OT: Win98se/ME support lifetime extended by Microsoft

[Falkentyne]

http://news.zdnet.co.uk/0,39020330,39119028,00.htm

now that it's officially extended, hopefully there's good excuse for
games (even LO-MAC in it's current patch state...still a bit iffy) to
keep supporting it.

I wonder what this means for drivers. (Come on, Nvidia, get your 98/me
driver support back up to par...)
Seems like over the last 6 months only, a bunch of software appeared
that was 2k/xp only...

And is MS ever going to fix that REDICULOUS scrollbar IE bug that
cropped into the last IE update last October (even affects XP, as far
as I know....)

Flame away....


<Gibs> When you kill 6 people in Unreal Tournament
it is "MonsterKill", In Quake3 it is "Excellent",
in Counter-Strike it is "Kicked by console"

 

[James]

http://news.zdnet.co.uk/0,39020330,39119028,00.htm

Wow, talk about a major shock!

 

[Ian Firth]

now that it's officially extended, hopefully there's good excuse for
games (even LO-MAC in it's current patch state...still a bit iffy) to
keep supporting it.

Go buy a calendar.

 

[Falkentyne]

Go buy a calendar.

Huh? Why? I already have a calender, thank you very much!
You sound like one of those teenagers who play Battlefield:1942...


<Gibs> When you kill 6 people in Unreal Tournament
it is "MonsterKill", In Quake3 it is "Excellent",
in Counter-Strike it is "Kicked by console"

 

[Darthy]

http://news.zdnet.co.uk/0,39020330,39119028,00.htm

now that it's officially extended, hopefully there's good excuse for
games (even LO-MAC in it's current patch state...still a bit iffy) to
keep supporting it.

I wonder what this means for drivers. (Come on, Nvidia, get your 98/me
driver support back up to par...)
Seems like over the last 6 months only, a bunch of software appeared
that was 2k/xp only...

Er... dont count on it. In the past 12 months, driver support and
patches have gone down hill big time. The only support is that M$
will handle tech calls (Paid by the customer) and important security
patches... nothing more.

No new hardware supports Windows9x correctly anymore because of
drivers.

Also, many of these "drivers" cause problems as they get sloppy or
possibly have problems built-into them (more than usual) which makes
XP more attractive.

Remember - DOS is still used all over the world to handle jobs that
dont require GUI (such as automatiation at factories) - since its
running ONLY 1 program, system failure is very unlikly.

I've compared Win98 to WinXP for modern hardware, unlike 2 years ago -
things have changed and CPU/system performance is 20% faster over
Win98... but for older systems, Win98 would be better to use.

And is MS ever going to fix that REDICULOUS scrollbar IE bug that
cropped into the last IE update last October (even affects XP, as far
as I know....)

Oh... you mean when you try to scroll back up, and it SCROLLS back
down the page for you? Yeah, I've seen that lately.

<Gibs> When you kill 6 people in Unreal Tournament
it is "MonsterKill", In Quake3 it is "Excellent",
in Counter-Strike it is "Kicked by console"

In UT2003, it's now "HOOOOLY SHIIITTT-IT-IT-it-it!!"

 

[Wblane]

I'm with you on this one. 98SE works fine for me, but I'm mainly a gamer. I'm
really reluctant to go to XP Professional just because I don't want to deal
w/the fun-filled nightmare of sorting out whatever features (as in it's not a
bug, it's a feature) XP has.

I wonder what this means for drivers. (Come on, Nvidia, get your 98/me
driver support back up to par...)
Seems like over the last 6 months only, a bunch of software appeared
that was 2k/xp only...

-Bill (remove "botizer" to reply via email)

 

[Flow]

Pfff, you all seem to forget XP is based on previous windows versions.
So you would be surprised how many today's hardware will install correct on
win98.
Not to mention the users who are still on older windows versions for several
reasons.
WindowsXP is certainly not the revolutionairy os that is promised for so
long.
In fact it runs not any better then a fine tuned win98 system.
B.t.w. i got all windows versions.
Im still waiting for that better os to arrive. :s

 

[Rudolph McCrack]

Pfff, you all seem to forget XP is based on previous windows versions.

And you seem to forget that XP is based on the NT OS and not the
Dos/Win3.1 OS as Win98 is. XP is *much* better than Win9x in the
stability area.

 

[Bill Seurer]

XP is *much* better than Win9x in the
stability area.

Yeah, yeah. Except when it isn't. I have systems with everything from
'98 to XP and the only ones that are LESS stable are the ME ones. They
didn't work well from the get go. '98, 2000, and XP system all tend to
become less stable over time and eventually you need to reinstall
everything (and hope).

 

[J. Clarke]

Pfff, you all seem to forget XP is based on previous windows versions.

Yeah. On 2000, which is based on NT, which is very loosely based on OS/2
and VMS.

So you would be surprised how many today's hardware will install correct
on win98.

Which has zip all to do with XP. XP drivers don't work with 98, 98 drivers
don't work with XP.

Not to mention the users who are still on older windows versions for
several reasons.
WindowsXP is certainly not the revolutionairy os that is promised for so
long.

Promised by who? XP was the promised union of the 9X and NT branches of
Windows. Nobody promised anything "revolutionary".

In fact it runs not any better then a fine tuned win98 system.

Then there's something wrong with your installation.

 

[Rudolph McCrack]

Yeah, yeah. Except when it isn't. I have systems with everything from
'98 to XP and the only ones that are LESS stable are the ME ones. They
didn't work well from the get go. '98, 2000, and XP system all tend to
become less stable over time and eventually you need to reinstall
everything (and hope).

98 sucks goats compared to XP and they are not equal in quality at
all.

 

[Ben Pope]

I'm with you on this one. 98SE works fine for me, but I'm mainly a gamer.
I'm really reluctant to go to XP Professional just because I don't want
to deal w/the fun-filled nightmare of sorting out whatever features (as
in it's not a bug, it's a feature) XP has.

Well all versions of windows have these features for a year or so, then they
settle down. I think XP is settled down now, SP2 has been released.

Get a copy of XP, download SP2, slipstream the install media and install it.

Run Windows Update, reboot and repeat until done (so that you can be sure
that you've updated the updates .

Use your shiny new OS.

Or not. The choice is yours, but I'm just saying that you're unlikely to
have as many problems as you think.

I'm still using Win2K SP4 at home, but with Windows XP and the Classic
Windows look at Work, I can barely tell the difference. Windows 2K and XP
are a vast improvement over Win98 in terms of stability as the memory
management and multi-tasking are in a different league.

Your biggest problem in changing over will be things like programs that
access the hardware directly, such as your Com ports (and of course, do not
support Win2K/XP) and, if you switch over to NTFS, anything that directly
accesses the filesystem (again, without support for Win2K/XP).

Ben

 

[Darthy]

I'm with you on this one. 98SE works fine for me, but I'm mainly a gamer. I'm
really reluctant to go to XP Professional just because I don't want to deal
w/the fun-filled nightmare of sorting out whatever features (as in it's not a
bug, it's a feature) XP has.

I'm on WinXP... it does something better, other things worse!

Stick with Win98 as long as you can.. but if you buy a NEW AMD/P4 or
AMD64 type hardare - you'd be looking at using WinXP as Win98 driver
support is now crap.

When/if you go WinXP - Download "AGENT RANSACK" - it works in
Win98~WinXP.... because WinXP "Search" tool is SHIT.. PURE SHT...
stupid Wizard interface.

 

[Darthy]

98 sucks goats compared to XP and they are not equal in quality at
all.

Yeah, WinXP sucks at a completly different level. XP does some cool
things (And Im using it right now)... here is the ONLY reason I use
WinXP.

1 - Driver support (win98 driver support is now shit)
2 - Proper Memory support above 512mb.
3 - Proper support for HDs over 130GB
4 - Memory mangement.

Having a stable system is important, new hardware is blowing chunks on
Win98 nowadays. other than that, I prefer the reliablity of Windows98
being easily accessable in case of failure (the way WinXP is not) and
the activation issues.

 

[Guest]

I'm on WinXP... it does something better, other things worse!

Stick with Win98 as long as you can.. but if you buy a NEW AMD/P4 or
AMD64 type hardare - you'd be looking at using WinXP as Win98 driver
support is now crap.

When/if you go WinXP - Download "AGENT RANSACK" - it works in
Win98~WinXP.... because WinXP "Search" tool is SHIT.. PURE SHT...
stupid Wizard interface.

--
Remember when real men used Real computers!?
When 512K of video RAM was a lot!

Death to Palladium & WPA!!

The biggest problem with XP, is the same problem repeated by microsoft on every
new OS release. All the features of the new OS that were present in the previous
OS usually do mostly the same thing (at least from the user point of view), except
that microsoft moves things around in the GUI, so we all have to go RElearn much
more than should be necessary. Improving stability and performance does not mean
that all the settings have to be done from a different menu than the previous
version! If you are doing the same thing, you should be able to do it the same
way!
gm

 

[dmac]

SP2? 1a is out but 2 is still beta isn't it?

 

[Ben Pope]

SP2? 1a is out but 2 is still beta isn't it?

Dunno... Thought I saw it somewhere, didn't pay much attention as I'm using
2K. Maybe it was a pre-SP2 patch and I just saw the SP2 and thought it was
released. Regardless XP has been around long enough for a sufficent number
of bugs to have been ironed out.

Ben

 

[Darthy]

Dunno... Thought I saw it somewhere, didn't pay much attention as I'm using
2K. Maybe it was a pre-SP2 patch and I just saw the SP2 and thought it was
released. Regardless XP has been around long enough for a sufficent number
of bugs to have been ironed out.

That's funny... major bugs are found all the time.

Since the release of WinXP - there are about 150+mb of "update"
patches to install on a clean system... especially if you want things
like USB2.0 to work.

 

[Wblane]

Um, XP has the exact same hard drive limitations as 98SE. My source: the
Western Digital handout that came w/my 250GB drive.

Yeah, WinXP sucks at a completly different level. XP does some cool
things (And Im using it right now)... here is the ONLY reason I use
WinXP.

1 - Driver support (win98 driver support is now shit)
2 - Proper Memory support above 512mb.
3 - Proper support for HDs over 130GB
4 - Memory mangement.

-Bill (remove "botizer" to reply via email)

 

[Ben Pope]

That's funny... major bugs are found all the time.

OK. I'm not disputing that. My point is that how many of the ones released
say, last month have affected you personally? How many of the ones last
month fixed instabilities and crashes that you had personally?

Most of the patches these days are security fixes, not stability fixes.

You think Win98se has significantly fewer updates that caused instability
than XP last month?

Since the release of WinXP - there are about 150+mb of "update"
patches to install on a clean system... especially if you want things
like USB2.0 to work.

And I suppose Win98se is much better at USB2 than XP?

We're comparing Win98se to WinXP here, not saying that XP is perfect.

Ben