I just thought I would throw this out to the 9X community. I ran Win 98SE perfectly well years ago on an AMD K-6 500 Mhz processor using some off-brand
motherboards. I never had a problem with crashes that i could not relate to some other non-AMD problem. It wasn't AMD's fault that vendors built poorly
constructed drivers, it was more like, Intel people being bigoted against AMD. I remember that AMD made more sense to me in terms of dollars
when it came to price camparisons...at the time, I could buy a 500 Mhz AMD processor for $90 while Intel was charging $350 for it's Pentium III 500 Mhz and I could
see absolutely no apparent performance difference. Sure, if you ran SYSMARKS against both procs, you would see slight improvements in the
Intel hardware, but who cared???? The differences amounted to nanoseconds, not minutes. That meant I had over $250 to spend on memory, m/b and other
things I wanted.... I was reading the post argument on whether or not Intel or AMD were better processors for Win 98...in my opinion, at the time I used Win 98,
the AMD K-6 processors were perfectly stable and as far as I can see, transparent compared to Intel processors or m/b's. Frankly, I despised the Intel m/b's at
the time and found them inferior to cheap Taiwan boards. When the very first 300 Mhz Intel Pentium III came out, 128 Mbytes of SD 66 Mhz RAM at the time cost $600!
An 8 Gigabyte HD from Maxtor cost $420. And Intel released their first m/b's for the Pentium III without the AGP drivers! Go figure! They were so eager to release
Pentium III they didn't have the time to build adequate drivers for the AGP bus. I just want to remind you 9X fans out there, of what Intel cost compared to AMD
and the fact that AMD didn't have the driver support from vendors like Intel did, in a time when Intel didn't have the ba**s to build adequate drivers
for their own motherboards.

I can see only one reason to even think of Windows 98/SE/ME these days and that is if you have an ancient computer you want to use for some
miserable task like being a firewall to a server. The fact is, I run a lot of games on Windows XP from the Win 98 era using the Program Compatibility
Wizard with no problems. I think it is a mis-understanding generally that Windows XP does not run older software well, in fact, I think it does....
and does so, much better that 98 ever could. I like the fact that the NT kernel on which XP is based, is much more stable, much less likely
to crash, blue screen and have significant hard disk error problems (like lost clusters and so forth). I found myself constantly battling '98 over
stability and driver issues. Especially, graphics driver issues...as I remember, I had to completely uninstall a graphics driver in Win 98 before I
could re-install a new one. In XP, it's on-the-fly. I have never had an actual blue screen in the 6 - 7 years of using XP, pretty dogone stable, on
dozens and dozens of new computers I have built. And further, who wants to deal with DirectX 7 level graphics on a 1X, 2X or 4X AGP card
with 16 or 32 MB of dedicated memory on the graphics card???? Whew, those days are long gone friends! Not only is AGP bascially a dead
issue, it's a done-dead issue. So if you cannot get good drivers for newer hardware, why are you complaining? The vendors aren't going to
waste their time building drivers for dead hardware and a dead o/s. Ya gotta step up to the plate sometime, I figure.

I like XP more than any other MS platform because of its rugged stability and I prefer NTFS over FAT32. I think it is a mirage to think that FAT32
is preferable to NTFS. It also has age on its side now, with 6, going on 7 years of improvements and is still supported until April 2009 when
it goes into extended support. Just think about the improvements in Windows Explorer compared to '98...a world of difference in file handling.

Unless you are running a very old computer which is incapable of Win XP I don't really see the point in using Win 98/SE/ME. MS isn't supporting it
any longer. Most vendors have said "Adios" to it and maybe its time to move on and spend a few bucks to upgrade to a newer hardware.
I remember building computers back in the '98 days could cost 2 Grand. I can build a computer today, which is vastly faster, vastly greater in
memory, hard disk and video abilities in every respect, for around $600 give or take. So unless you are into antique's, why bother with
this outdated O/S? I would like to hear some rational reasons other than you want to play quake 1 on it or you prefer the 9X version of
MS Solitair...just trying to figure out why anyone would be running '98/me in this day and age.

What are you trying to tell?

after seeing this, im a bit like do we have to have another why run 98 thread, havent there been enough 20+ page threads that have been locked about this.

unless you being more specific


i installed a graphics card driver today, i just installed it over the top and it just worked, fixed my problem that i was having as well


but try to run games pre 98 era

anyway your entitled to you oppioion and i dont want to start an argument

I agree with awergh, and don't take this as an insult jimc52, we should file this under dead issues. jimc52, if it helps any, ask yourself this question: Why do some people spend a lot of money fixing up their '65 Chevy when a 2007 Lexus clearly outperforms the Chevy, gets better gas mileage, is safer, is easier to drive, is more comfortable, and should run longer between maintenance intervals? Nostalgia? Preference - Taste? Comfort zone? Or could it be that the '65 Chevy owner just finds it easier to add their own personal touch to the '65 Chevy (fix it up)? That said, perhaps you should start a computer-psychology board. On a side note, as I can see that you love your XP system (for now) and are sold on the virtues of NTFS, take a peak at these articles for a nanosecond:

http://blogs.zdnet.com/storage/?p=169
http://blogs.zdnet.com/storage/?p=168
http://blogs.zdnet.com/storage/?p=167

This post is a joke, ain't it ? BenoitRen will back me up this time Someone call the firemen.
Wow, this is your first post after your presentation, why not register to a cricket forum to ask them why they don't stop that odd game to play something more modern like ... football ?

No, it never did.

Exactly, so why don't you post the same thread on the XP forum and promote Vista instead ?

Exactly, why spend 600$ ?

Hello everyone and thank you for the replies. No intention here to insult anyone at all. So apologies all around.
I just wanted to hear some reasons why people continue to use 9X beyond the "old games" reason. I guess if
you are satisfied with 9X and want to remain there, all well and good. I just wondered why anyone would
stick with it when so much has been done to advance beyond 9X. BTW, I always found it adviseable in '98
to first uninstall the older graphics driver and then re-install a new one. I believe I remember that you can
have multiple graphics drivers installed simultaneously in 98SE, but quite often, this caused more problems then just
uninstalling the old driver and re-installing the new one. I remember having some serious conflicts from time to time
when trying to install a newer graphics driver on top of an already installed older driver...this caused blue screens
sometimes, and other times, odd or difficult to troubleshoot instability errors. And sometimes, things would work
alright for a while but then I would see other issues which seemed to be unrelated but eventually could be traced
back or troubleshot to the multiple-graphics driver situation. After a few experiences and talking with a lot of other
9X users at the time on forums such as http://www.computing.net (which I sat on for years as a troubleshooter),
I advised to remove the old graphics driver first and then re-install a single new graphics driver. This solved the
majority of problems people had in 9X with graphics driver issues and a host of other problems that seemed to
result from different drivers, multiple drivers, or disperate multiple installed drivers.

Even though this part of the forum is for 9X users, the fact is, a lot of us came from the 3.0/3.1/95/98/9.8SE/ME
era and in fact, we all have things in common as a result. No intention here to create a flame war at all...
more curiosity than anything else.

While I honestly don't care for Windows 98/SE/ME (which I take is the focus of this topic), these are some of my reasons for using Windows 95 OSR2:

* Fast performance
* Small install size
* No Internet Explorer integration
* No DRM or "activation" schemes
* No annoying animations or button-style menu bars
* No unnecessary processes running
* No open ports presenting security risks
* A clean, intuitive, fully OS-native user interface (thanks to usability research)
* Compatibility with all the hardware and software I care to use (yes, including the "old games")

Why don't you link your weblog post while you're at it.

I am of the same opinion, by the way.

Ah yes, that page. The people on SomethingAwful.com didn't take kindly to it, for some reason.

So guys, BenoitRen and Andrew T., there is no topic about all what is needed to install to keep a 95 system as up to date as possible, which I believe is quite different than for 98/ME.

Would you be willing to create one as you seem to be two expert users of that OS ?

Well. Windows 95 does have some advantages. Now here are the reasons to switch to Windows 98:

- No newer Flash Player support. (Some sites do require this plugin)
- Very limited USB support.
- Problems with LBA 48 hard drives. I know there is a fix, but it is believed to be untested and unstable, still.
- Some small nuisances like up to 4 GB file set size couter limit.

It is not much, but the LBA48 limitation forced me to switch to Windows 98 a few years ago. Finally the Flash Player problems persuaded me to abandon Windows 95 as an Internet browser platform.

Sure, as soon as I get Nathan Lineback to explain to me how to install the newest TCP/IP stack included with Dial-up Networking Upgrade 1.4.

IMO, those sites can go to hell. No site should require a third-party plug-in to be viewed.

Aye.

If it is untested, it can't be deemed unstable.

Isn't the same true for Win98?

I like Windows 98 SE because it works.


Really there is no other reason.

Perhaps you are right. But, trying to persuade the whole world to do something other way is like changing a direction of a river with a stick.

If the author says his solution is untested, and possibly unstable, I will not argue.


No it is not. Windows 98 reports space taken by folders correctly, while Windows 95 starts from 0 after reaching 4GB mark.

Well, true. The Windows 98 works. But there are a few things driving me nuts in it, while Windows 95 just works. And the Explorer freezing after large file related operations is the one I hate the most.

http://www.infinisource.com/win95.html#upgrades


http://erpman1.tripod.com/win95upd.html

http://articles.techrepublic.com.com/5100-6346-1061913.html

http://wiki.oldos.org/Downloads/OSUpdates


HTH, Roman

You can always try. And it is definitely possible. Firefox certainly is doing a good job of persuading people to recognise web standards.

The key word here is "possible". Again, you can't know if it's untested.

Roman, the WinSock 2 update is what I'm using. The update shipped with DUN 1.4 is more recent, though.

<offtopic>In the summer of 2003 in the Netherlands several (small) rivers were reversed in direction by a penstroke. Because it was hot and dry the groundwater level was becoming too low, which should cause great damage. So the water of Lake Marken was directed to South Holland to compensate for this.</offtopic>

jimc52

W98SE unstability can be fixed by:
-Newer hardware (if compatible): More ram, more processor speed, faster HD etc
-Updates: windows updates (officials and unofficials), IE updates, multimedia codecs etc

When this is done, XP offers very little advantage for a home user PC but adds some disadvantages:
-Less safe against viruses and hackers
-Slower (except for internet based activities)
-Obligation to use "safely remove hardware" when removing devices (not on W98)
-More complicated to manage services, manualy modify systen files, tweak/hack etc
-Useless services and features
-No boot batch script (Autoexec.bat) (An advanced feature but realy useful sometimes)
-Wannabe "intelligent" interface is in fact very dumb and irritating
-Default settings realy suck (that can be fixed easily)

Finaly XP has its instances of BSODs, driver issues, installation incompatibilities etc. If at least it was good in this respect, but it isn't.

HTH

FWIW, the only site I visit regularly that uses Flash for a meaningful purpose is YouTube, and that works perfectly with Flash 7. Flash 8-only content, in any case, is still largely the exception to the rule.

YouTube movies likely wouldn't run well on this PC, unfortunately. But I like to view Flash content from sites like NewGrounds. I use the stand-alone Flash Player 7 for that purpose, which I discovered a couple months ago.

For me the most important thing on 9x is good compatability with older, especially DOS SW which needs some level of HW access - there NT gives no chance. Compared to pure DOS it gives me nice light GUI with multitasking ability allows to run DOS sessions, 16 and 32bit win apps with support of most newer HW. On my current PC 98se runs pretty fast and small sized (without any garbage I wouldn't never use). When I'm doing something with system I usually backup entire windows directory in few tens of secons (under other OS) so I can return back quickly. Try this on 8GB Vista, hehe.
But big issue is fading (nearly dead) HW support which will make impossible to run this OS on most current/future HW R.I.P.

If the thread was titled "why use Win98/SE/ME as your primary OS?" Id have trouble putting together a post.. Since 98 really doesnt play with today's hardware/software and the tasks they are used for. However what 98 does perfectly is the same stuff it did nigh on ten years ago, and with todays blisteringly powerful hardware its not too much trouble to have a little VM running 98 for thos odd tasks it comes in handy for... (incidentally my main box is a C2D 6600 w/4GB RAM.. Vista Ultimate is a joy to use and I cant contemplate switching back to an older OS for -everything-)

What do you exactly mean by those odd tasks If may ask ?

Maybe you mean I should be using my Jasc Paint Shop Pro, Adobe Photoshop, Corel Draw, Ulead Media Studio Pro as well as reading my mail, surfing the internet, etc... in a Win98 VM under Vista ?

My computer dates from 2002 and is almost on par with 2005~2007 machines as soon as performance is concerned.
The reason is that my 2002 PC runs on w98se and the new PCs runs on XP or even worse, Vista.
IMO you realy need to have your brain examined if you believe Vista is an enjoying experience or has a technical advantage over XP or w98.
I would even say that the technical regression we are withnessing with Vista gives me one more reason to stick even longer with w98 or at least, to think in the future about an alternative OS.

The main issue with W98++ is hardware compatibility (more than software compatibility IMO) but that's relatively new: one and half year old or so.
As long as compatibility runs fine, w98 is superior to XP and of course Vista for every task (except internet browsing in my case, I don't know why).

Last month I bought two DVD drives: runs fine on w98. My w98se PC is now converted into a double-decked DVD copying machine with the most recent DVD burning devices. So w98 is still relevant today. If only manufactureres would let us install their drivers on it, it would be limitless.

Softwares which are realy uncompatible with a w98SE fully updated are rarer than you think. It seems that most of recent softwres are not running on w98 because the big names (Adobe, DivX etc) have disabled installation on w98 but most of the software community have not put this limitation on their installers and often their programs install and works fine on w98 eventhought they sated it wouldn't. Most of the freewares still install and run perfectly on w98.

99% of the softwares I use are either W98 era or freeware. And believe me the reason is not money.

I bought my first notebook three years ago. It was a low-end HP ze4900 with the weakest Celeron M and 256MB of memory and XP home as on OS. From the start it was OK to use, but installing virus scanners and such it quickly became slower than my very old computer with 98SE. So I installed the 98SE (all the drivers were available) on that computer and it was working very quickly. However, there was this shutdown issue that was never resolved and for some other reasons as well I mainly used XP (I guess because I had already installed all the software I needed on it and couldn't bother do it all over again, there were also storage space limitations since I had a Linux (and a DOS partition) running on a 30GB hard disk.

At some point I got fed up with the slowness of XP and bought an extra 256MB. It gave the XP a really nice boost but for some strange reason (which I never bothered to investigate) 98SE boot time got longer, as if the computer was running some extended memory checks.

Recently I sold away my trusty old HP and bought a new one, NX7400 with 1GB and Vista Business. At least Vista wasn't slower than XP on the older notebook, but since the computer recommended turning off some features of Aero, I decided to turn everything off. Now Vista is OK, but XP is almost like 98SE on the old computer, except for slower booting (even with the extra memory delay). I tried to install 98SE on it as well, but this time I haven't been able to find the drivers like I could for the previous computer. It is really a shame, because 98SE boots in 10 seconds or so and for the first time I really would feel like I had a super-powerful system.

Trying to look for the drivers for 98 I came across this forum. Since none of the gurus of this forum have replied to the thread I started I may have to start to believe that there really are no drivers for my system. On the other hand, maybe I just keep the 2GB partition for 98SE waiting for some homebrew all-in-one driver! And let's face it, at least the older people remember the times that the VGA with 640x480 with 16 colours was a really good resolution, and to have games running on that was a giant leap from the CGA (320x200 with 4 colours if I remember correctly).

Anyway, I agree with the previous poster about the "technical regression", I think it should be for the user to decide what features of the operating system to choose. Actually, I'm slowly but surely trying to learn more about Linux because if you know how, it lets you build the OS by yourself. And for the same reason I would like to stick with the "good old" 98SE, because it is not that bloated, at least not by modern standards.

I second this...i use 98se on a daily basis and if you got a decent system lets say a beefed up p3 you get no bsod or stuff like that....and if an app crashes maybe is poorly coded (which are many these days)...i haven't reinstalled the os in 2.5 years and it works great.

Althought system based on DOS layer has some disatvantages one major advantage is possibility to use Dos based drivers, apps and TSR to change whole system environment as you want.

Also full compatibility with Dos apps is very good reason...

One can always cook up a DOS disk for that, too (I did, and ended up with about 168MB or so). One thing I found surprising is how many good useful DOS apps there are out there even for today's machines, etc. Even drivers - there's some I use on my DOS disks today, that would have been a fantasy to have back in the days when I was using DOS/Win95 regularly. Pair that with all the memory these modern machines have compared to those days (there's programs that will create huge RAM drives bigger than most people's hard drives back in the DOS days), and it makes it quite nice to do.

Can these NT/XP guys try stopping to tell that it's not good to use 98/ME.
You can write much longer negative text but nobody will read it.
Please let it in peace.

Not to go off on yet another tangent, but I get the impression that ironically a lot of "NT/XP guys" don't look highly on Windows NT 4.0, either...

[quote name='jimc52' date='Sep 20 2007, 03:53 AM' post='694763']
(like lost clusters and so forth).

That's a problem with FAT and FAT32. Running FAT32 with Windows 2000 and later defeats that purpose!

If you're using FAT32, expect lost clusters to be common when not shut down properly!

That's not a Windows 95 limitation, that's a FAT32 limitation and you cannot use NTFS, thus, you're SOL.

I said: set of files counter limit, not single file size limit.

Windows 95 explorer is not able to display how much space is occupied by a set of files. In case of a single file, everything works correctly.

When counting space taken by many files windows 95 counter wraps around at 4GB mark. So, this nuisance is not related to FAT32, as everything works correctly on Windows 98.

It is both a W9x and a FAT limitation. FAT uses a 32 bit field to define the size of a file in bytes, which makes a maximum of 4GiB - 1 byte. W9x uses a 32 bit filepointer to address the data to be read or written, which gives a maximum of 4GiB.
BTW, all flavours of FAT use a 32 bit filesize. So FAT12 can describe 4 GiB-1 file, while it cannot store it (FAT16 can, link)

/edit: I'm talking about the file size limit, not the file set size counter limit. Should learn to read.

Since I don't have anything close to 4GB of files stored unless I select every single file on my computer, I can't say I've ever found the counter limit to be a problem...

Why use 98SE, or in my case, ME? Simple - speed. They are lighter and faster than today's OS' and for the vast majority of things the average user does on their computer, still perfectly current. I can still browse the web, do my email, balance my household budget, listen to my tunes, play games, edit my photos in Photoshop Elements...

About the only thing I can't do on my ME machine is video calling on Skype, which is a shame, but I also own a Mac (PowerMac G5) and I do video calling (plus iTunes and a few other things that ME is no longer able to do) on that.

This is a home built computer - I built it myself. I purposely put Win ME on it because I wanted the speed it would offer on this hardware. I have not been disappointed. This machine, with its measly 768 MB of RAM, is in all likelihood faster at all of the above tasks than a much beefier machine with 2 GB or more of RAM running Vista would be. Speed and low resource demands are good!

...PLUS, I just *like* Windows ME!! Now there may be the best reason of all!

Actually, it makes a huge difference when you're running heavy applications, like 3D games. Maybe if all you did was run win9x and check mails and play older games it wouldn't have made any difference, but for me it's a world of a difference.

I am at present on an AMD K6-2 400 (@450 Mhz). I was using a PIII-450 (512 MB RAM) all these years and let me tell you, there's absolutely no comparasion between the processors. The P3 was so good that I never really felt the need to upgrade. I feel that I could have continued even till 2009.. All programs ran well on my XP-SP2, I was even able to play games like Quake 3 and GTA Vice City without any lag. I could run virtual machines with XP in them, run multiple sandboxed environments, browse in Opera with around 80 tabs open, program in .Net, design in photoshop, edit movies.. everything. And then it was no more. After its demise, I switched over to this AMD, with 576 MB RAM. And let me tell you, its absolutely nothing like the P3. Everything is way slower, and even having more RAM than I did earlier makes no difference.

It's not surprising though, the numbers speak for itself. While K6-2 has no L2 Cache, the P-III (katmai core) has 512kB L2! Also, the L1 cache controller was way better than what was present in the PII. Infact, the cache in the katmai was so good that, provided you had the right hardware, it could be overclocked to 600Mhz!

Even though my AMD motherboard is finely tunable with small stepping VCore, Multiplier and FSB jumpers, my PIII (which was only overclockable thru the BIOS) was able to handle upto a 150 MHz increase with ease. Although it wasn't that stable, a 100Mhz oc was sufficiently stable. The K6-2 on the other hand can just about handle a 50Mhz increase. Anything above that is unstable and would require a high VCore that would be potentially damaging to the CPU, not to mention you'd be needing a very good cooling system. The PIII didn't require any extra cooling even though it was running at 100Mhz+.

The Athlon T-birds were good, IMO. It seemed that back when that was the only one I had, the 900 mhz one seemed good enough that I would had still still be using it into 2009! There was only one game that was way too slow.

BTW, I had bad luck with K6-2s also, I had a K6-2 450 mhz and when just OC'ed to 500 mhz, it freezed all the time when gaming!

Upgrade to a K6-III+ 450 (not a K6-III 450), if you can find one, and you'll be surprised how much better than the P-III it is. They keep turning out on sites like eBay, from time to time. They are fine to overclock and will work at reasonable temperatures if cooled by any common socket A heatsink/fan assembly (the K6-III+ IS a socket super-7, but mounting a socket A heatsink/fan assembly on a socket super-7 is straightforward and works well), even with a reasonably higher VCore (they're mobile chips, intended for notebooks, hence their normal VCore is 2.1V, not 2.3V). Here is one case where YMMV, of course.

I really don't think CPUs should be judged by overclocking potential. They're not meant to be overclocked.

Funny you should mention that- I was on eBay yesterday and was thinking of buying a K6-2 550 AGR. I quite liked the features of the K6-III+. Are you sure it it would work on a desktop mobo?

This may be off the original topic, but here are compatibility web pages for the K6Plus.
http://web.inter.nl.net/hcc/J.Steunebrink/k6plus.htm
http://compatlist.k6plus.com/

And a website dedicated to the K6Plus.
http://www.k6plus.com/index.php

If your mobo is a Socket Super-7, yes. On an older plain Socket-7, maybe. But 8prime8 has pointed you to the rigtht places. And if you don't find your board there, still it'll probably work, but maybe you'll need a bios upgrade. If you dont find one for free, e-Support (google for them) probably can provide you one at a reasonable price. However, in most cases the bios upgrade is only needed for the bios to recognize it correctly as a K6-III+. If you don't mind it being described as another chip or as unknown, all odds are it'll work all the same. If the bios thinks it's a plain K6-III, it is a pretty certain bet. YMMV, though.

A list of the characteristics of all known K6 exists here. The K6-III+ are at the bottom. There is a K6-III+/500ACZ,
which is the pearl of the K6, but it's harder to find than the 450. But, even the 400 would give your system a big boost. But now that I checked I see I remembered wrong, K6-III+ VCore is 1.9~2.1V. So 2.1V is the top of the range recommended by AMD. But with an Socket A heatsink/fan you certainly can go to 2.2V without damaging the chip. And do give it a good thermal paste, say, Arctic Ceramique, for instance. Mobiles do support higher temperatures than the desktop chips do, but good cooling is paramount to stablity and overclockability. Good luck!

I run 98Se on athlon3200, 1g mem. I shall upgrade when i run to game title i really want and that runs on modern os only. So far i am happy with this and let the other 1g ram sit in box. But if i upgrade HW, it makes no longer sense to run98 since i wouldnt be able to take advantage of having multicore cpu/PCI-E and over 1g mem.
- And i still need 98 even in my work, formating pcmcia-card to our system won't work in w2k/xp. They do format, but not properly for the legacy systems we support (ms article 296117).
- And i use 98 also to remove extended atributes from files at copy operations (EA_DATA.SF), The systems we support do not like recycle.bin or ea_data. sf -file. ( i must be dump not to be able ot get attributes cleared otherwise, but 98/usb disk works as workaraound to clear em)

Can people please quit this "modern" nonsense? People always use it wrongly.

Hmmm .....



Socket7 and SuperSocket7 performance is tightly related to chipset support. Most S7 can only cache memory upto 128MB/256MB. Some VIA S7 can cache upto 512MB or even 1024MB. Even with k6-2+/k6-3+, the chipset still have a role to play. I did have an experience with k6-2+ 500 on an VIA board 1mb L2 cache with 512MB RAM a long time ago. It was lightning fast (at the time). Disable that L2 cache, and things start to go a bit slower ...

In contrast, a SiS S7 chipset with any S7 cpu is limited to 128MB cacheable range (most model). Go any higher and windows will crawl ...

Rgds

Sorry, I have at least a couple of games that won't work properly with Windows XP.

Thus, I still use Windows 98 SE for those.

I recently picked an old PC with Win 2000, no upgrades done on it. Put the hard drive in my 98 (not SE) box, set up a dual boot, and updated 2K to SP4. Got all the unnecessary services disabled, drivers updated, tweaked and tuned. My hardware is old, an HP Pavilion 4463 with a 366mhz Celeron and 160 MB RAM, upgraded from 64 MB. Hardware upgrades include a new USB card, network card, and CDRW. I removed the original combined modem/sound card and put in an old Sound Blaster.

So far, I haven't found one instance where the Win 2000 OS outperforms my old 98 install. 98 boots faster, even with the batch files I added to the startup, shuts down faster, and navigates the file system faster, including the external USB hard drive. With the same browser on each, internet speeds are about equal, both browsing and download. So far, I haven't found any apps I use or want that don't run as well on 98 as they do on 2000. Was very disappointed to find that my file/partition encryption program of choice (Scramdisk 3.01r3c) wouldn't run on 2000. There's supposed to be a 3.02 beta version that was around for a while but I haven't found it.

I didn't really expect to see any significant improvements in performance from 2K on this old hardware, but some of what I've observed has suprised me. On web pages with large animated images like weather radar loops such as this one, the CPU demand on 2000 and 98SE stays at or near 100%, and the speed the animation moves slows down quite a bit. With 98FE, the processor usage is still high, approaching 100% at times but the animation runs at the proper speed. This is using the same hardware and browser on all OS, except for the hard drives they're installed on. 98SE is using my best hard drive at the moment. I would have expected 2000 and 98SE to handle such a page better that 98 first edition, or at least equally as well but in this instance, 98FE works much better.

As for stability, my 98 box runs 24/7. I can't remember the last time I shut it completely down. It does see an occasional reboot, but not because it needs it. It's usually to finish an install or to switch to an alternate configuration. Can't remember the last time I saw a BSOD that wasn't the fault of something I did. On my hardware, newer equals little if any gain in function and compatibility, lower performance, and a less secure system.

Why use 98/SE/ME? I can't find a good reason to update.
Rick

I second this. MS has a patch which cures a hang after each 49.7 days. This prooves that W9x can be up for this period.

One more reason you could add to the list is incompatibility. Some old mobos have this weird version of ACPI in the BIOS that causes BSODs in 2000+ OSes, as they don't allow the BIOS to access the hardware in that manner. I have one such mobo, and the only fix for it to work without crashing in XP is a costly $60 bios upgrade from eSupport. And there's no guarentee whether that upgrade has a fix for the ACPI issue.

9x on the other hand, works perfectly on this mobo.