Farewell Windows 98 etc

mike65 · 21-12-2003 3:09pm #1

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/3324471.stm

not a big surprise perhaps (except to Micro$oft discovering how many ppl still use old OS) but as a Win98se user a reminder that a perfectly good OS will proberly be abandoned by its maker within the next year...

Mike.

SouperComputer · 21-12-2003 3:26pm

yea, shame really.

of all the OS on my PC, 98 is the only one still running!

L1011 · 21-12-2003 3:49pm

not the first still perfectly good OS to get abandoned by its owners:

IBM dropped OS/2, although ECS picked it up

Be dropped BeOS, although yellowTAB picked it up

RedHat dropped the normal RH line

etc...

Stephen · 21-12-2003 6:12pm

Bye bye windows 98 you smelly piece of poo, you won't be missed.

Capt'n Midnight · 21-12-2003 6:56pm

Well I still consider Win98 to be Win95 OSR3

If you use 98Lite on 98 and put IE 5.5 on win95 it's a real spot the difference contest.

98 can be copied from drive to drive (Xcopy or Lcopy) and will boot and find new hardware - NT / 2K / XP will just blue screen.

If you use ERU (hidden on the CD and M$ web site) you can recover it quickly.

It's not perfect but it's easier to fix than the others.

PS. It's virtually free
Since almost all branded PC's sold had a licence for it !

PS good OS's dropped - whatever happened to CP/M

eh: Stephen what licensed SW will you use instead of 98 ?

Stephen · 21-12-2003 8:26pm

I haven't used 98 in a few years. I'm using Windows XP at the moment. It came with my laptop.

Capt'n Midnight · 21-12-2003 9:59pm

http://www.micromail.ie/cgi-bin/shop.pl?item=0&categ=ZZOS

To upgrade from 98 to XP home is €143.99 - or it's €301.29 on it's own
XP pro is a snip at €359.00 - you can get a resonable low usage computer for that

But XP is sod all use if your hardware or perpherials can't handle XP - hey but then again you are supposed to buy new stuff every 3 years...

joePC · 21-12-2003 10:15pm

Good Riddance really,really bad OS, XP not much better:

Turn to Linux ((Gentoo)) ..............

sceptre · 22-12-2003 1:11am

Originally posted by Capt'n Midnight
PS good OS's dropped - whatever happened to CP/M

I thought it was still going

ColmOT [MSFT] · 22-12-2003 11:31am

I'm delighted that Win 9x is being killed of rapidly!!

I've to use Win9x from time to time in work, and it is completly head wrecking and incomprehensible to use after you use Win 2K or higher.

I'm looking forward to not using it ever again :-D

Capt'n Midnight · 22-12-2003 11:49am

Originally posted by ColmOT [MSFT]
I'm delighted that Win 9x is being killed of rapidly!!

I've to use Win9x from time to time in work, and it is completly head wrecking and incomprehensible to use after you use Win 2K or higher.

I'm looking forward to not using it ever again :-D

First thing I do with an XP setup is change everything to CLASSIC and pop it in to the default user NTUSER.DAT - and I started off with the Windows 3.1 / 3.51 interface so I'm not a big fan of radical GUI changes..
Remember it's not being killed for technical reasons, but purely for marketing.

BTW: 98 (&95) can logon to an NT/2k/Xp domain - XP home can't

ColmOT [MSFT] · 22-12-2003 12:01pm

Well - it is being killed for technical reasons...

Managing 2 codebases is much more intensive and diffcult than 1 codebase.

Also, Win 9x doens't support a lot of the technologies that W2K and later does.

On top of that, the whole architecture was fundementally unstable and fell over at the slightest failure.

W2K/SP are miles ahead of Win 9x technically.

Clod · 22-12-2003 7:32pm

Since switching to w2k (about 4 months) ago, I've had one crash. When I was using w98 I had at least one crash a day. So I won't be sorry to see it go.

mike65 · 22-12-2003 10:34pm

I have to spring to the defence of Win98se. It almost never crashes and I use a alot of homemade/hobbiest plug-in soft-synths and other flaky music apps. The last time I had trouble was when I tried to record in 24bit resolution using a card that was fit only for 16 bit (Audigy 2 basic, I belived what I read on the box!).

Though one app that did used to causes crashes stopped when I stopped using it- namely Internet Explorer. Opera since it hit the 7s has been much more calming....

Mike.

Capt'n Midnight · 23-12-2003 12:32am

I wish people would not get so worked up over 98's MTBF - it's got a very low MTTR instead

ie. if you prepare properly you can have an easy fix os.

Anyway the other point is marketing - m$ could offer it as is at a reduced price - like old games really- for people with old machines. Instead they kill it to maximise sales of the new OS which helps turn the HW/SW spiral up another turn. Which is not good news for people using PC's for accounts / word processing /email and other things where almost any machine would do (especially until the masses get affordable broadband)

Though I do subscribe to the half life theory of 98..

L1011 · 23-12-2003 1:43pm

Originally posted by Capt'n Midnight

PS good OS's dropped - whatever happened to CP/M

Wasn't dropped. They just made the "educated decision" not to licence it to IBM in 1981, and IBM of course went to Microsoft and asked to licence their quick and dirty CP/M clone that they'd just bought for 25 grand - DOS.

The story goes that the IBM people came to the CP/M owners house when the husband was out flying and the wife, who was also a coder, said no. He wanted to say yes....

Dar · 26-12-2003 4:55am

Too many ppl badmouthing 98 I just swapped from xp/slack to 98lite/slack

. XP just rubs me the wrong way.....

Mad Mike · 26-12-2003 12:31pm

Originally posted by Capt'n Midnight
http://www.micromail.ie/cgi-bin/shop.pl?item=0&categ=ZZOS

To upgrade from 98 to XP home is €143.99 - or it's €301.29 on it's own
XP pro is a snip at €359.00 - you can get a resonable low usage computer for that

But XP is sod all use if your hardware or perpherials can't handle XP - hey but then again you are supposed to buy new stuff every 3 years...

I too will miss 98. It was perfect for cheap lash up computers. I have supplied several relatives with sub €200 computers for email and web browsing.

It was great to be able to get a legal copy of 98 for next to nothing that would run almost all industry standard software.

Please don't lecture me about open source - I can just imagine the never ending headaches if I tried to fix my mother in law up with Linux ("This gardening software I bought in Tescos doesn't work...") and I am certainly not going to give the good lady an illegal copy of XP.

mike65 · 14-01-2004 2:23pm

this from the register -

Microsoft has issued a stay of execution for Windows 98, 98 SE and Windows ME, extending support for the geriatric trio until the end of June 2006, and tidying up their status a little, while it's about it. Win98 and SE were scheduled to take the drop this Friday, while ME was due to be around to depress us until the end of the year, with End of Life (defined as one year after an OS enters "non-supported phase" a year after that.

The change means that customers using the operating systems will still be able to get paid-for telephone support, and that Microsoft won't wash its hands entirely when it comes to security issues. Since it got the Trustworthy Computing bug the company has floated the possibility of a cull of the older products being the price of security, but it would appear this won't play with all the customers. Microsoft has also been coming under increasing pressure from open source in emerging and cash-strapped markets, so there's probably some defensive sense in it letting the 98 family run for a little while longer.

Which is a pity, considering how horrid, clunky and dated they all are. But while rational people with disposable income might reckon Microsoft could quite reasonably and public-spiritedly put a bullet in the lot of them now, you can see the problem. Microsoft has been at the forefront of the drive towards better, faster, newer that has driven upgrade cycles down to three years and below, and that has kept Microsoft and much of the IT world in business. But beyond the valued corporate customers squealing with pain over the speed of change there's the whole of the rest of the world - the rest of the world that the IT industry is eyeing greedily as a future market.

The three to five year cycle doesn't work there, nor does the notion that ever-faster hardware leads to ever more wonderful, more beneficial applications. If it ain't broke don't fix it works, but that could mean Win9x machines staying in use for even longer than Microsoft's new standard seven year lifecycle, and IT companies who want to play there having to do unnerving things like trying to fix problems with due consideration of the resources available. And get used to more leisurely product lifecycle

Mike.

Farewell Windows 98 etc

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