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Isn't that just an emulator with everything pre-configured? It'd be impossible to natively boot an x86 OS on a PPC, and they certainly can't port something without the source code. It's very interesting. And pcalvert is right, NT 4 does indeed run on PowerPC processors. I'm really giving poor answers here...

NT versions prior to 4 ran natively on PowerPC. I don't know how they messed with old world ROMs/new world ROMs, but are you sure it wasn't 3.51? And gamehead, I didn't know that, but there's very few G3s clocked equal or faster than 700MHz

IIRC, VirtualPC 7 (the last on Microsoft Made), only ran on a G4 or better. This machine sounds like a G3.

Yep, it's gotta be PowerPC. I ran Qemu once on a PowerPC G3 with 160mb (32 to Qemu), for 98SE. Painful can't even begin to describe the performance. And gamehead, would it be a violation of the rules for him to sell a Mac on MSFN? Or to sell anything?

The NetBurst based Pentium 4s (all P4s) are horribly inefficient per clock cycle. The PIII was a much better design, and some of that was carried over to the Core processors.

I agree with you on a lot of aspects here. Windows 9x, when properly maintained, is fine for the home user that does little to no internet. Most browsers are outdated (and I hate opera). Obviously, being a tech buff, I have two very beefy Vista/7 x64 systems, but I still do my basic tasks myself on a 9x machine. It's a familiar, much more basic operating system to get stuff done. It should play all your music files, sync with most older music players, run office well, and even be enough to check email and do basic web browsing. If your current machine is productive, that's great, if you don't think you'd see an increase in productivity, well that's all the more reason to save your money these days. However, a newer machine, even with Vista, will be faster running Vista than almost any 9x system. (Assuming you're not running 98 on say a 3.8 GHz P4).

Why disable it? Just push it behind the hard drive in the boot order.

Lack of stability, and the inability to have files greater than 4GB strikes me first.

What do you mean a board problem? I don't have the issue on IE6 on Windows 98 SE, or FF 3.5.2 on Vista x64.

I always run CCleaner on Vista before running Auslogics Disk Defrag, because it cleans up some odd 100-300 mb worth of temporary internet files that I don't need to waste time defragmenting, only to eventually delete. The little registry things it picks up are so insignificant, but since that scan runs fairly quickly, it doesn't hurt to keep the system tidy. As for performance gains, on older PII era 9x machines, it may make a slight difference with MUI lists and such if they're really cluttered, but on newer hardware, you'll most likely see no real benefit.

Well, here's the issue. First off, you'd never be able to run the OS from an NTFS drive, it would require far too major changes to the closed source kernel we don't have access to. It's not very hard to write a program to read/write NTFS drives, maybe by the use of a simple virtual real mode driver. However, when you speak of system wide NTFS support, you are talking a far more complex job. In order to natively support a different file system, and have explorer, amongst all Windows applications be able to write to NTFS as if it were nothing, you'd have to implement the support at the kernel level. Again, when you speak of file systems in the kernel, being closed source makes this a whole hell of a lot more difficult. All of the GUI in Windows, including the applications, deal very little with the actual disk access of the operating system. How it works is that a basic write command in the code is sent (such as C++ or VB). When compiled, this code speaks to the APIs for that programming language, which are specifically written differently for each operating system to inferace with the kernel and other lower level code. It is THAT code, that then deals with the physical disk, and therefore, the file system. So the changes would have to be made at that level to pass up the benefits to all applications, and even Windows Explorer, which is just a basic Windows program, set as shell in boot.ini. My guess as to why no one has bothered to implement this in Windows 98 is because it never really crossed paths that much when Windows NT began to rise up, and now, there's far too few Windows 98 active users where anyone would take the initiative, time, and energy required to make this undertaking.

Is it only in FF 3.5.2? My guess it's just an issue with KernelEX/FF. I'd probably wager that FF attempts to use a relatively newer way to ensure the saved passwords are kept secure on the disk, and that may require an NT system call on Windows that has not yet been implemented in KernelEX.

If you, like me, want just a vanilla 98SE and aren't interested in any aftermarket patches (although the community's work is much appriciated), you just need to download the IE 6 installer, and install it. Upon doing so, you can get all official updates still from the Microsoft Windows Update website. That's what I did.

I'm another generic .exe here.

I ran Me for a while years ago before I had a machine that could handle Xp. For it's time, if you disabled system restore and certain other things, Me ran fine, just as stable as 98SE. Arguably the interface is a little more refined. However, I now use 98 because I can use Real-Mode DOS without hacking. That said, I didn't have bad Me experiences myself. Anyway, I will definitely give K-Melon a shot, thanks for the suggestion.