This idea comes to me in the 'New ideas for the next version' 3ad about uSP.
Due to MS abandon of Windows 9x, why non collecting open source apps/components to gradually build an alternative windows 9x system ?

Just an idea !

Eventually...

Windows 98 turns grey in a few years. I hope that the ReactOS Project will continue to become a serious OS in the meantime.

Well, ReactOS is a Windows NT-compatible GPL'd OS, so it's not exactly the same...

E/OS LX could be a different chance

Anyway i think is easier to change apps/components of a working OS than rewriting a new one. Am I wrong ?

Re-Writing the kernel for Win98 would not prove to be an easy task - if ReactOS's kernel becomes a bit more reliable in the future, it's probably possible to adapt their kernel for use in Windows 98. This is a far stretch, but seeing as WinMe's kernel was, infact, based on 2000's kernel, the same sort of idea applies.

ReactOS is coming along... the fact that it is NT-compatible is what makes me think that Win98 will be modified in the future to accomplish things that no one ever thought possible...

I don't mean to start a flame but...

Perhaps I have an eskewed view of the whole Win98 SP2.x thing but I just see it as a way to improve Win98 for people who HAVE to run it. I'll take 2k/XP anyday as long as my hardware can run it (even if I have to heavily tweak it to run on 128megs of ram).

The only "better" OS I'm waiting for is Longhorn.... in all seriousness, if you see the NT 5.x kernel is the worst thing since sliced bread, perhaps you haven't been reading your white papers.

And if you want to rant about bloat, tweak your 2k/XP setup to your liking. I'll take the extra ram overhead to get better security, proper memory management (aka no blue screens) and driver compatibility that isn't on life support.

Don't get me wrong, I love the Win98 SP project, I'm a very active promoter and feel I ad a fair amount to this forum but sometimes I really think you guys have your heads in the wrong place.

I'll entertain any intelligent responses to this post, but flames will be left alone to burn in their ignorance

i beg 2 differ i realize that u probably assume that 98se is a ancient os not worthly of the time spend on programs 4 it but its more a labour of love 4 these creators i think a chance to use their knownlegde on a os they no inside and out.sure a xp sp pack been done theres not alot that u can do with xp after nlite or xpstyles so why not help out peeps that still run 98se its isnt a bad os sure u have to manually install drivers and stuff but its a small price to pay and theirs lots of drivers around 4 most 98 programs a simple google search .i use xpsp2 and its great boot up alittle slow but its 5times the size of 98se so it not 2 bad considering .i like 98se i support continued effords to beef it up make it more stable customize it .ived seen and tryed all the programs there amazing they deliver no bsod in months cant complain now if u got the ram a P3 or better u should use xp makes sense under a P3 then why stress your pc just to say u run xp go 98se and enjoy the bevy of programs provided here.peace out...Long Live 98se

Hear... Hear...

Not a rant, just real life. 98se + Gape's & MDGx prgms provide all the hoursepower the average home user needs w/o all the hassles of XP. I have reverted more people from XP to 98se+ than I have upgraded from 98se to XP for that very reason. IMHO, XP was rushed to market & shoved down peoples throats at least 2yrs b4 it should have been. So I say "ALL HAIL" to Gape & MDGx for putting out the prgm that MS should have come out with, "1 for the general public" It ain't got the pretty face that XP does[Tihiy's working on that], but it's a workhorse.

Well if that's what you believe, then 4 years of extra developement (see: SP1 & SP2) should have fixed every issue you have and them some. So at this point nobody can say XP is premature (which I highly disagree with but not relevant here).

The fact that XP will support the bulk of the architecture of Longhorn, goes to show there's a lot more going on behind the scenes of XP than one expected. Although white papers for XP went into the subject of all the robust XML backend so I don't find that too surprising.

I really think it's a zealot's view to think if you downgrade a XP box to 98SE (assuming their hardware could fully support XP) and you are doing people a disservice.

I could name dozens of new features but I can't imagine using as OS that doesn't support services (aka daemons), as they can improve the OS and memory usage in a multiuser enviroment. And another one I can't ignore is NTFS as prefer the extra reliablitiy of the file system and the fact I don't have to worry about "lost chains" anymore.

why is it microsoft releases oses before theyre fully tested i know its money driven and by the time all the sp packs are out and its near perfect they tell us to buy the newest os comming out and it happens again.The idea for a 98 platium sounds cool what if all theses 98 sps etc were joined together one exe hmmmmmm.the wonders of windows .

I can't even begin to attack the ignorance of this statement. MS tests their software more than any company on the market, which is why their release dates always slip excessively.

Ok lets cover some software developement 101 here, Microsoft style.

Alpha - the software is at a basic phase where architecture to support features is being created, the software isn't very runable yet.
Beta - features are being created and are disabled if they don't function, the software is usable for examples
RC (Release Candidate) - every feature is finished and it is send out to requesting users for use

Microsoft often leaks out beta copies of their software (for people to test their current) and people can submit any bugs they find, which are expected. MS does internal testing to be sure their "beta" software in stable because any MS employee is allowed a 2nd computer to test their own software. Their internal word for this is "dogfooting" where they use their own "in the works" applications. And if you are the team developing that software and you use it, they call it "eating your own dog food". When a beta build is considered stable enough, then it gets out to the public. as mentioned above.

Usually after the 2nd or 3rd beta the software is finished and becomes RC1. In order to meet RC1 standards EVERY feature is 100% finished and there are no known bugs except maybe some very rare exceptions they are addressing that the average person will never run into. Users play with the software in various setups and reports any bugs found.

After MS considers all known bugs fixed they enter RC2 and released this new bug fixed version to the public. The same thing as RC1 happens all over again.

When RC2 bugs are fixed MS releases RC3 and 90% of the time, the copy you buy in the store is exactly the same as RC3. They only release RC3 to verify customers that had a RC2 bug have their issue fixed in RC3.

Now you all don't have an escuse to even claim "MS releases their software too early" as that's a bucket of hogwash. MS's testing is over the top, and it's 10x more extensive than it was during the Win95 and Win98 days.

In all honestly, XP is to 2000 what Win98 is to 95, a post commercial cleanup of their first iteration of a new piece of software. Where as 95 was their first "user & network friendly" OS and Win98 is the sum of all those ideas with 3yrs of improvements. And 2000 was their first true Network OS with proper memory management, crash prevention and a journeled file system and XP includes almost 2 yrs improvements and now in 2005, 3-4 more years of improvements.

There's nothing early, rushed or feature lacking about XP, stop fooling yourself. You can like 98 all you want, that's cool, but stop trying to fool yourself that you can to run it because XP is a toy, crappy, unstable, unsecure or whatever other point that is totally untrue.

MS may have made changes I don't agree with (although I wasn't privy to all the usability research they have performed, which is the reason 95 looked the way it did, and the reason why XP looks the way it does) but I'm open minded enough to realize that in order for a major change to occur, groups have to meet, studies have to be performed and it has to be proven X is better than Y. Nothing is changed by 1 single person working in a closet hidden from everybody else.

As I said above, run 98 because your hardware can't handle anything else, I mean if I had a P2-233 with 64megs of ran, I would run 98 /w SP2 too, it's the best solution. But please stop thinking that 98 is a better OS in any way, shape or fashion, it simply isn't. 7yrs of OS improvements (98 -> XP) means a billion improvements.

If we followed your logic in reverse, then DOS 5 is so much better than 98, I don't have to worry about that silly "start" bar and all these graphics wasting my cpu cycles.

That's a good summary. Quality post.

Microsoft exceeds their previous quality standards with each new operating system. Server 2003 has the highest quality standards to date and Longhorn will far surpass those. Microsoft cuts features when core components are not up to quality standards. This is absolutely the best approach to software design.

Xp meets MS's standards. It was by no means rushed or forced down anybody's throats. Microsoft cannot provide support for OLD operating systems forever in the same way they cannot support old APIs or protocols. Think of NetBUI here. Continually embracing old standards and old ways of doing things forces progress and innovation to grind to a halt.

In my opinion Microsoft is clinging to old operating systems and old technologies for far too long. They should have ditched NT and 98 long ago and focused on getting their NEW operating system out the **** door.

Rhelic and other pro XP,

There is a 54 pages thread (now blocked), where this topic has been debated.
I don't think such debate has a place here, but if you insist:

We don't want XP because we don't need the so-called services that XP offers and because we want a an easy and fast OS.
We don't want to have to disable dozen of services in order to get some control of our computer back into our hands.

XP is great for networking, multi-user, corporate environement, (all this has been debated many times). But for our use, it's totaly irrelevant. I works not bad of course, but w98 for us is better.
Everytime I'm using XP, I'm always saying "sh*t!, why he is doing that!? W98 is so much easier!" and in my experience I have seen more disadvantages than advantages using XP.
But I'm not going to rewrite all 54 pages that explained why on the other thread.

The problem with M$, is that instead of developing a larger range of products adpated to everybody's wishes, they do only ONE and unique OS: XP!
For M$, XP is the one and unique OS that the mankind is supposed to use from now on. I don't agree with that view.
It's a very big mistake from M$ management.

That's why we need a new better alternative OS.

Here is the link to the previous discussion about XP vs W98...

I wasn't debating anything you think I was. I was addressing the claims of others that Xp was premature and not up to quality standards which is total rubbish.

98 is available for you to use as long as you'd like. Don't fret about it. It is not like there's some timebomb in it waiting to go off.

Ok, sure. Start your own fork if you really think it will help. Then your project can be as fragmented and disorganized as the OSS community is.

If you haven't noticed, XP is highly customizable. Just poke around the forums and you will see. XP OOB is good for just about every situation. Should you disagree with the OOB install in your current situation/requirements, open notepad and get coding! Were microsoft to release a plethora of versions for every deployment situation they would be commiting corporate suicide. XP is like a brand new car. It gets you from point A to point B. It's up to you to tweak the appearance, performance, reliability, etc.

I can almost hear the comebacks before they hit the keyboard. If you want a sportscar, go with a RTOS or embedded OS. If you want bulletproof security, get with the *BSD crowd (sorry, the Linux kernel is just as bad, if not worse, than MS kernels). If you want the quintessential minivan/SUV, go with XP.

The bottom line is, no one is forcing you to use anything on your computer. If you don't like what you see, turn your eyes to something else.

7yrs of OS improvements (98 -> XP) means a billion improvements.

Which OS is 7 years old? There was no Microsoft OS released in 1998.

I use 98 SE, which was released in 1999 and is 6 years old.

But please stop thinking that 98 is a better OS in any way, shape or fashion, it simply isn't.

That's a nice opinion.

My opinion is that 98 SE is better than XP. Reasons: less bloat, less sluggishness, better DOS backward compatbility, ability to run with CPU in real mode, better hardware compatability (I have hardware that XP SP2 is incompatable with), fast install time, easier GUI, no activation hassles. 98 SE is very fast and responsive on my Athlon 3400+ with 1 GB RAM and does everything I ask of it - gaming, music synthesis, scanning/printing, developing software, etc..

I can create a RAM disk and mount a compressed volume on it from the command-line - can you do that in XP?

Do I need Windows XP integrated CD burning? No, on Windows 98 I use the freeware CDBurnerXP Pro which is NEWER and BETTER than Windows XP integrated CD burner. Do I need WMP10? No, there are so many newer and better free apps here I couldn't tell you all of them.

OMG do I Need IE7? No I can choose Firefox, Avant, Opera, Maxthon, and Netscape. I can boot into DOS and get on the Internet using Arachne or Links. There are so many choices in computing now that paying for $300 for the right to phone in and activate your OS every time you change your hardware just seems ridiculous.

I feel my opinion has some validity because:

-I actually use Windows 98, in year 2005, as an experienced user, with fancy modern hardware and all of the freeware tools that exist in 2005 and the improvements to 98 such as SP2, 98SE2ME, Dx 9.0c, .NET Framework, Remote Desktop, etc. I'm not basing things on a six-year old memory of an OS that I ran on a Pentium, haven't touched in years, and didn't really understand how to use.

-I don't go into the forum of some OS I don't like and be a troll.

-I actually use multiple OS's every day including DOS 98, XP, and 64-bit Linux. So I have a fairly broad perspective - I'm not just a fanboy.

Do you know how great Windows XP is? Windows XP is so great that it takes me more than 10 minutes to log in - its poorly-written DNS service takes an unbelievably long time to load due to the presence of my 3 MB HOSTS file. And svchost.exe consumes up to 27 MB while doing this.

98 SE handles the HOSTS file instantly without a single hitch. And the WHOLE OS fits in under 27 MB.

FYI, I find that I am actually most productive with Linux, but when running Windows apps I usually use a Microsoft OS and the best such OS is Windows 98 SE.

I absolutely agree, I have no interest in a XP vs 98 discussion (anymore) and am only giving my $.02 on some of the items discussed that I feel are outright incorrect. I feel some good opinions are coming out of this thread but if it comes down to a raw 98 vs XP then I encourage the mods to lock this thread too.



The reason MS clings so long is because of business users, in fact NT4 support was extended an extra year or two because so many businesses still ran it. The shop I'm working at now sees Win98 as a viable plaform in a business enviroment and anybody with a Win98 box won't be seeing an upgrade anytime soon. I've been trying to preach to get SP2.x deployed across the whole company but it's been falling on deaf ears for now. This is also why I preach so much about SP2 purity in other threads as I feel Gape (which he has been) needs to keep SP2.x as a pure update patch, and leave all the 3rd party toys for other downloads.

Unfortunetly even if MS does abondon their OSs faster it won't change business users because of the investment involved. From a management perspective if you have 1,000 PCs that can run everything fine (.Net, all the win apps on the market, etc) why spend more than half a million dollars (or more) to upgrade the company?

I'm not agreeing with this perspective, in fact working in IT I had to learn to understand the concept, but I can admit it's very realistic and honestly if I owned my own company, I would be hesitant to burn half a million on an OS/Hardware upgrade for the workers, so I would be running a Win98 unless I could prove the $500k would be saved by running a managable network with MS MOM and an all XP deployement. Many studies have shown businesses can save a ton of money on problems by upgrading, so it might be a good investment.




That's funny, I recall MS having 2 OSs currently in production, the NT5.x kernal and the CE5 kernel. NT5 comes in many flavor being: XP, XP Media Center, XP Tablet Edition and CE5 comes in 2 major flavors, PocketPC edition and SmartPhone.

Thats 5 flavors of "Windows" depending on your needs, and actually MS is about to release a lean version of XP within the next 30 days that is targeted for users with Win98 class hardware, so now we're upto 6 flavors.

Both of MS's OS kernels were built with the intenion of being a "piece meal" solution where the OS can be built upon for extra features or have pieces taken away for a leaner setup. Longhorn will take this to the extreme offering almost as much modularity that only Linux has previous had, Longhorn won't be lean enough to run on cell phones or handheld devices yet.



Perhaps you haven't been reading this thread at all, I seemed to recall embracing Win98 under certan cirumstances and XP under others, and I will admit to leaning towards preferring XP whenever possible, nothing trolling about that.

Grr, MSFN's forum won't let me delete a post (clicked wrong button)

Rhelic I have no problem conceding that XP is probably better in a corporate invironment, but this discussion[I thought] was about the average home user & maybe SOHOs, who usually don't need half the stuff that XP has, nor know how to use it. I reverted people to 98se+ because they ask me to, not because I had nothing better to do with my time. Once again it's a matter of choice, theirs not mine, and alot of them are running upper end machines like azagahl's. I really don't want to get in a whizzing contest either

Windows 98 SE has it's advantages and disadvantages and it is application specific what is better. I use both WXPSP2 and W98, I have two identical boxes (2.4G P4/512M RAM/80G RAID) connected to KVM switch and use that one which better suits the task I have to do.

As a matter of fact, both new software and new hardware does not support W98 SE.

I'm planning two new boxes - one with Smithfield 830 processor and 955X chipset, second (silent for home use) with Dothan 750 processor and Alivio 915PM (GM) chipset like AOpen I915GMm-HFS, for both boxes 200G SATA RAID0. I see no possibility how to use Windows 98 SE on them - maybe in Virtual PC.

Disk controller support is bad - Intel application Accelerator can be used up to I865/ICH4 chipset, for newer soutbridges like ICH5, ICH5-R, ICH6, ICH6-R, ICH7, there is no specific support and only ESDI_506.PDR has to be used.

First time I was forced to abandon W98SE when I had to use Acrobat Professional 6. several years ago. And there are more and more incompatible applications - even viewers, like Adobe Reader 7 or new Word and Excel viewers.

I tied to use at home Asus WL-HDD as a network storage - and surprisingly it does not support W98 as a samba (filesystem) client, just clients that support unicode.

Windows 98 SE can survive several years on old boxes, if no specific new applcation will be required. Wirth W98 first edition it is even worse - I have posted it two days ago, and This file has been downloaded 3 times already. - it means MDGx, erpdude8, + 1 person.

New OSes mentioned here have similar problems - lack of manufacturers support.

Petr

the more programs are designed for xp only the more 3party apps surface so its a 50/50 shoot you will find drivers for 98se on some applications yet i download lots of apps and i still find 80% offering either a nt or 9x solution so i guess this is good for 98se users as far as Eiger goes the new lean xp designed for pcs with older 98se era hardware i think this is good yet it also is a way to get u onboard with xp no matter what incarnation it is.its true aswell that i a guy whos the resident os installer in the crowd am ask to just put 98se on it its good enuff for me not because of activation woes just because people are familar comfortable with it .i tell them about xpsp2 security is much better etc and yet it goes over their heads they just want to play pogo yahoo check email go figure so i guess 98se still got a place in the world .

Rhelic


You are talking of OS for handheld devices, for usual PC you have still only XP (I don't know what they mean by XP Media Center since my W98 would make a perfect media center if I want to).
No IMO they din't let the choice for specific needs. XP is a good for all, but not the the best for all. A company of the size of M$ should come up with anything we can dream of.
It's like a if a car producer made only one model of car because it's the best one.
That's non sens.

Petr,
yes unfortunately, for economic reason hardware and software makers don't invest in w98 support. They also assume that w98 is dead?
But that doesn't mean that w98 si worse.
If I need to upgrade I will try to find if possible w98 compatible hardware.
If not possible then I will have to learn how to make XP as good for me as w98.

Same with softwares. But so far I have very few software are not w98 compatible.

I guess it still all boils down to choice, if you walk into a Big box store[ie: Circuit City type] you don't get a choice, it's XP, and now days you don't even get the disk, just a recovery partition thats nearly worthless unless you want to format & reinstall, thereby loosing all data Ya, Ya, I know XP has sys restore, I've also heard all the tales of woe on that 1 too! Most average users are not savy enough to know about backups & all ways to save data so they end up loosing it. I guess we need some real progress in Data recovery to trickle down to the masses. Oh well, it keeps all the help boards going

I think they simply mean an application launcher for multimedia apps that occupies all the screen with icons big enough to be recognized from a few meters and that can be piloted with an infrared device.

Well over the past 1-2yrs the public has been really responsive to XP (mostly because everybody is buying new PCs) and one source I rely on shows this trend: http://www.thecounter.com/stats/2005/June/os.php

WinXP 68% ..... Win2k 15% ..... Win98 13% ..... Mac 1% ..... everything else 4%

So if you are a coder writing a new program and want access to the newest features possible, it's no surprise they require a NT 5.x kernel (Win2000 and newer) because your app will works on 83% of computers out there, keeping in mind this figure is growing every day. In fact according to this site, XP is gaining 1-2 percent every month.

I develop myself and have no guilt writing an app that requires 2000 or newer (unless the software requirements demand 9x/NT4 support). You can argue that Win98 isn't dead yet and I won't disagree with you, but it's definetly on a feeding tube as far as the stats dictate.

WinXP 68% ..... Win2k 15% ..... Win98 13% ..... Mac 1% ..... everything else 4%

How is this counted?

Worldwide or some region only? Consumer / corporate? Does it include linux apache servers?

Based on PC sales? What about ppl that wipe Windows off their PC's and install linux? Or ppl that put their own PC's together?

Based on OS sales? What about free or pirated OS's?

Based on browser info? Some ppl have PC's without internet access. Browsers can be configured to tell lies.

I'm just curious how all these statistics are calculated!

TheCounter keeps stats on webusers who view their counters that other sites are using. Scientificly accurate? Hell no, but it's still the best stats I've come across and are updated in real time.



Less than 1% of internet users even know it's possible to change their browser string, and using IE, it's much much harder to change. So if you want to take 1% of the XP users and throw them to Mac, Win95 or whatever, go ahead, the truth is browser agent altering does not affect stats with such a large sample set, which is over 250million hits per month.

Considering they get so many hits a month I feel the stats are fairly accurate, especially since they seem to follow growth rates. There hasn't been any incosistantcies in the stats (I've been watching since 2001) to make me suspect the stats are flawed.

Base on a counter stats on one of my websites approximately over 12 months i got these stats Operating Systems Visitors % Total
Linux 25 0.23 %
Windows NT 10 0.09 %
Windows 95 17 0.15 %
Windows 98 2299 20.74 %
Windows 2000 439 3.96 %
Windows XP 7370 66.48 %
Windows ME 891 8.04 %
Windows 3.x 0 0.00 %
Sun OS 4 0.04 %
Free BSD 0 0.00
so that survey above aint far off the mark. Who knowns.

Well, you know: "There are three types of lies - lies, **** lies, and statistics."

For our country, there is a statistics based on browsers self-identification and I think this method is sufficiently reliable. It is divided to various categories.
Windows 95: about 0.5%
Windows 98: from 8.6% (hardware) to 18.4% (agriculture)
Windows ME: about 0.05%
Windows NT 4.0: from 0.6% (computer games) to 3.6% (government)
Windows 2000: from 9.1% (computer games) to 21.8% (government)
Windows XP: from 55.8% (government) to 79.6% (computer games)
Mac: about 0.8%
Linux: 0.29% to 1.71%

You can see that these results are very similar - and they are for the Czech Republic only. Short characteristcs of this coutry: new member of European Union, middle Europe, lowest piracy rate (by BSA) among all middle and eastern european countries.

Of course, there are other categories like servers - but I think there are not many servers running on Windows 98. (This is Windows 98 forum)

Petr

I'm not surprised that XP nears the 70%. I'm only surprised of Mac and Linux taking hardly 1% each....

If XP is so popular it's because XP is always sold with a new computer and almost every new coputer is sold with XP (98% XP, 2% Mac or Linux).
While new computers are never sold with w98.

I mean when you buy an XP operating system, you get the computer that comes with it, while when you buy another OS, you get only the installation disc.
Of course there are poeple buying only the XP installation disc because they have heard that it will solve all the problems on theyr old machine. That's the kind of poeple who doesn't know what "deleting temporary internet files", "anti-spyware" and "defragmentation" means thought they have vaguely heard of it.
For these poeple, XP may be a good choice, psychologicaly.
Eventualy they will come back to the shop, to buy more memory. What's the problem? And when their HD is full, they buy a second one with 120Gb.
Then finaly they will show up again at the store and say: "Well now that I have tried XP, I want to buy a good computer to use it."

that makes sense.70% using xp and the other 30% used by your mom lol. I guess the cost of pc are cheap so if u factor in the amount of pc sold in 1999 to todays totals including laptops etc i bet its probably 5-1 .i guess 98 users want 2 hear 40%still use 98se but reality is if you cant afford it theres always someone telling you where to get a pirated copy so how many pcs are running corporate keyed xp ? and same 4 98se theres always some friend who offers up a copy of 98se to a friend whos starting out on a used P2 he got 4 cheap cause his buddy finally upgraded.So what we got here is 2 groups of users ones that owe older pcs with 98se or the buyers of new pcs with xp .no need to fight and fuss over whos better.The folks in the forum seem educated on microsoft oses and are well aware how good xp is to 98se and the 98users no this they just like the ease of 98se no thrills nearly everyones used it before and cant part with 200 bucks for something that basically does the same thing lets face it the average ham&egger dont give a ratz azz whats behind the bootup logo as long as they can download mp3s of check email only the techy most of us care about whats inside a os .Hell my brother brought a pc a year ago it had xp on it hes never used 98se and hes not alone but when he was on a friends 98 box he didnt care as long as he could play poker online i think most people dont care whether application are being built exclusivly for nt 5 and not 9x because they can find a 3rd party clone to do the job.Now the geeks and techy will argue over there favorite os 4ever and it wont change a average users mind at all.i got one friend who whines at me if im not using latest yahoo or msn messager cause i cant see his cute winks or emotes some folks are reglious on keeping up to date and some dont care if they run icq 99 you dedide ived say to much ,buy my book lol .carring on fuzzing it makes for a humous read.

Hey, guyz... you missed the point !

Due to its nature, every project released under an open source license CAN'T dead.
Development can stop, but the knowledge behind it remain for others.

What i meant is that if uSP, SE2ME and RP can change so mutch the system, so the Win98 'gradually convertion' into an open source OS don't seems so difficoult.

Anyway, interesting posts here.

This is also why I preach so much about SP2 purity in other threads as I feel Gape (which he has been) needs to keep SP2.x as a pure update patch, and leave all the 3rd party toys for other downloads.

YES!!! I just want the updates for 98SE, not added bonuses or stuff replaced with third party apps (eg. new task manager). I didn't even think the icons swap to 2000 style was "pure" enough to be placed in the service pack. If anything, put those extras in a separate archive and not with the main service pack.


and actually MS is about to release a lean version of XP within the next 30 days that is targeted for users with Win98 class hardware

Hmm, this sounds interesting. Is there a name for this version of XP? Will it just be similar to using XP with XPLite?

this new release a lean xp for 98hardware is called Eiger do a google search.

This Eiger thing is very interresting.
They had to do it a long time ago. In fact XP had to be what Eiger will be at the beggining and then grow with more extras.
At M$ i's what I call "reverse evolution":
Thay came from w98 which stand on 250Mb and work on 133Mhz and 32Mb to XP which requires 2.5Gb of HD, 512 Mb of memory and at least 1Ghz processor.
Quiet a huge regression if you ask me.

one would expect that with time, software got neater, smarter, easier, faster and more performant... No XP is only more bloated, more awkwardly written, takes more place, needs more of everything, more complicated (just look at the tree from C: to the user's "my documents"), slowlier and even less safe against hackers and viruses.

Looks like they catch it now. Better late than never.
It's interesting to see that they refuse to admit it's a sort of XP light...which in fact it is.

They say Eiger is an XP for aging hardware. It didn't say it's an OS that will run faster or as fast as w98 nor that it will be also very good for new hardware.
While the dream of every w98'uSP fans is to exploit w98 with zero crash tolerence and full optimization on recent and future hardwares.
Not because we don't have money to buy a new computer (last checked the cheapest new box was 350$).

And, the by the time they fix all the buggs, securities issues and other flaws, we will still be for looking forward for the new w98's uSP releases for a while!

Hi all

I am new on this forum but I had an idea. Everyone is talking about a new and better windows with packs here and patches there, so I thought that we, as programmers or resource hackers, could come together, instead of making everyone download lots of little packs, that don't work together properly, we could make one big pack with all of the decent features in from XP/ME/2K that we are missing in 9x. Such as XP icons and 32bit icon support, and decent customisable start menus, and built in usb mass storage drivers, and everything else. We should put it into one big pack, and say we all worked together on this, so it is really good. Rather than having lots of little packs which aren't compatible with each other. I really cannot decide which to download at the moment.

Im gonna help. If nobody can be bothered then I will do it myself, because a lot of people will probably think its a great idea.

Im multibooting 98SE with XP, think that my 98 needs a touch up.

Help please!

Hm... your idea isn't new, but clear. Packs here aren't going to merge, but they are mostly compatible. If I [ever] have time after I'll [ever] finalize my pack I'll try to make "Universal Installer" for updating selected system components.

VWIMaster,


The unofficial Service Pack by Gape is already a big pack compiling dozen of dll's, official M$ upgrades, TweakUI, some 3D icons, etc. It's 15 Mb already.

Tihy's Revolution Pack is mainly cosmetical and interface, for those searching for a new look. While Gape is rather focuse on the system, on the invisible side of the window.

Other packs available here are too specific and/or a part of already big pack uSP2.0

We were talking about adding freewares in uSP. But that could make eventualy a third main pack. Not everybody is looking for new freewares and it will be difficult to make a pack with the softwares that everybody need without bloating it with softwares that most poeple won't use. So at the end a website where you can find descriptions and links to the coolest freewares around is just fine.

Is it just me, or do AMD users prefer Windows 2000 over Windows XP and vice-versa for Intel users?

RJARRRPCGP, it's probably just you

I have AMD processor, and I run 98 and XP on multiboot system.
Works fine for me, except 98 keeps on having memory problems.
Everyone else I know has Intel processor, they all run either ME or XP.

I'm and AMD user (beuacse of the price, I prefer the quality of an Intel cpu) but I'm a hardcore XP fan. No reason to not like XP, I mean if you don't like the "skin" then simply turn it off.

You can make an argument about 98 vs XP, but anybody that prefers 2000 over XP is silly.

Well, first off, the NT series has always required more RAM than the 9x series. Second, if you take nLite and strip out all the extra crappy features from XP, (which is really not much different than all the tweaks you have to do to 9x to get it useable), it will run on almost as good as 9x. I'd say bare minimum for 98 to be useabel is 32 MB RAM, bare minimum for XP-stripped is 64. Both require 128 MB unless you want to be hitting the swapfile for almost everything.

The only real problem is XPs disk space requirement - 2.5 GB is really an exxageration, but it does require 1 GB. :/

If all the PC is used for is email and light web browsing, suer, 98 is OK. My grandpa does that - he never installs anything, and he never leaves the PC on for more than 2 hours.

Of course, there are good things to do both with original 98 and XP.
It would be cool to have installations that are already adapted for various uses and that don't require patches, tweaks, uSP etc.




That's +- what I had when I installed XP on an empty HD...ok maybe 2Gb but more than 1.5Gb.



Every XP user says that. Actualy my feeling is that XP is for the n00bs who will never open a crontrol panel. Because if you open a control panel and check the services, I wish a good day.
Everithing in XP is n00b friendly, message box, wizards, animations...but don't try to browse your computer starting from c:!
No, if you want an advice give your grandpa XP and take back w98.

n00b friendly huh?

Show me a RIS Installation of 98.
Show me an unattended CD-Rom install of 98.
Show me how to lock down the machine using Group Policy in 98.
Show me how setup 20 users on a machine and prevent each of them from seeing others' files.
Show me how to enforce strong passwords and force password changes in 90 days.
Show me how to monitor performance counters in 98.
Show me set and enforce security policies in 98.
Show me how to view event logs on a network computer in 98.
Show me how to remotely modify a 98 machine registry.
Show me how to run scandisk while doing other things.
Show me how to defrag while doing other things.
Show me how to visually partition and format hard drives in 98
Show me how to create a software RAID array in 98.
Show me how to inititate a VPN connection to a 98 machine.

Oh geez. I can do all of these things in Xp Professional... I must be a n00b.

That may be true, but show me how many people are actually going to use any of those features excepting corps & maybe a few sohos

Hi Raskren, a few reflexions on some of your writings :

Show me how setup 20 users on a machine and prevent each of them from seeing others' files.

1 person, 1 computer. That is the way I see things. Microsoft sees it otherwise. On XP you'll have a runtime (that presumably is integrated in the core OS files and can't be disabled) consuming CPU cycles for that task even if one is the sole user of his box. I understand that the ultimate in this trend is the project of boxes without CPU and OS which are just terminals using shared and remote CPU and OS resources for a fee. Do you want this as a home end user ? Not me. So who is interested in that ? Only the corporate.

Show me how to remotely modify a 98 machine registry.

Which OS is the most secure. XP whose registry can easily be remotely manipulated ? Or 9x whose registry cannot be so easily remotely manipulated ?

Same seems to apply for Remote Desktop Server which is something, I understand, that allows for easily remotely accessing and modifying anything on an XP box.

Seems to an outsider like me that XP might be a very vulnerable system from a security point of view.

I understand (maybe wrongly) that all is needed to do whatever one want to such an XP machine connected on a network is knowing its IP and admin password. So what's your IP raskren ? If you don't use a proxy, this website knows it already for example. And your admin password is maybe... raskren or admin. If not, you are unlikely to have choosen a very secure password (256 random characters) because you must remember it and type it often. It is therefore probably all too easy for someone to access and tamper with your machine from a totally anonymous laptop connected to the network through a public WiFi hotspot, while you sleep doing some filesharing, confident in XP Pro's industrial security strenght. Correct me if I am wrong.

Show me how to run scandisk while doing other things.
Show me how to defrag while doing other things.

True you can't do those things on 9x with the standard tools. You need a third party util such as Diskeeper to defrag while doing other things and there is nothing to replace scandisk. But has the fact of being able to do or not to do those things anything to see with XP being for nOObs or not.

Show me how to visually partition and format hard drives in 98

On that one Fredledingue is right then. It is much easier to visually partition with a GUI tool than to use a freakin' command line tool.

I thought we covered this ground before, in several posts, this is getting to be a rehash & goes nowhere

I agree, randiroo76073, but posts are quite scarce here those those days, so...

Still I'd like to hear someone knowlegeable enough in computer security to comment about my rants.

And this thread is about a better windows...

Hasta la Vista, baby.

I'll have to wait for that too Eidenk because my assesment is the same as yours