7years and still cranking on millions of machines everywhere with new service packs themes etc.but like win95 the beast of microsoft is trying to phaze out 98se by making new programs and games work only on xp ex.msn 7.5,we knew it was comming .Sure theres still alot of companies providing apps designed to run on 9x like avg etc and most games still offer support.Now i like trusty little 98se it got a bad rap on stababity bsod but gapes sp2 sorta fixed that,so what do ya do.burn all the programs drivers service packs etc to cd now before support ends spring 2006 search for third party apps like trillium etc thatll run on 98se,the fact is by 2000 win95 users were faced with the same problem so get it now burn it.Any other suggestion should be made here.maintain that 98 membrane my friends.

Windows 98 support sounds like it has already ended the way companies are already rapidly dropping support for it. And most games still being compatible with 98SE is actually inaccurate. Go to any store near you that sells computer games and pick out 10 high end, new release games and I can guarentee you that at least half of them will say "Compatible with 2000/XP" or "Compatible with XP." We don't have to wait till 2006 to see 98 support die.

It should be obvious to anyone who's listening, that 98/SE just won't due for the Gamers or Audiophiles. They need to be at "State of the Art" to run all the very latest software.

But, for the average home user that just wants to do email, keep their golf scores or club records, Windows 98/SE is just fine. And will be till those folks can no longer operate their PC's.

Heck, I see PC's every week that only have Pentilum II or AMD K6 processors, and sometimes as low as 32 megs of ram. There is NO WAY IN HECK that those old PC's could ever run XP.

So what those folks need is a tech like myself that will take the time to clean, tweak and tune those old PC's to work as efficiently as possible.
You won't get that from the "Geek Squad"....I promise you.

There are still millions of businesses world wide that use custom made software, written to work in DOS or windows 95/98.

Those people will never chage to XP. The "little guys" just can't afford it.

98 rules and XP drools!

Cheers,
Andromeda43

Yep,

But all the w98 fans here, only want to run this OS on the most recent hardwares and for the most advanced use and applications.

XP-only apps are the classical bloated noobwares that we will never use anyway...

I would fully agree with that, if I didn't play any computer games. I don't care about most of the new apps, I agree that they're bloated with a bunch of useless crap that mostly appeals to noobs. But, when it comes to playing new games, us windows 98 users are slowly getting screwed. So far, I haven't hit too many compatibility issues, except with vmWare, which I really wish did run on win98, but, oh well. As for some of the more popular new apps that have been discussed on msfn such as MSN Messenger 7.5, Office 2003, WMP 10, and IE 7 (which coincidentally are all made by microsoft)... who needs them? MSN IM 7.0 works perfectly, Office 2000/XP are fine, WMP 10 sucks, and I can get tabbed browsing from Firefox. All I'm saying is that there are alternatives. From what I see, win98 users are starting to be like the open source community when it comes to wanting compatible software.

Now if *only* Windows 98 ever did become open source. Just microsoft unfortunately wouldn't allow that to happen which quite a pity. Could have ended up with win98 becoming the next Open Source system like linux.

... Well, for now we can all dream

:whistle:dare to dream