Stanley Daniel de Liver wrote:

New hardware won't have W98 drivers available. 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. These things are progress.

Microsoft has a chart he

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa366778.aspx

....that covers memory limits from XP on. Basically:

- Win7x64 can use up to 192gb (limited by how much $ was spent on Windows)
- Server 2008 R2 can use up to 2tb (no x86 version)
- Win8x64 can use up to 512gb
- Server 2012 can use up to 4tb (no x86 version)

None of those do *me* any good; my only x64 workstation seems to be limited
to 1gb (it's a BIOS problem; it reports the installed RAM as 768mb
(incorrect!) and XP reports "704 MB" in System Properties... sigh).

But I mostly agree, learning a new UI every release is a PIA.

I didn't remember much difference moving from 98 to 2000... but when I *had*
to move to XP a few years back (got a hard drive that 2000 *would not* use),
it was... interesting. I'm mostly used to it now. Mostly.

--
I'll just trot on down to the end of the line
and wait for my head to explode.