL is full of fud, claiming that people will be forced to upgrade to HDMI because of microsoft but the reality is that they'll be forced to upgrade because of that stupid AACS protection of HDDVD/Blu-rays that was wanted by those damned majors. Even the standalone hd-dvd/blu-ray players will have the same limitation when HDDVDs/blu-rays with the image token constraint turned on will begin coming out.

>> In my case it solved some crashes with firefox (asking me to update),

There is no crashes in current Firefox versions which are solved by upgrading. Oh noes, i recalled: Mozilla had to release a Firefox 2.0.0.1 just to make it work with Vista...

Yeah but it still has plenty of problems that alternative browsers like Avant don't have because Firefox setup doesn't install the associations correctly.

>>media player crashes

O RLY?

Yes, RLY, because the xvid beta I was using didn't support vista (or wmp11, I don't remember).

>> video driver crashes (that made aero restart) telling me to upgrade my catalyst drivers

Again, there were no Catalyst updates. And that means they've included buggy driver into RTM.

I won't tell how ugly Vista is and how pathetic it comes perfomance-wise.

I wasn't using the rtm drivers, I was using the drivers I got from ati website that were newer. A week after ATI released newer drivers that are a lot faster and solved all of the problems. By the way the performance problems on vista are mostly caused by non-optimized drivers (vista is coming out the 31 of january so the hardware producers have still time). And by the way the RTM drivers of XP were also pretty slow because obviously who produces the drivers turns off all the optimization in order to keep the drivers stable (if the OS was crashing or not booting due to RTM drivers how could people manage to update them?).

>> Oh and XP?

I'll tell you funny story:

Recently, i had to install XP on a modern Sony Vaio.

After installing it and fully updating, it kept hanging on shutdown or standby.

After several support calls and mass hysteria i've found a fix that must solve this problem.

And guess what? It does not exist for Russian XP version (however, it was found 2 years ago), nor it was available for public.

I had to hack file in Safe Mode just to install 'hotfix' for an 5-year-mature OS which hanged on shutdown.

That same thing could have happened on 9x so I don't understand what would the sense of that story be.

By the way, on http://hotfix.xable.net you can find all the non-official updates (and you can use applications like reshacker to copy the localizations from a dll/exe to another).

The only fact that the NT kernel has memory protection makes it way more stable than 9x.
Applications can't make XP crash
Oh, and didn't you heard a recent story where one simple MessageBox caused memory corruption, privilege elevation and BSOD on 2000-XP-Vista?

(It is still not fixed)

That doesn't change the fact that an application should have been designed to exploit that messagebox. Or do you think that any application starts using messagebox with malformed strings?

BTW as long as I remember that vulnerability is just a double free() so as long as I know it could just hang the system.

>> On 9x any buggy applications can make the system crash just by writing in the wrong memory spot, because on 9x the memory is not protected.

Mac OS < X didn't have a decent memory protection too.

Even AmigaOS didn't have a decent memory protection so what? That doesn't change the fact that any OS without memory protection allows any badly-programmed application to screw the entire system up.

Edited by Francesco
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Almost fell asleep too.

I'm not flooding I'm answering to other posts.

You've got to be kidding. Stop posting in the Win98 forum if you don't like it!

1) ntfs has more security checks, has additional streams that can be used for example, like kaspersky does, to extremely speed up antivirus scanning

2) windows uses less ram to read ntfs drives because it doesn't have to keep all the structure loaded, like it happens with FAT32

What's the point since XP sucks up the whole ram anyway.

3) ntfs can use the MFT to speed up accesses to small files

4) ntfs supports compression and encryption without needing extra software

5) ntfs has a rollback system that automatically undoes interrupted operations if for example your pc powers off while the ntfs is being written

6) ntfs doesn't have to be checked each time you don't shut off your pc correctly because as I told before it can automatically rollback interrupted operations

Tihiy allready answered that.

7) ntfs can have smaller cluster sizes on small (<= 8gb) hard drives

8) ntfs has a small storage of files data in the directory to speed up directory accesses making directory accesses faster because the OS doesn't have to read all the file record chains

9) ntfs supports sparse files that allows applications like emule to avoid allocating all the space for the files at once

You said it yourself. Fat32 is faster so no point alleging speed improvements.

10) ntfs is optimized for indexing while fat32 is not

Great! Another reason not to use it.

Chkdsk is more powerful and all the extra security feature for data integrity in NTFS are used to enhance the filesystem repair. Also chkdsk needs a reboot because it needs write access to the filesystem and you don't have to reboot if you just want to scan for errors, you have to reboot if you want ALSO to fix the errors.

Yeah. Very usefull to scan but your disk BUT NOT fix it...

And as BenoitRen mentionned, it's a closed proprietary format even if unofficial programs exist to read it under DOS or Linux.

And? Even if it is closed now linux has fully working read/write drivers (and even chkdsk-like utilities to scan and fix) for NTFS so I don't see where all this problems would be.

Well, this means you can't use it easily from any other platform.

Partition magic doesn't have recovery features. There are applications like getdataback and easyrecovery that support NTFS and work perfectly to recover your data. Did your partition disappear from the partitions list (it may happen when the partition table is corrupted (and that can happen independently from the filesystem you are using))? You can still use acronis recovery expert that detects and supports NTFS perfectly.

Believe me, everything I tried was unsuccessful.

By the way, you can install XP on a FAT partition if you want. Nobody forces you to install XP on NTFS.

What do you think I do? ;p

Yes I'm ok with M$ babysitting. Oh yeah sure, all the DRM in vista... really I'm scared if the windows DRMK.sys drives polls my videocard drivers to check their integrity 30 times in second ONLY while watching an HDDVD (because in those URLs full of FUD against vista they want to give the impression that vista constantly checks for driver integrity while in reality it does that only when playing protected media)! My usb laser mouse in comparison is always polled just a few thousand times in a second but who cares...Oh by the way that DRM crap is needed by HDDVD and Blu-Ray (know anything of Protected Video Path?), you should thank the majors if all that mess is mandatory in order to reproduce that media. Hddvd/blu-ray probably won't ever come to 9x for the simple reason that newer video cards (with HDMI) don't support windows 9x or if it will come it will become useless when the majors will activate the Image Token Constraint protection (that forces the content to be played over HDMI).

What can anyone say after reading that. If you're fine with all that crap, then you really shouldn't be here.

Vista also lets you send crash data for microsoft and thanks to the application "Problems reports and Solution" you can check for solutions to your crashes (and not only system crashes, even application crashes).

Yeah, report to M$ function... Another kind of bloat will all wanna use! (I thought Vista was so stable anyway, why would you need to report your crashes...)

The only fact that the NT kernel has memory protection makes it way more stable than 9x. If OS X, BSD, linux, beos, solaris and pratically any other decent OS have memory protection while 9x doesn't there must be a reason, don't you think? Even Microsoft's own OS/2 (an amazing OS that was planned to be windows 3.11 successor) had memory protection back in 1992!

The reason why MS didn't add memory protection immediately was because of retrocompatibility (because many DOS applications used direct hardware access) however any developer can tell you that an OS without memory protection won't never be as stable as an OS with memory protection because any application could make the system crash. And as you may know bugs may exists in almost every application.

You give the answer yourself: retrocompatibility. We can use DOS program or any old games. Xp can't. Besides, everything that makes 98 blue makes XP show BOSD despites you're beloved memory protection (which is far from perfect and is the reason for crashes as well).

XP has a firewall turned on by default that just closes the ports (and because of that its cpu usage is ridicolously low). Unlike some third-party firewalls that you are forced to install on 9x if you want one, because 9x has no firewall.

You didn't get my point. It doesn't need any since ports are closed naturally!

XP is already usable out of the box: you need to disable the services only if you have a PC without much ram. Also removing stuff with nlite is mostly useless unless you have a very small HDD, because you can obtain similar results by disabling services by hand.

You don't need to keep an AV running because like you do on 98 you can just install firefox and install an antivirus (like the free AOL virusshield that is a rebranded kaspersky KAV 6) and disable realtime scan and use manual scan for the files you've downloaded.

XP is a danger out of the box. 30secs to get infected. Even yourself advise to immediatly disable most services by hand!

Using nlite is an obligation if you don't want tons of risky bloat.

And you don't need an AV on 98 more than on XP.

Really. Enough now. This is a Win98/95/ME forum and other OS fans are not welcome to flood it. Do we trash XP/2k forums? No. Do we come to Vista forums to say how bad it is? You've made your choice? Fine. We've made ours and this thread is here to explain why. Not to read your 100 posts.

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Haven't you ever noticed that if you shut down your pc without shutting win98 at the next reboot windows scans the partition for errors? That doesn't happen on XP if you use NTFS (it happens if you use FAT) because NTFS has some extra integrity checks.
Well, i have a computer at work which shows chkdsk _everytime_. Everytime it finds enormous amount of errors and fixes them - but finds a lot more next time. And with FAT32, all was ok... :blink:
Would you please explain me why would viruses add useless metadata to the files?!?!?

Well, virus can add itself into alternate file stream for notepad.exe, for example. It won't be visible in standard Windows Explorer, so it is almost no chance to remove it without using additional programs.

Guess what? It's so crappy that on many tests it blows the other AVs out of the water.
Guess what? It eats all memory (edit: &CPU), perfoms disgusting sounds :whistle: and didn't helped me even once at work, while freeware tools could.
I imagine you saving your entire work only 1 time a day, especially in the same exact moment your PC shuts off.

You sure have good imagination :rolleyes: However, that wasn't once, was randomly and was terrible. Fixed somewhere in SP1...

>> It is more than paranoid, it's pure FUD

Time will tell.

>>A week after ATI released newer drivers that are a lot faster and solved all of the problems.

Well, can't speak for newer ATI drivers. I've tried newer NVIDIA drivers that were released today and perfomance still suck: GDI/overall responsibility is still 3-10 times slower. I guess all-new driver architecture is rotten, however, time will tell.

>>Yeah but it still has plenty of problems that alternative browsers like Avant don't have because Firefox setup doesn't install the associations correctly.

Well, does Avant makes it correctly? New 'you silly negro, select program for your internets' API is not used in current programs. Maybe only via XP compatibility mode...

>>The new audio stack has its advantages, for example now it natively supports 5.1/7.1

The only things i've seen in forums about new audio stack is: jerky sound and completely unability to support more than 2.0 sound.

>>That same thing could have happened on 9x so I don't understand what would the sense of that story be.

Well, 98 is dead, and XP is in mainstream and still have critical bugs. They haven't offered a hotfix for my russian XP, and english can't be installed (even though it doesn't contain any localizable resources). And remember, all 'shutdown correctly' patches for 98 were released publicly.

>>BTW as long as I remember that vulnerability is just a double free() so as long as I know it could just hang the system.

No, it was a strcpy( asLocal.Buffer, asLocal.Buffer+4 ); and is exploitable.

>>Even AmigaOS didn't have a decent memory protection so what?

Well, your point was about 1992 OS/2. I'm speaking about 1999 Mac OS. So, 9x wasn't the last.

Edited by Tihiy
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Hi,

To all you guys who posted supporting Win98... I couldn't agree more. I'm dual-booting Win98 and WinXP and for different reasons I like both O/S!!! And will continue to use Win98 for as long as I can. There are still several things I can use Win98 for... far more successfully than XP.

However... from what I've read and seen about Vista, WinXP will be the last Microsoft O/S I use by choice.

My main reason being... I for one am sick of this 'race' to build ever bigger and faster computers, with an O/S that gets more and more bloated... in the name of progress??? My slipsteamed WinXP O/S is now to big to fit on one CDROM!

For progress in an O/S, how about a choice (for those of us who want it), the choice to decide what parts of the O/S you would like to install. I doubt there's many, if any, other companies who more or less give you a 'take it or leave it option'.

Waywyrd :)

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You've got to be kidding. Stop posting in the Win98 forum if you don't like it!

So I should give you always the last word because according to you I shouldn't be allowed to post in the 9x forum if I don't like it? Yeah it's easy to counterdict other people and just finding a lame excuses to avoid the the other person to answer, isn't it?

Why don't you stop coming out with absolute answers like "NTFS better than FAT? Nope." and irritating answers like "XP more stable? lol" instead? I was trying to make a constructive discusion but thanks to arguments like those this discussion is starting sound more and more like a flame.

1) ntfs has more security checks, has additional streams that can be used for example, like kaspersky does, to extremely speed up antivirus scanning

2) windows uses less ram to read ntfs drives because it doesn't have to keep all the structure loaded, like it happens with FAT32

What's the point since XP sucks up the whole ram anyway.

Maybe because you can have much faster AV scans because the AV avoids rescanning files it has already scanned plenty of times thanks to checksums stored in additional streams?

Oh by the way, trying to change argument? If you don't like XP ram usage there's still 2k (and NT for very old PCs).

7) ntfs can have smaller cluster sizes on small (<= 8gb) hard drives

8) ntfs has a small storage of files data in the directory to speed up directory accesses making directory accesses faster because the OS doesn't have to read all the file record chains

9) ntfs supports sparse files that allows applications like emule to avoid allocating all the space for the files at once

You said it yourself. Fat32 is faster so no point alleging speed improvements.

I said that Fat32 is faster on some file operations, not on all the operations.

10) ntfs is optimized for indexing while fat32 is not

Great! Another reason not to use it.

Oh sure, have fun with slow non-indexed searchs.

Chkdsk is more powerful and all the extra security feature for data integrity in NTFS are used to enhance the filesystem repair. Also chkdsk needs a reboot because it needs write access to the filesystem and you don't have to reboot if you just want to scan for errors, you have to reboot if you want ALSO to fix the errors.

Yeah. Very usefull to scan but your disk BUT NOT fix it...

Yeah nobody can manage to reboot their system to fix the filesystem (and by the way, with NTFS corruption appears a lot less often than with FAT32 when you shut down properly thanks to the rollback features I talked about before)... reboot takes too much time!

Well, this means you can't use it easily from any other platform.

Maybe if you plan using other platforms maybe you should think about keeping your data stored in a shared partition? On XP you can mount a fat/ntfs partition as a folder if you have problems organizing your stuff in other partitions.

Believe me, everything I tried was unsuccessful.

EasyRecovery can find erased files, rebuilding all the correct directory tree by reconstructing the partition from both the structure data and journal and has also filesystem-independent raw recovery so I really doubt that you tried it because with it you can recover almost everything even if the partition structure and journal is completely destroyed (for example you formatted before recovering).

>> By the way, you can install XP on a FAT partition if you want. Nobody forces you to install XP on NTFS.

What do you think I do? ;p

Maybe this explains why after XP crashes you have to reinstall: filesystem without journal, rollbacks and additional integrity checks?

What can anyone say after reading that. If you're fine with all that crap, then you really shouldn't be here.

I said that it's mandatory for hd-dvd and blu-ray support and that all that crap is activated only when viewing hddvd/blu-ray so I don't see why should I complain for that: would you prefer a windows with hd-dvd and blu-ray support or one without?

By the way, secure audio path (the audio protection included in XP) was also included in windows ME but as long as I know nobody ever complained. Strangely now that vista included a similar protection for videos everybody started screaming with no reasons: this protections are enabled only when viewing hd-dvd or blu-ray, they're turned off when you're not viewing them so I don't see where all the problems are.

Yeah, report to M$ function... Another kind of bloat will all wanna use! (I thought Vista was so stable anyway, why would you need to report your crashes...)

Because not all the drivers are actually stable, the release is the 31 january and the hardware producers are still releasing beta drivers. Oh, by the way, error reporting it's a service that was present also on XP that can be easily disabled.

You give the answer yourself: retrocompatibility. We can use DOS program or any old games. Xp can't. Besides, everything that makes 98 blue makes XP show BOSD despites you're beloved memory protection (which is far from perfect and is the reason for crashes as well).

You can use dos emulators for dos programs and you can use a dos emulators, sound emulators or simply keep a separate dos partition for dos games. DOSbox probably now runs more games than the ones that you can actually run from windows 9x (unless you reboot to dos mode).

It's simply not true that everything that makes 98 crash makes also XP crash, normal applications can't make XP crash, only buggy drivers or faulty hardware can. If you watch the XP forum you can see that people make entire posts about their crashes: in fact on XP the crashes are so rare that people ask for help to find out the driver or the piece of hardware causing the problem.

You didn't get my point. It doesn't need any since ports are closed naturally!

Naturally??!?! Windows 98 by default has the following ports open: 137, 138, 139. I've just checked on a clean win98 install on a virtual machine right now. Want a screenshot of the "NETSTAT /NA"?

XP is a danger out of the box. 30secs to get infected. Even yourself advise to immediatly disable most services by hand!

Using nlite is an obligation if you don't want tons of risky bloat.

And you don't need an AV on 98 more than on XP.

Risky bloat? Since XP SP2 enables by default the firewall there have been 0 remotely exploited bugs. Also on win98 there has been a bug where people could access your shares from remote without even having to know your password ( http://www.securityfriday.com/Topics/share_passwd.html ) so pratically everybody who had a network with shared files could get infected. Not even win9x so was immune from remotely-exploitable exploits.

Really. Enough now. This is a Win98/95/ME forum and other OS fans are not welcome to flood it. Do we trash XP/2k forums? No. Do we come to Vista forums to say how bad it is? You've made your choice? Fine. We've made ours and this thread is here to explain why. Not to read your 100 posts.

I'm not flooding it's you guys that answer me all together and you pretend me not to answer saying that I'm in the wrong forum or that i'm flooding. Why don't you put a "Windows 2K/XP users not allowed" as a sticky post in this forum then?

I have tried to close the question but you guys continuosly come repeating the same arguments plenty of times, especially because you don't read the precedent posts and just come here answering to the latest ones.

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>> Haven't you ever noticed that if you shut down your pc without shutting win98 at the next reboot windows scans the partition for errors? That doesn't happen on XP if you use NTFS (it happens if you use FAT) because NTFS has some extra integrity checks.

Well, i have a computer at work which shows chkdsk _everytime_. Everytime it finds enormous amount of errors and fixes them - but finds a lot more next time. And with FAT32, all was ok... :blink:

FAT32 is scanned only if windows is not shut down correctly while NTFS instead is scanned when the ntfs driver in windows finds errors in the filesystem integrity so even a byte written in the wrong place could make the NTFS scan trigger.

That problem is probably caused by a bad ide or chipset driver or any driver that prevents windows from shutting down correctly. It is still a single case however, I haven't seen other XPs doing that without reason.

Would you please explain me why would viruses add useless metadata to the files?!?!?

Well, virus can add itself into alternate file stream for notepad.exe, for example. It won't be visible in standard Windows Explorer, so it is almost no chance to remove it without using additional programs.

But then the virus would still need a launcher that extracts the data and runs it and that launcher would still be detected by the AV because it would be a part of the virus.

Guess what? It's so crappy that on many tests it blows the other AVs out of the water.

Guess what? It eats all memory (edit: &CPU), perfoms disgusting sounds :whistle: and didn't helped me even once at work, while freeware tools could.

It may be slow and that piggy sound isn't much great however but it has the best virus detection around. If you use NTFS and use the "scan new and changed files only" feature it scans a lot faster than other AVs because it just checks if the file has been altered or not by using the additional ntfs streams. And also thanks to AOL there's a free rebranded version of KAV called Active Virus Shield.

I imagine you saving your entire work only 1 time a day, especially in the same exact moment your PC shuts off.

You sure have good imagination :rolleyes: However, that wasn't once, was randomly and was terrible. Fixed somewhere in SP1...

A random rollback? Rollbacks are done only at startup (when the NTFS is mounted) and only on the last interrupted file operation so I don't think that the rollback feature could be the responsible. In order to have your data rollbacked the system would have to crash in the exact moment you save your work because only the last unfinished operation is canceled.

>> It is more than paranoid, it's pure FUD

Time will tell.

Vista is already available so people can already tell if this performance hit caused by DRM is there or not. I haven't seen any noticeable performance loss especially with the latest drivers in fact now i'm using vista as my main OS without problems.

>>A week after ATI released newer drivers that are a lot faster and solved all of the problems.

Well, can't speak for newer ATI drivers. I've tried newer NVIDIA drivers that were released today and perfomance still suck: GDI/overall responsibility is still 3-10 times slower. I guess all-new driver architecture is rotten, however, time will tell.

Nvidia drivers for vista still have plenty of problems and are estremely slow also the last ones that were released today have a "7 december" creation date so they're still pretty old, ATI drivers instead are a lot more mature. In fact most vista benchmarks were made on PCs running ATI videocards.

>>Yeah but it still has plenty of problems that alternative browsers like Avant don't have because Firefox setup doesn't install the associations correctly.

Well, does Avant makes it correctly? New 'you silly negro, select program for your internets' API is not used in current programs. Maybe only via XP compatibility mode...

They had plenty of times to implement vista support. Firefox team was also invited to redmond to get better support on vista ( http://news.com.com/2100-1032_3-6109455.html ) so it looks like they didn't went there at all :P

>>The new audio stack has its advantages, for example now it natively supports 5.1/7.1

The only things i've seen in forums about new audio stack is: jerky sound and completely unability to support more than 2.0 sound.

Probably it's because of the drivers, the realtek integrated audio card I'm actually using works perfectly with the RTM. Also the SiS integrated audio I have on another PC works fine too (and it uses the rtm drivers).

>>That same thing could have happened on 9x so I don't understand what would the sense of that story be.

Well, 98 is dead, and XP is in mainstream and still have critical bugs. They haven't offered a hotfix for my russian XP, and english can't be installed (even though it doesn't contain any localizable resources). And remember, all 'shutdown correctly' patches for 98 were released publicly.

Are the dll/exe of the patch localized? If it's language neutral and doesn't contain any localized text string inside probably you can just copy the files by hand. BTW what's the patch number?

>>BTW as long as I remember that vulnerability is just a double free() so as long as I know it could just hang the system.

No, it was a strcpy( asLocal.Buffer, asLocal.Buffer+4 ); and is exploitable.

According to http://www.determina.com/security.research...-harderror.html it's an exploitable double-free bug. I really don't understand how can they exploit a double-free bug, it's very strange.

>>Even AmigaOS didn't have a decent memory protection so what?

Well, your point was about 1992 OS/2. I'm speaking about 1999 Mac OS. So, 9x wasn't the last.

Well the first AmigaOS with (limited) memory protection came out just a few days ago (26 december) so even MacOS isn't the last. But however that doesn't change the fact that since most of the OSes have implemented that feature it means that it's very important for the OS stability.

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I guess this would be a good point to close this thread. The original item of it was to show reasons why Windows 9x should still be used even its support was stopped. But in the meantime this is a discussion war in comparing the advantages and disadvantages of Win 9x and XP. And this WASN'T the original content.

In my opinion comparing 9x with XP is like comparing apples with pears. Both operating systems were developed at different times with different abilities. Windows 9x was developed at a time were W2k wasn't yet available and primarily meant as a "consumer" os. And Windows NT (4.0) was not convenient for "multimedia" purposes or was some sort of limited. Windows XP was developed to have ONE platform for two operating systems (Home and Professional). So MS must support only one platform, but offers two versions. And the stability of the NT kernel serves the home as well as the professional user. I agree that the w2k and xp os'es are ressource hogs, but that's it, and I haven't heard anybody complaining yet, that developing faster hardware would be nonsens.

I am a friend of both systems. My measurement machines at work are driven by Win 9x as the hardware (GPIB, bus cards,...) can be easier handeld with it. But Windows XP cannot be bluescreened because of just one task.

You can see, both systems have their right for their appearance. And one thing must be clearly mentioned: Even the software development of the W9x scheme is coming to an end. Firefox 3 doesn't support it any longer, and Thunderbird will probably do the same within the near future. There are several beautyful programs available at sourceforge (like clamwin, winpooch, firewalls,...), but all of them are primarily meant for w2k and above. For example I haven't found any OPEN SOURCE tool for realtime protection on W9x systems, but enough for w2k and above. This is very sad, but true. And the lack of new software is the death for an os.

These are my thoughts to Win9x. It is good for older machines and will do its job for another two or three years. Actual software is (still) available, drivers are becoming a little problem now. But there is one thing I am sure for now: I will never use Vista because of its built in "protection" against the user. I don't know why to use a os which controls my machine in that way, that I am only the owner, no longer the boss of it. It is some kind of a communistic os as I am only allowed to use hardware, software and media which is "officially" recognized and approved my MS$ and its related industry (Didn't we have that already?).

This brings me to linux for example opensuse and ubuntu. WXP is supported until 2009, and I am working in parallel with linux. And then, somewhere in 2008, I will make the final move...Good bye windows.

Regards

Tamiga

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