This will require opinions to answer in some degree but it seems to fit better here…
I just had a friend help me build a computer to replace my trusty HP Pavilion which died the other day with a bunch of Crisis in the Hard Drive! noises.
Anyway, its based around an AMD Athlon 2600, with an nVidia Nforce 2 chipset; 512 megs of RAM and a 40 gig (going to 80 when its back in stock at my component store) hard drive.
Anyway, I installed Windows 98 SE because I had a copy already- is it worth going to XP? My friend suggested that 98 isn’t adequate because it wasn’t designed with systems running at over 2 GHz in mind.
Any suggestions on a) a technical level, regarding whether I’m losing performance with 98, and b) a preference level… is XP buggier? etc., would be much appreciated.
My experience has been the exact oposite. I was offered my choice of operating sytems with my latest machine and opted for XP. Bad choice. Every single time a program stops responding it seizes the whole system. No chance to us the task manager because everything seizes. Total reboot required.
I have since istalled my copy of 98 from the old machine. No problems.
My personal experience is go with 98. Not excatly scientific but it’s a vote.
still up to date through directx9
plays all your old games
very fast explorer interface
you need applications for zip, CD writing, etc
needs APIC disabled in BIOS to resolve interrupt problems
you need to be savvy about drivers and install issues
can be less stable than NT/2k/XP variants
XP:
does it all for you
pretty, although slow, explorer interface
supports new hardware
crashing apps do not take down the system
Home use: My vote goes to 98 for speed and backward compatibility.
Office use: XP for stability and network roll-outs.
How about Linux running VMWare or win4lin? That way if your Windows system crashes, it doesn’t bring down your whole computer. And with VMWare you can install multiple Windowses (how do pluralize a plural?).
You’ll have to excuse me… I’m not entirely up to speed on a lot to do with PCs… I didn’t know you could run more than one operating system… but wouldn’t that suck up a metric crapload of memory anyway?
Multiple operating systems will take up disk space, but since you can only run one at a time they don’t conflict over memory usage.
I dual boot 98 and XP just because I need the compatibility of 98 for some software and I like XP for internet access and office apps and such.
The last time I looked at the various windows emulators for linux they still weren’t quite ready for prime time. They are a lot better than they used to be, but not quite ready as a general substitute for a windows OS.
There’s no performance issue with a 2+ GHz machine and 98. In fact, because 98 is designed to run on slower processors, you’ll have more spare cpu cycles for your software under 98 than you would under XP. On either machine, with a cpu that fast you aren’t going to notice the difference in operating systems performance.
Microsoft is rather poor about keeping the application interface consistant between various windows versions (they will gladly break compatibility to make the OS “better”). Also, NT versions (NT, 2000, XP) have a “hardware abstraction layer” which doesn’t allow software to directly access the hardware. This is what protects the core of the operating system from misbehaving programs (which is why it’s a lot easier to lock up a 98 box than an XP box) but it also causes a lot of incompatibility with software, especially older games. Depending on what software you run, you may find that a lot of things don’t work under XP.
You’re right about Windows emulators. WINE pretty-much sucks, and the others don’t seem promising. VMWare, though, isn’t a Windows emulator. It’s a virtual machine (like Virtual PC on my Mac). It has a full, licensed install of my Win98 and WinXP on it. It’s only a hair slower then booting up natively, since it is a virtual machine and the hardware is emulated. Virtual PC on the Mac (and there’s a Windows version) works the same way. Except on the Mac it’s slower since besides the hardware it must emulate the processor. I’m using the 30-day demo of VMWare, though, so I don’t know what I’ll do when it expires. Maybe see if work has a site-license or something. There’s no Virtual PC for Linux, unfortunately, and now that Microsoft bought it from Connectix, it’s doubtful there will be.
WinXP runs quite a bit slower than Win98 does on the same machine, and it crashes a lot also (at least in my case). When it crashes it totally hangs; that BFD “task manager” doesn’t work. Either the whole system freezes so you can’t even open the task manager, or you select and end the task, and it ends-- and then— nothing–(everything is still locked up)-- that task is gone (as far as you know) but you get no more response than before. Or the whole desktop and icons disappear and keyboard input doesn’t work, so you have to do a hardware reboot anyway. My PC setup is all about 4 years old, all assembled out of name-brand parts that got good reviews at the time, and that 98SE runs just about perfect. In particular XP doesn’t like hardware drivers at all, unless they’re approved by MS for XP, but of course most you find aren’t, unless it’s for something totally brand-new. The only thing I have found that XP does that 98SE doesn’t is that my PC on 98SE won’t run virtual drives at all with any of several CD-copying programs I tried, but it will run those same programs just fine on XP.
My copy of XP is a P2P copy, which some have pointed out may be why it doesn’t work well. I kinda doubt that myself, because it continues to update and otherwise function properly, in between crashes. There are too many instances of it doing things wrong or locking up to relate here. The advanced features aren’t that useful: the different accounts aren’t really totally separate (they share machine settings such as screen resolution) and aren’t secure (to use the pushbutton log-on screen, one pushbutton has to be set up with admin rights—WTF was the point of that!?!?!?!). At the moment I’m not using XP at all, because something in the startup has been messed up and it takes like 45 minutes to start. And I switch back and forth between XP and 98 because there is software and hardware I have that 98 runs just fine, but that won’t work at all in XP.
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I’ve been researching XP in comparison to Mac OSX. Here’s a few links I found. My conclusion: I would rather gnaw my own foot off than install XP. The system is not secure, among other startling and shocking revelations.
I would go with XP - I have found it to be vasty more stable than 98; I got crashes every couple of days with 98, but with XP I have gone months without even turning my computer off. If you don’t like the “fisher-price” GUI on XP, it is pretty simple to change it so it looks and acts like 98. Keep the 98 on dual boot for the older games through.
You might want to stay away from XP but upgrade to Windows 2K - I did that when configuring my current workstation here at work. I run a lot of apps simultaneously and I can honestly say that I haven’t had a system crash since I got the machine in March.
I run 98 at home and while good, I still get the occasional blue screen of death.
Microsoft is great at hiding simple truths behind some really spiffy advertising hype. If you look at how the operating systems identify themselves, you get a much clearer picture of what is going on.
Windows 95 identifies itself as Windows 4.0.
Windows 98 identifies itself as Windows 4.1.
Windows ME identifies itself as Windows 4.2.
NT 4.0 identifies itself as NT 4.0
Windows 2000 identifies itself as NT 5.0
Windows XP identifies itself as NT 5.1
95, 98, and ME are all minor version changes in the same product line. You’d expect software that runs on one to have a very good chance of running on any of the others in this series, which is pretty much true.
2000 is a major version jump up from NT, but is basically still part of the NT line. 2000 and XP, despite the major facelift changes, are very close underneath the hood. XP is really only a minor upgrade to 2000. Generally speaking, most software that works under 2000 will work under XP, and vice-versa.
You end up with the most software incompatibilities when you jump from one product line to the other, due to the fact that the underlying structure of the NT product is completely different than the underlying structure of the windows product.
With windows XP, microsoft “merged” the two product lines together, which is a total load of doublespeak crap. They didn’t merge anything. They killed off the windows line. From here on out we all run NT whether we like it or not. However, they did put a lot of work into making XP more compatible with older windows software, which means that out of the NT line, XP is the most compatible with windows 9.x software. In my experience it’s only been marginally better than 2000 though.
Cite? No offense, but I have heard lots of different figures for how much RAM 98 can “use”, and none of them were direct from Microsoft–they only publish a minimum, which is what? 32? I have heard as low as 192 megs, and I have read a few program supprt FAQ’s that said lot of people have problems if they install more than 512 megs (in Win98)… -but I have a few programs that are RAM-resident, such as Paint Shop Pro–in which, both the program executable and the image file you are working with must both fit in RAM at the same time, and I know from an older Win98 machine I have that came with 64 megs and I later bought another 256 for that there was definitely a huge increase in the file sizes that PSP would allow working with–so I’d be willing to bet that it very well can use more than 192 megs…
It seems to me that the only people who would really “know” such technical details are the ones familiar with the source code, and they don’t seem to like revealing much.
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Thanks for all the responses… keep 'em coming, please!
Incidentally, since I can’t be bothered to run them on double boot (unless someone can explain how in 5 easy steps) sticking with 98 appears to be winning right now…
Partition the hard drive into 2 partitions, splitting the size as needed (XP takes up more space the 98, but if you have a lot of software you’re only going to use in 98, you may want to give 98 more space)
Install Windows 98 to the first partition.
Install Windows XP to the second partition. The XP install will install the boot loader to enable you to choose between 98 and XP.
Fairly simple process. There are some decisions that need to be made. The partition split is one. You can choose to create 2 primary partitions, hiding your OSes from each other, or you can create a primary and a logical, allowing XP to see the 98 partition, and 98 to see the Xp partition if you don’t format it NTFS.
I think with that computer, you’re likely to find that XP is just fine and you would be spending less and less time in 98 anyway. The older games are probably going to be your only reason for needing 98 at all, if they don’t run on XP with ot without compatibility mode.
The article has instructions on what to do if you do have more RAM than that also.
Dual booting is as simple as installing 98 first then XP. Make sure you install a new copy of XP to somewhere other than your C:\WINDOWS directory (in other words, answer no when it says upgrade your existing windows). XP will automatically install a boot manager that will give you a choice between booting 98 and XP when you start the machine.
Don’t let XP “upgrade” the partition to NTFS. It’s a one way trip (you can’t convert it back without wiping the partition and starting over) and 98 can’t handle the NTFS partition without some major fiddling.
It’s a little easier on your sanity if you partition the drive and keep all the 98 stuff on one partition and all the xp stuff on the other partition, but it’s not a requirement.
so this is not encouraging news… 