It’s almost like some sort of inflation. Computers get faster but the resource needs of OSes and applications increase at almost the same rate. I used W98 from 2000 to January of this year, and the switch to Xp, and even to Ubuntu (on a newer computer), left me with this feeling that programming was getting sloppy and inefficient because the performance increase should have been astonishing and it was only “pretty good”. Although I did notice that programs I’d used in W98 worked very fast on my new Xp machine and with Ubuntu (with wine -dual boot).

I’ve heard that some gamers prefer W98 because of it’s low resource use and because it allow games to access hardware at a very low level which Xp doesn’t. Of course this leads to total system crashes instead of just single program crashes.

System crashes… wasn’t that the hallmark of W98?

Hi Tim,
“System crashes… wasn’t that the hallmark of W98?”
Yeap - that was it. Lockups that froze the system solid.
Like I said, I wasn’t advocating going back to 98.
Ron

Despite what others say, I had nothing but good experiences on 98 and Me, except for 3 things. I had to reboot daily, as it would ‘lose’ the resources to run programs. This was memory leakage, which really did not get fixed completely EVER. It was substantially improved in XP after SP2. Also, the ability to store large amounts of stuff, with very large hard drives [>128GB] made me want to switch to XP. Last, whenever I would move and/or rename a lot of files the ‘explorer’ would always crash.
The first 2 I could live with today, the third makes a move back impossible.

I do know what you mean about the speed however. I last used Me on a 900MHz Athlon with 512MB PC2100 DDR, and it was very quick. Quite possibly faster in most things than what I use today.

I think that if programs were meant to last, and coded efficiently, they would be much faster, take up less memory, and be more reliable. Just look at what Lotus 1-2-3 2.01 [DOS] used to do, with so little physical memory, and such a small amount of hard disk space [actually some people ran it from floppies]. It was coded in ASM, and if that was done with Vista, perhaps we could run it on a 1GHz P III with 768MB of RAM!

Hi Marc,
Thanks for the comments. Can you imagine what the next version of Windows will need? Dual Quad cores with 8G of RAM. LOL
Ron

Hi,

While you are at it, go to the 98 lite site and play with that software. I ran the lite version of 98 for years and even took out the internet explorer. I used Beonex browser as my only internet browser. The system was very stable and quick as lightning. Just a thought and you might have another article on 98 and the old days.

98 lite is a sports car version of Windows 98.

Kyle

Hi Kyle,
Actually I took off 98 and installed Kubuntu on the machines. Works perfectly.
Ron

Good,

I think you will like it! I have been using it now exclusive for weeks. I am still struggling with printer problems but everything else is perfect. I went to another machine and played with XP, I was surprised at how slow XP felt. Just seconds of time but they add up. You can also make Ubuntu super secure. It has a firewall (called Firestarter) to install if you want and Avast AV works nice with it. All in all I will not be returning to Xp. Right now the one machine XP is on, has a printer attached and that is all its used for. My printer by Lexmark now has drivers being developed by the company. Won’t be long and that last cord will be cut. Yippy!

Kyle

Hi Kyle,
Glad to hear that your are enjoying the switch over to Linux.
Ron

Ron, this would be a good time to give PCLinuxOS a spin. I expect you’d like it as well or better than Kubuntu. I was thinking of trying it on my 800 MHz Duron with 512 MB of RAM but Debian Etch with KDE is so nice on it I’ve decided to stay with it indefinitely. I’ve been saying for weeks that it’s more user friendly than Win98SE and more powerful too. Firefox (renamed IceWeasel in Debian) seems slow on it compared to Firefox on my 1.8 GHz Win2K system (also with 512 MB of RAM) but it boots up much faster than my Win2K box and I keep wondering how Etch will work on the 1.8 GHz box.

Hello eldergeek,
Thanks for the suggestion. I have used PCLinuxOS before and always highly recommend it as well.
Regards, Ron

always use a better hardware with a weak software.

so to enjoy your computer.

for example win98+a computer from 2005

winxp+computer from 2007.