I'll be more polite here since you seem sincere.
Yes, Win98se does lock up and crash more
often than 2k/XP, but not exactly a hell of a lot
more if set up properly. I have about 10 PC's I use
a lot for different purposes -- some XP Pros, a
Linux (Ubuntu) box, an XP home, a couple of 2K's,
and a few 98SE's.
My primary PC is the slowest of the bunch -- a
433 Mhz eMachine with a Celeron cpu and 128Mb
of memory, but running Win98SE. I use Firefox for
the Web, Thunderbird for email, F-Prot for my
antivirus, and Atlantis for my word processor (you
want to see what happens when you write efficient
code? Go here to download the trial version of
Atlantis:
http://www.atlantiswordprocessor.com)
I also have a pile of music and graphic-related
programs. All work very smoothly and when I
download and test a new application that ends
up screwing up the system, it's trivial to get
thing back to where they were. I keep extra
copies of my *.dat and ini files, and tracking
down and removing all pieces of junk software
is likewise trivial. And there are few things that
a reboot can't cure. The XP's, though, are a
different matter. They can get awfully fussy
and cantankerous with apps. I got one that
decided it wasn't going to let Irfanview be able
to resize images, and because I have no
patience, I'm ALWAYS getting "unresponsive
program" messages and requests to send
error reports to Microsoft. The XP Pros I
stripped down and cleaned up, and they
just aren't responsive enough for me to
want to use any of them as my primaries.
Also recently, I friend dropped off her mom's
PC, a 2 yr old Dell with WinXp, because the
modem stopped working. I spent an entire
afternoon cleaning off spyware and worms,
including one Rootkit. I had to use several
programs and do my own manual detective
work before I got every last bug off. I used
a battery of programs, including Ad-Aware,
Spybot S&D, Microsoft AntiSpyware, Ewido
and HijackThis on the spyware side, and
AVG, F-Prot, and a "special" version of
Kaspersky on the antivirus side before I
finally caught everything. No single product
caught everything. And while the modem
started working again and the PC seemed
quicker and seemingly bug-free, I would
be very antsy using that PC in my house
on my network without a full wipe and
reinstall. Cleaning up Win98se under
similar circumstances would have been
trivial by comparison: for less places to
hide and you can always do a low-level
scan at the DOS level.
Another recent example was when I set
up a wireless network for someone with
two PC's: one was a 10 month old HP
with an Athlon processor, the other was
an old discarded 500Mhz P3 Dell I had
rehabbed for them with Win98se. I first
wanted to program the router with a
WEP key but the HP wouldn't let me.
It was a Hawking router that apparently
used ActiveX to for some stuff so I had
to use IE. The HP IE wouldn't work. No
error messages -- it just wouldn't work:
a popup window would come up for the
WEP key and nothing would save. I
knew better than to screw with IE so
I simply plugged in the old Dell, with IE
5.01 I believe, and that set the router
up with no problems. I then installed the
wireless cards, both identical Hawkings,
in the two PC's, following the instructions
about installing the software first before
putting the card in. The old Dell -- no
problem. Done. The HP -- some strange
messages initially, but apparently that
worked as well, and so also done. Or so
I thought. The HP worked fine for a few
hours and it just stopped. I came back
and found that the wireless card became
marked as "Disabled" and nothing would
reenable it. Seeing this behavior before,
I completely removed the software that
came with the card, hooked up the HP
to the router with a cable, uninstalled the
card via the device manager and rebooted
the system. Xp detected the card but
couldn't identify it and it asked for a
software disk. I had it instead search
online for a driver and it found one --
a generic-sounding 8.11G, but it worked.
This allowed me to use Xp's native wireless
management and apparently that did the
trick.
But this is the sort of crap I called up on
all the friggin time by people I know who
try to do anything at all with their new Xp
system. There seems to always be some
sort of gotcha in doing the most mundane
tasks. And auto-installing those critical
updates has been causing increasing
problems for some people I know who use
highly specialized software.
This is NOT how "improved" software is
suppose to behave like. Blame other
vendors like Hawking all you want, but
they pretty just follow what Microsoft tells
them to do. And this does nothing to
change how things tend to me simpler
and easier in general with the older
Windows versions.
So....
-BC
