On Thu, 24 Jan 2013 15:28:38 +0000 (UTC), "Auric__"
wrote:

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.

Are they really progress? Win98 never needed all that memory. I can
esily run 10 different programs at once and have 25 browser windows open
at the same time. That's when things start running slow, but that is
really an overload, and I need to close some stuff.

I have 512 megs of RAM. Win98 does not need more than that to run well.

But these new OSs suck all the RAM power before a program is even
opened. I still cant see any advantage to these newer OSs, except lots
of useless bloat. Well, Ok, to be honest and fair, the newer OSs did
fix the USB support that 98 lacks. And the newer OSs allow for huge
file sizes, which 98 did not. However I have never had any file even
close the the limit (I forget what the limit is).

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.

Having Win2000 as my dual boot, I will say that it's not all that hard
to use, but was the beginning of the annoying NT system.

It began that nasty NTFS drive format, which I refuse to use. It began
that stupid folder called "Documents and Settings", which contains
"Administrators", "All Users", and "Default User". (This is one very
irritating thing for me, because I never know which one contains what,
and most are repeats......). After all, this computer is only used by
me, I'm the ONLY user, all of thse should be in ONE folder. Then there
came XP with all the stupid questions. Everyting I want to do, has a
"do you really want to ______". I get ****ed at that ****. I didnt hit
the button to do _____ just for the hell of it...

And then comes the bootup and shutdown times. Both 2000 and XP seem to
take forever compared to 98. Hell, on my laptop with XP, I might just
turn it on for one minute, because I left myself a note, such as
someone's phone number. I read the note and shut off, then I'm forced
to hit TWO shutdown buttons (as if one isn't enough), and then I watch
it say "savings settings". WHAT SETTINGS? Not one ****ing thing was
changed, I read a phone number, nothing else....

Thats what I like most about 98. I have it set to boot to dos. 20
seconds later I open my text file that contains my notes, and shut off
the computer. If I want to enter Win98, I "WW" which is my batch file
to start windows (actually it just runs WIN.COM).

You cant do this in W2000 or XP. You got to go thru the entire bootup
process, waste several minutes waiting for it to boot, and then go thru
the shutdown hassle. This is not progress! It should not take 5
minutes to access a tiny text file, and shut down.

Win2000 was irritating, XP seriously annoys me, I dont even want to
imagine how I'd feel about Win7 or 8....