how many of you guys still use windows 98, and still plan to into the new year?

I do.

cool!

it hard to beleive that is gonna be 10 years old isn't it?

98 is still my OS of choice. I'm going to keep using it as long as it's able to do what I need. Thanks to sites like this one, 98 is more stable and functional than it's ever been.
Rick

I have Windows 98 on separate hard drive. Whenever I feel nostalgic, I swap hard drives on my Internet PC and use it.

Sure. But it's really alive and kicking. I tend to 5 separate Win 98SE machines, besides my own.
And I bet many, if not most, of the people here in this forum have/know of/tend to more than one 9x/ME machine each.
Win 9x rules!!!

Win98 - 10yo (dates 5-98?)
Win98SE - 9yo (dates 4-99?)
(from my failing memory)

so 98se was realeased in 1999? i didn't know that

windows 9x does rule. it really does

As long as my MoBo and Graphic card stay alive, I'll keep w98se running on them.
The MoBo, the Graphic card and the case are the only pieces that remain from the computer I bought 5 years ago.

Happy new w98 year!

This computer is my best friend. I got this computer as a Christmas present in the 1999. If it need a new part, I will buy replacement part to fix it up. During the 2007, I brought two 128 ram to upgrade the ram in my computer.

IMO, i think that the support here is better than anything microsoft could give

I am using my 98se computer at this time

As long as the motherboard is completely supported (up to i915 inclusive) I will install win98SE on every computer I build. Video and audio drivers don't count.

Still running 3 sets of 98Se in my system. 1 kids, 1 for wife, 1 for me. All in they own primary partition (system commander).
Looks like i can add the other 1g ram and use bigger disks also, so i can still keep my w2k licences + xp pro in self collecting dust.

I do...98SE4EVA

This is probably my first post

I'm running 98se now. I prefer it to all the other os/s bar linux. I wont go live on the 'net with a windows product, but prefer to 'hide' behind a linux server/gateway package , e-smith/sme 7.x here as I find most hacking programs use win based written hacking tools which generally stop at the firewall, with some exceptions, of course.

I cut my teeth in dos 3.11 thru 6.22, (with windows 3.11), begrudgingly upgraded to win 95b, and then to 98se. I prefer to have total system control at the dos level. I only upgraded bcoz my netscape browser wouldnt connect ne more to the sites that i needed to access.

Without sites like this, I believe all would be lost. So keep up the good work, all of you, and may win98 rule long into the distant future.

?did I setup a .sig?

my apologies if this appears twice..


----
Regards,

Louis

well, i had a brief stint with windows me today, and it sucked.

im going to promptly re-install 98se

what do you guys use for a media player/organizer?

anything better than winamp?

Hi,
I do (my first post) on k62 450 mb(video encoding) with waterfall.
Got a 2nd hand board(sempron 2800-ecs via chipset). See that waterfall does not work well and cpu core temp (speedfan) is 37deg as compared to xp(32-33 deg).kcpu cooler seems not to run well with the amd cool and quiet driver.So forced to use xp.
regards

Hi,
I do (my first post) on k62 450 mb(video encoding) with waterfall.
Got a 2nd hand board(sempron 2800-ecs via chipset). See that waterfall does not work well and cpu core temp (speedfan) is 37deg as compared to xp(32-33 deg).kcpu cooler seems not to run well with the amd cool and quiet driver.So forced to use xp.
regards

I still use Win98SE (actually 98SE2ME) on my secondary computer (Tyan S2495 with Athlon XP3000 CPU, 756 meg. RAM). My main computer has Win2K on it. I do a lot of transferring VHS to DVD and the 4 gb. file size limitation of Win 9x would be a problem.

I still like to use Win 98, just to resist the attitude pushed on us of 'you must have' the latest and greatest OS.

The 4 GB file limit is because of FAT32, not Windows 98. But, because you cannot use NTFS with Windows 98, you're SOL.

Also, when doing benchmark tests, Windows 2000 is better than Windows 98 on AMD systems, at least with socket A. *

*UPDATE.SYS DON'T SUPPORT AMD PROCESSORS WITH WINDOWS 98!*

Thus, Intels outperform AMDs with Windows 98!

I use 98SE because is a fast. I think that this system need to remove some unused code, to add some a new gui or to make a some compatibility with a new app and will be great!

NEXT 10 YEARS TO ALL!

It's a W98 limit too. W9x uses a 32 bit filepointer to keep track of the read/write location in the file. This limits the filesize to 4GiB. Fat32 uses a 32 bit field to store the filesize, which gives the same limit.

How the he** do you guys burn DVDs?

W9x cannot handle an ISO bigger than 4 GiB. But a DVD is generally build of several files, each <4GiB, which is no problem. A movie on a standard video DVD is chopped in several files of 1 GiB or less. This is done to be compatible with OSs which cannot handle very big files. This is not only W9x, but also the OS of a standalone DVD player.
As long as you don't try to fit the contents of a DVD in a single file, handling a DVD is no problem. It's just another filesystem, just like FAT32, which has a limit (on W9x) of 2 TiB, 4 GiB per file.

for me is not a problem to digitalize up to 4 hours of 640x480 video in realtime to Xvid and then directly burn to DVD in AVI format. good quality for VHS to DVD convert...

I just refurbished a PIII with ME on it for games, mostly to keep my family away from my XP computer. I bought the ME disk when it first came out, used it for a week and reinstalled 98SE. I was surprised to see what ME is like with all the updates from Microsoft as well as ATI’s video drivers from 2005. I hadn’t realized this OS had been tweaked and tuned to run this well. Of course there’s still the problem of ME being unhip so I made a Vista like startup screen and removed “Windows Millennium” from the start menu so now it’s cool.

My Frankenstein machine in the basement still runs 98se. I use it for my experiments with the projects found on this forum. I’ve killed it a few times with my hardware mods but thanks to EBay I can still find all the parts I need to bring it back to life. I’ve spent about 75 dollars total on these two old machines so 98xx has the best bang for the buck of any OS.

I hope everyone here keeps up the good work so I can still be running 98se for years to come.

I use windows 98se all the time. I love it. i find that xp is ok but it doesn't feel the same. As for vista i couldn't even use it for 10 min with out geting frustrated. windows 98 serves all my computing purposes just fine. I recently got a Thinkpad T30 i installed windows 98 on it and it works great.
Keep windows 98 alive!!!!!

Well the only reason I need not to use 98 is the file size limit over 4 GIGS and that is about it. I am considering moving to MSX or even AppleII. Speaking of Apple I might need a OSX or G3 machine later.

Soooooo in short there is no reason not to use 98 at all since hey the OS rules and has tons of support the only thing better is WINE if I ever decide to start using Linux or even Unix. Then again Sun BSos and so on.

So in short 98 for everything since I can't afford or am to lazy to learn how to operate anything else

Two machine with WIn98SE + Service pack 2.1c + Revolutions Pack 7 + Maximus Decim USB driver
MaxFrax

wow

and microsoft thinks were a dying breed!

Hi, all!

My first post here. I still love 98SE, mostly because it's MY d*** computer, not Microsoft's as they would like to claim. I use XP only when I absolutely gotta. About 98% (no pun intended) of the time, I'm in 98SE, like right now. I'm fairly certain that it's not phoning Redmond right now to report on me; I can't say that about the more "modern" flavors of Windows.

I fix a bunch of computers on the side and sell a few, too. We 98 lovers always hear the "why are you using an obsolete OS" junk from the supposedly more enlightened. Well, I'll tell ya. 98SE is way easier to fix than XP, W2K, or (gag) Vista. Virus or spyware problem on 98? No problem - boot from a DOS disk and rip that sucker out by the roots! On the more "advanced" OS's, with something really sticky you're probably (time wise) better off reinstalling. Oh, that's right, you can't do that too many times without getting permission from MS. Boot problems? A simple sys c:\ fixes most of them, or an fdsisk /mbr if it's really bad.

With Vista, Microsoft finally went all the way to the dark side. If you have that OS, fully half of your computing power (on your very powerful computer) is dedicated to preventing you from doing things that Microsoft doesn't want you to do. Another strange thing is how you can't seem to get XP drivers for new computers. This is a first - there has never been an MS product launch where you couldn't get hardware drivers for the previous edition. Some of the more odious OEM's (well, OK, HP) have taken to censoring their forums to prevent access to XP drivers.

I could (and have) gone on and on. I will use 98SE as long as I can, but it looks like the future for true 32 and 64 bit lies with linux.

I do have a problem, though, with 48 bit LBA. I'm gonna post it under it's own topic and I hope someone can help.

There is problem with licensing Windows 98 today, which is important in a corporate environment. M$ doesn't want you to use older software and cuts you out with selling OEM lincenses with no 'rights' for 'downgrading'. It's true even for Win2k, which I would otherwise always install in order to get rid of useless XP's eye candy.

Here I needed Win98 for an old program with an odd multi-codepage standard. I had to physically exchange computers only because the other machine happened to have a Win98 hologram on its case.

j7n: There are still perfectly legal copies of 98SE floating around on ebay. They're licensed out of the box, you don't need approval from Microsoft. I don't understand....

@fishindude; i think he means if you use older software in a corporate enviroment microsoft won't sell you OEM licsenses

i mainly use win98 for gaming, my personal fav is unreal tournament

I just dusted off an old Dell Dimension v350 with a Voodoo5 PCI graphics card (little bit of history there). The PC has a Powerleap CPU upgrade (Celeron 1.4) and 384 MB of PC100 RAM. I installed Win 98 SE on it last night, installed the Unofficial Service Pack and then used Windows Update for everything else. It's hooked up to a DSL router with a hardware firewall. I installed the latest version of Opera as my browser and Avast! AV, plus numerous other 98 friendly utility programs. I also installed Diablo II and Divinity Divinity (two Glide games I like - main reason I resurrected this PC).

It runs beautifully and I'm surprised how viable a Win 98 machine can still be. There is no reason to "junk" a solid old PC like this and it's a shame MS doesn't see fit to help it's customers get the most out of their hardware. And the two Glide games are great. It was such a good gaming API in it's time - it's a shame 3dfx went under.

Now that I have this little old jewel put back together I'll definitely hang onto it as long as possible.

thats the spirit!

ive got a voodoo3 2000 agp

I run 98 as a VM (Virtual Computer) on my core 2 quad Vista 64bit box and on serveral Macintosh computers. Windows 7 is expected to be a hypervisor (small base OS for running VMs) with everything else running as VMs. So when I have 128 core CPU, 64 g memory and a 16g Video card, I'll still be running Win 98, Win NT and Win3.11 when ever they are usefull.

I'm glad I still have my 98SE computer running...I've modded it and killed it hundreds of times, but I just reload the OS and slap on some new hardware and I'm good to go. It's a shame to see my dad running VISTA, because it runs so horribly slow; but he, much like many others just can't "handle" the complex obsolescence of an older OS (if that makes any sense)...I on the other hand love using a variety of electronics that the "mainstream" has deemed obsolete. To this day I still use regularly: Win98SE and 2000 (I do have XP on a computer I never use though), a Compaq Evo n610c that's been the most reliable laptop I've ever had, a CRT television, Sony walkman tape player/tapedeck, a vcr, and an oldsmobile (which continues to fall apart from the inside out).

I still love all my sh!t, even if it is almost all obsolete...everyday I boot up my 98SE desktop and enable auto-reverse on my tape deck I feel all the more nostalgic!

speaking of obsolescence, i still use my Tandy 1000tx for stuff from time to time, and my TI-994A for when im bored

and i will still never understand why people think new is always best (well some people, anyway).

The best system is the one you're most familiar with and therefore can work most efficiently on it.

i agree.

That's because the industry has been bombarding the users with that propaganda for years. Their primary motivation is to get users to part with their money. 98 is nowhere near as obsolete as they'd like you to believe. I have 98 first edition, 98SE, and Win2K-SP4. 98 first edition is my workhorse and the one I use most often.
Rick

I have two xp & two 98se computers this celeron 2.6 luv's win98se yummm speedy.
look on the web, You can still buy windows 98 new.

Yeah, yeah! Win98SE FOREVER!!!

Indeed. Even Win95 would seem like a recent operating system to me if I weren't constantly reminded by the web (and other media) how ancient it is - if its existence is even acknowledged, that is - many sources seem unaware of anything older than XP.



Only 5? The newer one of my two workstations is from 2000 or -01. The older one is from 1995 or -96, and was originally a 133 MHz Pentium (classic, not MMX), with a 1.2 GB IDE drive, 4x CD-ROM, Opti924 sound and S3 Trio64 video. I think the AT case (minitower) and power supply are the only parts that haven't been upgraded: the current specs include AMD K6-III CPU, 73 GB 10k RPM SCSI disk, SCSI CD-RW, AWE32 sound and Matrox Millennium II graphics, but I still count on further upgrades. Also a very significant upgrade was the replacement of the original Win95 keyboard with a proper one with full-size space bar, Ctrl and Alt keys in place of the irritational typo-introducing windoze keys. It came with Win95, but I went back to DOS 6+Win3.x for a while until I learnt about BootGUI=0. Win95 was then used until long after Win98 was released - until around the time that I found out about 98lite.

By the time that I got the newer workstation (this one that I'm using now), I had learnt some lessons and only minor upgrades have been necessary or even interesting (e.g. from 9GB to 73GB disk, 128 to 512 MB RAM, 400 MHz Celeron to 500 MHz P3). The stupid Nvidia graphics driver (Riva TNT) also forced me to switch to Matrox graphics (G400). Due to the existence of so much poorly written software that runs slowly even on a 500 MHz Pentium3, I may upgrade to a 1.x GHz CPU (in fact, I already have several, but I need a Socket3xx->Slot1 adapter). Of course, this machine also runs Win98 (SE with many fixes and modifications).

The servers run Unix/Linux systems, and are easily accessed over the network from the Win98 machines, which greatly reduces the need to switch the workstations to Unix.



I've had more security incidents (including break-ins resulting in full root compromise) with Linux servers than with Win98 machines. All of the machines included in the comparison have (or had) been permanently on-line for years with no firewalls and with public IP-addresses. Try that with an XP box!



I upgraded because I found that Win9x with BootGUI=0 actually is more DOS-compatible than Win3.x, not to mention more stable and otherwise more capable in many ways. The DOS-compatibility is the main reason why I haven't traded Win9x for Unix/Linux.



It's not necessarily better than Winamp, but I play mp3s on a nearby Linux server and connect its line-out port to the line-in port of the SB-AWE64 card of my Win98 box. This allows me to hear the music as soon as autoexec.bat initialises the sound card, and before booting the GUI.



Yes, it would be great to scrap the old 16-bit GUI (Win16 - that is GDI.EXE, KRNL386.EXE, etc.) in favour of a new one based on the X Window System (as used on Unix/Linux). The VMM/VxD layer (mainly VMM32.VXD which contains most core VxDs) really only needs modest upgrades, but due to the lack of source code and documentation that's a more demanding task than it might seem at first.



There are better alternatives than NTFS - eg. the XFS or ReiserFS of Linux.



Most operating systems used 32-bit file offsets until fairly recently (I think the switch from 16 to 32-bit occurred in the 16-bit Bell Labs Research Unix V.7 in approximately 1979), and large file support took time. The kernel and device drivers were the quick part, while it was a long time until applications were upgraded to support the new (usually 64-bit) APIs.



I don't. I don't own a single DVD, and only received a DVD-player yesterday...



Yes, indeed. I thought they had gone as far as they could possibly dare to with XP, but Vista proves that they believe users (and hardware manufacturers) will tolerate anything, which seems an accurate assumption so far, but I think Windows will start to decline in terms of market share, especially considering that competition is increasing.

Hi, somewan
Yes my w98 computer is only/already 5 years old.
The fun is that this cmputer is XP capable, yet runs exclusively on w98. That makes all the pro-XP/w98-detractors angry! LOL

I use it as a telephone, a video recorder, a multimedia convertor, a cd-Audio duplicator, a DVD duplicator/re-author, and... HOO-Hah!... also as a computer (e-mail, internet, Word, OCR, translation, photo retouching etc.)
It just doesn't serve me cofee at break time but that's not a problem because I don't drink cofee.

My computer age is mixed depending on a component. it stands on rather older PIII motherboard with quite new graphics card. i can still upgrade to board which i bought two months ago and win98 will be capable to install. In fact computer designed for win98 can be brand new except graphic cards...

Win98 still can provide me everything that i need, and Immolator project is reaching its end very slowly (if i found solution i test it for longer time period). Software and system upgrades are still being developed and that is what matters. Right now i havent found a sw solution (multimedia, work, or whatever) which cannot run on both 9x and 2k based systems.

Thats not matter of MS support. Thats matter of community now. Even when i am quite young to remember i was once using 8-bit computer and while there were people able to create new software on that platform it could be useful. There was no official support like with windows. there were just people with same computers - maybe 20 users in whole city - able to create and share software. Now we got the weapon of mass destruction. Internet with at least hundreds of users

Vista has one big advantage in multithreading and 64bit support over classical XP, but nobody is currently using this kind of potential or even developing applications of daily usage. Just ask why.

When my computer shall not be able to work as i need then i shall reconsider upgrade, but... right now i really dont know which new free software shall i add? there is too much of it...

I dunno, Somewan. My site stats indicate almost as many 98 users as Vista. Linux is about even; there are more MacOS hits. This is over a year after launch, even with OEM's cutting off driver support for XP. Maybe Microsoft won't get away with it this time.

got that right. if i were Microsoft i would still support Windows 3.1! Not everyone wants (or can) upgrade.