In what way is 2k better than '98?
Don't give me touchy-feely stuff like it's "more stable".
Give me some hard specs. I'll start by saying that yes, 2K can handle
files larger than 4gb, and 98 can't. You can run with more ram in 2K,
while 98 hits a wall when ram reaches 512 or 768 mb. What else?
Hard specs aren't necessarily where it's at. Hard experiences are far
more to the point in making the OS comparison.
I purchased two new low end machines over a year ago which both have
AMD Duron 1.6 ghz cpus and 256 meg RAM. I had a choice of installing
either Win 2K Pro or Win 98 SE on these machines, and I tried both.
For starters, installation of 'SE was a royal PITA compared to Win 2K
Pro. I really wanted to use SE but its ignorance of hardware and
drivers ... and its "finikyness" and stange behaviours during
installation were a real turnoff. It didn't cooperate well with the
motherboard driver installs. But installs of Win 2K Pro went
like a breeze. Call it "touchy-feely" if you like but Win 98 SE seemed
like junk compared to 2K Pro.
Since I had purchased a LinSys wireless router, it was a requirement
that at least one of my machines work ok with the adapter card. In
spite of what it says on the box, the adapter card does not work
correctly on Win 98 or on Win ME (which my wife uses). So I was
forced right there to use Win 2K and have the adapter card in that
machine while the modem and router reside at my wife's Win ME
machine loacation. Again, another hardware/driver incompatibilty
problem with SE .... which you can blame on LinkSys if you wish, but
the fact is that its just another case of SE being a royal PITA when
it comes to compatibilities, whereas Win 2K Pro works perfectly
without any glitches and weird behaviours.
A downside of Win 2K is the large and complex updating to sp4
and all the hotfixes, which even with wideband is a tedious
procedure. It's also more complex in other ways, and it took quite
some time for me to get familiar with it and disable
unwanted/unnecessary services, etc. Once you get such a installation
the way you want it, more or less, you definitely want to clone it to
a backup physical drive.
But I feel all the work has been well worth it, and I don't look
back on the relative simplicity of Win 98 with any warm fuzzzies
any more. It's a antiquated piece of junk now to me and I want
nothing to do with it
I do think it would be nice if there was
a simpler OS available for "mom and poppers" which has been
modernized and which plays well with more up to date hardware.
That's why I have an eye on OS such as Ubuntu. It _almost_
installed ok on one of my low end machines ... and installation
is a breeze.
Art
http://home.epix.net/~artnpeg