Yes indeed. Mostly Dells, Toshibas, Microns, & Gateways. Only a few
compaqs & a few other turds.
The Gateways were very good systems. High-end boards,
high-end cases, very easy to set up and run (except for
their annoying proprietary form-factor power suppplies,
still standard ATX electrically though). EXCEPT, the
hardware of that era, while good mainstream stuff, had
horrific drivers. Parts like Ensoniq sound cards and nVidia
Riva 128 sound card's drivers just weren't quite right for
another year or two after the arrival of Win98.
Therein lies a common theme I hear from people who claim
WinXp is so great... They're ignoring that it wasn't just
the OS that's newer most often, but the drivers and apps
too. I've recycled/reused Intel TX/BX boards that came out
of the Gateway systems with quite good results, Win98 or
Win2k, but newer drivers and apps.
Dells were a PITA though, didn't deal with that many
Toshibas or Microns. Compaq being crap is just a given,
didn't have a whole lot to do with any particular era!
No OS is really hard to set up if you know how. But there's setting
up and setting up. & when there are too many gotchas, too many
reboots, and lousey control of installations that are allowed to take
a shit on the OS and virtually useless SFC, I'd argue these are too
many hoops to jump through & too many things to handhold on a
_painfully_slow_ computer
True but that's not a Win98 flaw per se, just the software
of the era. Having had tons of repaired and redeployed
Win98 boxes come through here, I can state that Win98 is
really not bad given newer drivers (sometimes meaning newer
hardware for components whose drivers never became stable
enough) and apps.
I don't use SFC and don't feel anyone needs it.
Painfully slow though?
For everyday uses like surfing, email, etc, a Win98 box can
be faster than a more modern alternative. Take one of those
BX boards in a Gateway, throw a slocket plus P3 1GHz into it
and a semi-modern HDD and it's snappier than a brand new
high-end Dell. Two reasons for that, one is the crap the
OEMs load onto a box, but the other the horrific job MS has
done at producing bloatware.
Yes BX was excellent but not everything with 98 was a BX with solid
peripherals.
True, but I still point back to add-on cards' drivers and
apps. If I randomly picked a WIn98 era board off a pile of
boards here (and was lucky enough that it posted before I
became apathetic about it), I'm pretty confident it would be
up and running WIn98 fine within 45 minutes, including the
time to hunt down drivers... but then I never use anything
but newer drivers when setting up an OS- yet another thing I
hate about WinXP, that it starts assigning hardware IDs and
default drivers when the last thing anyone should want is
the old defeatured drivers MS graces us with.
I have a laptop that uses BX that I still use around the house every
day for basic stuff on the web or through terminal services. It's
stable as long as I run the fan. constantly If I let the BIOS control
the fan it doesn't kick in until the cpu hits 70C and turns off when
cooled to 65C. The computer becomes unstable when in the mid 50's.
BX is no guarantee of anything. OEM's can botch it nice. & Yes the
machine runs XP fine with my hack & NT's HLT commands & some RAM.
You may've had something set up wrong, Win98 does do HLT
cooling. In fact I can't remember the last box win98 didn't
do HLT cooling properly on except a hacked-together Tualatin
Celery on a generic pin-adapter sloket in a BX board. Same
board did HLT fine with a Coppermine in it.
Can and should fix/setup/maintain are unrelated with computers because
time=money. That's not just for business. How much time should I
spend on a home PC? I'd rather go out to a party, get laid, or study
for a new certification then muck about with an old hand-me-down.
I don't find it very time-consuming or expensive.
If anything setting up old gear is extremely quick for me
because I archived all the drivers, docs, etc (not every
driver/etc ever made but with dozens of Gigs of them,
sometimes it seems like it).
Main thing I do is ignore the OEM support crap and just use
the chipset drivers per the respective part. Works fine for
me... and Win98 is so easy to plug-n-play migrate that I can
clone an installation all set up, plug-n-play it for the
different parts, all finished in less than an hour, even
less if the box already had a NIC in it.
Granted many things seem easier in retrospect, but part of
the ease i can also attribute to trying to avoid low-end
junk boards. I found those harder to work with than OEM
boxes, partially because it seemed common that bios weren't
realeased mature enough nor often enough to get as many bugs
fixed.
Hmm lets see, I saved $150 dollars versus got promoted, hired by a
better company, found a great investment, or found love. What's a
better deal exactly?
The deal is that many uses don't need anything faster. If
you need a box and the parts are right there, might as well
use them. It's your call if you want to build a box or
persue other interests instead, and not exactly appicable to
the discussion. Newer gear would take longer to
order/receive/assemble, which is fine if the role of the box
benefits from it.
Otherwise there's no point in throwing away useful parts
just because they weren't mature when new- as most parts
_aren't_ mature when new, yet another reason to choose parts
that have had a very drivers/bios-updates/whatever. Win98
is another matter though, either it fits the need or
doesn't, I can't really recommend it for a primary-use
system these days unless someone "needs" hardware that has
no newer OS driver.
and how many computers is their stuff on exactly?
Too many?
Enough that they don't have a justification for the OS
price, and the resultant monopoly keeps that price
artificially higher than it would otherwise be.
Sure it is - with good computing practices - like a lot of things
Same could be said about Win98, or take your pick of OS.
I predict XP will be looked back upon as the WinME of the NT
family, a resource hog that added little of use over Win2K
save for more app compatibility, an issue that has already
changed drastically as anything semi-modern runs on either
OS.
unless you tell it not to
True, and I do prefer manually doing it, but once you strip
away several of these features, you've stripped away a lot
of the reasons why less experienced users prefer it.
win98 is far more temperamental to change.
..
You're 100% wrong there, I can plug and play from any one
Win98 box to any other platform capable of running it at
all. 100% success at it. WinXP isn't even remotely close,
and never will be.
Either are fine if
installed on decent equipment with only a few apps on it and left
static. But that's not how most use these things or what the other
poster seems to want from his Win98 word processor & web browser.
You may still be thinking of old apps when you think of
Win98. It doesn't have any problems with gigs of apps so
long as you don't install really old buggy apps. I don't
mean multitasking them though, clearly Win98's resource
limits make it quite poor relative to 2K or XP in this
regard.
I still disagree that it take more time, if anything I think
it's quicker.
You really are deluded if you think that just because YOU
would do that, that this self-projection onto others is
valid.
I've often been in a position to "have others by the nuts"
and didn't take advantage of that. I feel that once Billy
G. & Co. have a few million they're not being anything other
than greedy. They have no respect from me for further
personal profits and instead I see their attitude as
offensive in how they choose to maintain a monopoly which
then forces most users to put up with easily preventable,
serious security flaws.
Consider the typical PC owner, who isn't particlarly
computer inclined, has never made a dime in the industry.
Why should they have a default email client that allow virus
infection by opening an email? MS shows complete disregard
for the welfare of it's customers. Running a business in
this way may be necessary for some (businesses) but not for
MS, they have not any worries about being in business in 10
years time unless it's their monopolistic tendencies that do
them in.
Even if I didn't want to obligations to investors would demand it & I
would be replaced by someone who was more of a shark.
Overgeneralizing about "businesses" doesn't do anything to
further an arguement about Microsoft.
You've really seen nothing since windows 98, have you?
I didn't have the problems setting up or running the past
OS. I can't help it if you did, but that only makes the
newer ones even MORE desirable for you.
I also fail to see where you come up with that comment, as
it doesn't even appear that you have much experience with
any MS OS... you don't even realize how much harder it is to
PNP XP to a new box.
Take a look at
their current platforms, esp servers, and how they are handling
security & patching. It's light-years from their horrible behaviour
in the 90's and before.
That's funny. Millions of businesses run older versions of
WIndows Server with no problems. The worst possible thing
they could do is move to a NEWER version of WIndows server.
Frankly though, I'm still amazed that so many are deluded
into thinking a server should run windows at all unless it
MUST, literally.
M$ is a market leader. As such they serve to standardize existing
technologies.
No, quite wrong.
Standards typically exist ahead of MS adoption and often MS
tries to go proprietary. Open your web browser and hit a
few sites reandomly for a reminder of this. Heh, do it with
Sun Java though since that is one area where MS finally
lost.
users benefit even if we don't like the idea of
monopolies.
Nope, completely wrong.
Users benefit from a common platform but to have that
platform maintained in the matter MS does it, is worse than
had something like Unix, had the board development support
focused on it rather than Windows. What Windows did is
remove user's chance for a secure OS without all kinds of
extra crap to get there.
Sorry but it's how things have been playing out. Too
much competition means consumers are left with their thumbs in their
mouth, scared & confused by conflicting, incompatible choices, and
developers fighting with each other and reluctant to invest too much
in a particular technology. Computing needs leadership, even if M$
isn't everybody's first choice for that role.
Not leadership, only a common platform.
Things like "plug n play" were inevitable technologies.
Firewire, USB, a Windowed GUI, all things that would've come
into being with or without MS. MS is a leader not because
we needed them to be, merely because they were the only OS
that dominated and they supported the technlogy they had
nothing to do with developing.
those older versions were so bad I don't know they're worth fixing.
I mean WinXP too.
I completely disagree with the "how bad" part about Win98.
Given new drivers and apps it's not at all unlikely that
WinXP will throw up an error or two before Win98 will.
WInXP itself won't crash, and for many people that's VERY
important. For others it isn't so important, as the app
they were running is what crashed and (sorta the whole point
of having the computer on in the first place).
I'm happy to see them gone. How about another idea: If you bought
Win 3x or 9x and maybe NT you should be entitled to a free upgrade to
2k or XP where M$ actually made somewhat of an attempt to make a half
decent product.
We aren't on the same page here.
Security flaws are the primary problem, and things like
drive corruption for lack of initial 48 bit LBA support-
glaring bugs due to the MS philosophy about how to handle
(and place value upon) user data.
WinXP should'e been recalled too IMO.
That make more sense to me then breaking the average
Joe's balls with activation & money grubbing. A little payback is in
order for those of us who tried to endure their shitty SW of the last
decade or more.
Free upgrades seem a good idea, but I can see an arguement
for not giving the user the new features and support that
the OS they paid for didn't provide. Granted sometimes it
would've been possible to add support with drivers or
relatively simple patches, but I wouldn't fault MS for not
giving free WinXP to 98 users IF MS chose to patch the WIn98
flaws instead. Unfortuneately just giving users WinXP
doesn't resolve the issues.
You're right M$ is far from perfect. I don't mean to defend them but
there aren't a lot of reputable souls in business or in the technology
business. After 3 or 5 years everybody tends to say enough is enough
- the new technology is so much better that old stuff isn't worth the
time.
I can't help but think you're doing something horribly wrong
if it takes more time. Then again, I still place blame on
drivers and apps... try setting up Win98 using mainstream
well-developed hardware/drivers and it's not at all
difficult to do... as I've proven time and time again doing
so.
