In message , 98 Guy writes:
[]
I realize that the vast majority of people are handicapped in that they
don't have the intelligence or skill or experience or clue about
building their own PC, and hence they are a slave to what-ever is

A _little_ arrogant: true in probably the majority of cases, but also
the limitation of hardware availability. Not everyone has the money - or
knowledge to know which is going to remain a "good" choice - to lay in
stockpiles of components (motherboards, etc.) for which older OS drivers
(even XP, let alone 98) are available.

available to them at the retail level - which usually means they have no
choice about which version of Windows will be forced on them when they
buy a new PC.

Certainly agree with you the if I went to most of my local outlets, I
doubt I could find a Windows 7 machine now.

I also realize that the desktop PC itself is a dying segment of the
"personal computer" product space - with that space being taken over by
hand-held devices (phones, tablets, etc) and dwindling number of laptops
and netbooks.

Indeed. And home-build of laptops/netbooks isn't really possible for the
average punter.

This means you miss out modern faster gizmos. And anything 2G.
64bit W7 can handle many terabytes of memory, w98 is limited
to 2G IIRC.

Win-98 can "see" and use at most 1192 mb of ram, and it can't boot if
the system has more than 1.5 gb of physical ram.

But that's not the point.

It can be for some ...

For the vast majority of desktop-computer use-case situations, a win-98
system with 512 mb of ram can accomplish quite a bit (lots of open
windows and running programs). That's because unlike NT-based windows,
win-98 doesn't need a lot of ram to run lots of completely bloated and
unnecessary processes and services.

Well, say, transcoding HR video in something approaching real-time will
make it squeak a bit. As to whether this constitutes "the vast
majority", there is a lot of truth in what you say - but also, what you
do _is_ tailored at least to some extent by what you know you _can_ do -
though it hurts to admit it.

(Certainly, most of what I do - email, usenet, and genealogy - could be
done perfectly well under Windows 3.1, or even DOS, though I like
task-switching to be available. But I probably _would_ do more with,
say, video, if I had more powerful hardware [with bigger discs], and a
larger internet monthly limit.)
--
J. P. Gilliver. UMRA: 1960/1985 MB++G()AL-IS-Ch++(p)Ar@T+H+Sh0!:`)DNAf

live your dash. ... On your tombstone, there's the date you're born and the
date you die - and in between there's a dash. - a friend quoted by Dustin
Hoffman in Radio Times, 5-11 January 2013