Which operating system is the best?

[Louisiana Night]

I think he's talking about a security update...

they're supposed to be updating the security for a little while longer.

[Oldbushie]

All I saw was an IE update.

[Louisiana Night]

You're using Win98?

That seems to be the prefered OS on the forums.

Along with XP being the least liked.

I don't see how people can complain about XP... with ME still being sold.

[Oldbushie]

XP is alright, I use it on my new computer mostly because it takes advantage of a few features that my old computer lacks. The main thing I don't like about WinXP is the need to relicense it every time you change hardware.

[LondonBroiler]

You know, I totally agree, oldbushie.

It's all about the sheer levelling of everything and the disappearance of uniqueness.

I mean, 7-11 is selling cell phones and video games. It's like a mini Wal-mart!

Pretty soon every store will sell everything and it will all be made by Microsoft.

[Oldbushie]

Bleagh.

*decides to send some ninjas to kidnap Bill Gates*

[dew7]

It was an IE security update that was with 98SE

You don't need it with XP SP2 on IE

Windows 98/98SE/Millenium (critical updates until date below)

extended support ends in June of 2006 --- I think this is mainly because people still like using DOS with their old games and XP only has a command.com prompt and no true DOS and yes I was a person who wrote Bill Gates on why 98SE needed more life and frequented the microsoft 98 newsgroup to expand my knowledge of Windows 98SE.  

[dew7]

Well, partly the consumer is to blame because they wanted to save a few cents and drove mom and pop stores out of business by going to Wal-Mart.
Maybe Mozilla Firefox will succeed in the casting down IE.

[GravityMX]

I mean, 7-11 is selling cell phones and video games. It's like a mini Wal-mart!

OMG, WTF over here (Australia) 7-11 is just a petrol station. What's next KFC having movie screenings

Maybe Mozilla Firefox will succeed in the casting down IE.

Let's hope so  

[racx_00]

Maybe Mozilla Firefox will succeed in the casting down IE.

Mozilla is better than Firefox

[GravityMX]

Mozilla is better than Firefox

Either way, their still much better than I.E.  

[Louisiana Night]

IE is part of Windows. As long is Windows is the dominant/main OS, IE will always be the dominant/main browser.

[racx_00]

People don't always use IE just because Windows makes you have it
People install Mozilla and Firefox because it is much more secure , but yeah even if everyone stops using it, Bill Gates will continue to make it part of Windows

[Oldbushie]

Like many people have said before, why not have all the final Win98SE updates released on CD? If support ends then people on really old machines need some way to update it to at least be somewhat stable....

[Oldbushie]

It sucks that my school email can only be checked properly in IE. It just won't load right in Opera for some reason...

[dew7]

Well you can call Microsoft and they have a cd with updates but it will only cover you through Oct. 2003 --- will Microsoft release another newer cd -- maybe but who knows if they want to go to the expense --- however this is a good thought Oldbushie and hopefully Microsoft will release another cd at the end of 98SE's supported life

[dew7]

That is true with Creative's auto-update feature (needs IE) for their soundcards as well although you can update them manually with another browser.  

[dew7]

Just some thoughts to help you decide which Windows version is Best:

But surely they realized the fallacy of doing this by the time Win98 was released!!    Why would they need to dedicate two limited 64K blocks in memory, instead of using, and reserving, more RAM for this stuff?    Was this due to the limitations of the 80286 (and below)?     That 64K segment addressing crap limitation??

The reason is simple - "Backwards compatibility".   There were a large number of applications where the programmers used a "cute programmers
trick" of bypassing the operating system functions by having their application write directly to the resource heaps.  Because the resource heaps were fixed in size this was technically not difficult to do and it did provide some modest performance improvements.

This type of programming is one of the major reasons why many DOS and Windows 3.x applications will not run under NT based versions of Windows including 2000 and XP.

Microsoft did tweak the operating system design over time so as to reduce the usage of the 16 bit Resource Heaps by moving as much as
possible to the 32 bit heaps, but it was not possible to move everything with backwards compatibility being the biggest consideration.   So there were significant improvements in the 16 bit
resource usage with Windows 98SE and Windows Me compared to the original release Windows 95, but they still remained as a critical part of the operating system.

Hope this explains the situation.


Ron Martell     Duncan B.C.    Canada
--
Microsoft MVP
On-Line Help Computer Service
http://onlinehelp.bc.ca

"The reason computer chips are so small is computers don't eat much."

[dew7]

and a plug for NT  

The NT series of operating systems (WinNT, Win2000, WinXP) do a much better job here. You cannot run out of "system resources" in those systems.
>
> --
> Tim Slattery
> MS MVP(DTS)
> Slattery_T@bls.gov

[dew7]

Finally this bit of history may be interesting to some:

The goal was to make systems that would sell, be backwards compatible, etc., long enough to let them get a user-friendly NT kernel system (i.e. XP) into place.

That became the goal during the Windows 98 period but NT simply wasn't fit for that sort of use just yet.  PnP wasn't really working fully, there was still no defragger, it only supported older versions
of DirectX, etc. and on top of all that, it cost more.

Win2000 was supposed to be the Win9x-killer, but misfired.  9x was locked into old hardware paradigms, whereas hardware had to improve substantially before XP could become a reality.

At the time 95 came out, it was in step with the most modern hardware.

By the time of 98, NT could make better use of hardware, but driver support was still slower for NT than it was for 98.

It's only now, in the XP era, that NT's ability to use new hardware, DirectX, Media Player etc. is ahead of Win9x - and RAM capacities have
also caught up with NT's requirements.

Even now, NT isn't complete, from the perspective of home users.  There's still no maintenance OS, and we are still expected to use crusty DOS-shaped ChkDsk while waiting for Scandisk to be invented.

Courtesy of "cquirke (MVP Win9x)"