Should Windows 98/ME still be supported by hardware and software manufacturers?

[bsobel]

I would guess that more than half of the current installed base of Windwoes is of the 9x family.

Now that is scientific. The actualy number is much lower, their is plenty of market research on whats being used. Further, the rate of hardware upgrade and software purchases on 9x boxes is much lower than newer boxes/newer OS's.

Bill

 

[corkyg]

In the final analysis - legacy software/OS will be supported only as long as it is profitable to do so. There comes a time when it is necessary to turn the page and get on with life.

How many new programs carry printer drivers for DOS 6.2?

 

[Tom]

"like ive said before ~ how many of you have run Win98se on a modern machine? "

I dual boot 98se and XP on my main system, a P4 at 2.4, and never have any problems in 98se.

I'd like it if Microsoft and other companies kept supporting 98, but I don't expect they will; but not because there's anything wrong with 98, it just isn't the way they make money.

 

[dawks]

Originally posted by: Fern
Got any proof other than anedotal/personal opinion stuff?

What kind of proof do you need? Reading articles on gaming sites are not going to provide you the proof you seem to WANT. The authors on most 'popular' sites have no idea what is going on inside a kernel of an Operating system. If you really want to get some information on the differences between the two OS kernels in discussion here, and why the are soo very different, hop over to MSDN and have fun spending several hours reading through thousands upon thousands of documents.

The difference between a Win9x kernel and a WinNT kernal are like day and night. As Sunner said above, they are just two totally different beasts.

Originally posted by: Fern
Used ME and 98se for gaming until last month, now I'm using win2K sp4 on my primary gaming rig cuz I'm playing Doom 3. B4 that, I had a dual 98se/XP setup on the rig in my sig. WinXp ain't faster (good lord the bootup/shutdown times are like molasses compared to 98se), nor more stable. Now there's many things I don't do that you may, like rip DVDs etc. Maybe there are some features you benefit by, which I don't use/need/want.

There are many sites which have compared XP to ME or 98se for gaming, no advantage to XP ever found. Instead of "theorizing", I've compared the two on my dual setup. Know what? XP isn't faster and I rarely needed a patch to play many current games like Far Cry, KoTOR etc. You gotta have the patches for XP, not 98se.

Why did you switch to Win2k to play Doom3? Probably because memory intensive applications will bring Win9x OS's to their knees, reguardless of how well the application was coded.

Windows XP boots to a usable state in 30 seconds on my PII 400 with 256ram. 20 Seconds on my Athlon XP 2800+ with 512 ram. Thats plenty fast.

As I stated above, many of the authors of these articles dont completely understand whats going on underneath within the OS and HAL, to give a good, informative writing. Win9x OS's have potential to run games faster since programs within those OS's have Direct access to hardware. In an NT based OS, Windows NT controls all access to hardware, adding a layer of software, which can be a potential slowdown. On the other hand, this provides much more stability, by keeping badly programming applications from doing something they shouldnt.

The other key in this case where XP would be considered 'faster' comes with general overall use. While the actual ingame speeds are very much alike, after you close a game, Windows NT is much better at getting the system resources back. I remember sometimes after playing a game back on a 98 system, I had to reboot the computer to get it back to a useable speed. That was because 98 wasnt capable of reallocating the system resouces. NT OS's do this extremely well, which is why the can run smoothly for months at a time and a 9x OS cannot.

If you compare OS kernels from Linux, BSD, Unix, WinNT and Win9x, you'll see that the WinNT kernel is much more comparable to Linux, BSD or Unix, then the 9x kernel is (as far as memory management and such is concerned). The 9x kernel is sort of in a class of its own in this case.
(I know this is a very broad comment but I am trying to shed some light on the situation, if you have a better way of stating it, please do)

Originally posted by: Fern
If you don't swallow the BS marketing hype of M$ and actually tried for yourself, you'll prolly be surprised, notwithstanding the features I don't use (ripping DVDs etc.)

Business apps (accounting/spreadsheets/word processing/email/networking) have not improved in speed and/or stability since win 3.1 and the 486 DX chip.

None of the stuff I pointed out above is marketing hype by MS since 98% of computer uses don't give a damn about kernel scheduling and resource allocation abilities. I have actually tried myself.

While that is a little bit of a strech it is mostly true, but what does it matter here?

Originally posted by: Fern
By the nature of the design, winXp is horrible as far as security issues. Blaster worms, 60mhz refresh issues, re-activation. Bah, your using an OS designed, not for you, but large corporate IT adminstrators, with no tangibles bene's anyone can seem to prove for (small) users like me.

I guess thats a reasonable statement. CS grads have never really been taught to have security as a high priority. Thats only resently changing. You also need to consider the complexity of the OS for one thing, and the requirements of compatibility that the market and Microsoft themselves has put on themselves. The OS has to work on millions of combinations of software and hardware.. It makes it difficult to make everything work, and still be completely secure. If you look closely at whats going on within Microsoft right now, and look at XP SP2, you'll see they are working hard to remedy this situation, but its going to take alot of time and work.

The 60hz refresh rate doesnt fit in with a paragraph on security but it does match this thread nicely, as it is there for older hardware compatibility. Modern drivers meant for modern hardware have the option to deal with the 60hz issue.

Originally posted by: Fern
Simple math says 94% don't beleive XP is superior, or at least not worth the $ to "upgrade". If 98se etc were so unstable/slow you'd think the small amount $ (for a business anyway) would need to upgrade would be worth it. (downtime, hassle, loss of productivity etc.)

Please, link me the sites that say something like "our IT dept has found 37% less service calls found since using XP, or 24% less downtime" etc. Or, find a link comparing FPS in gaming for XP versus 98se etc. that shows an advantage to XP in gaming. Lord knows I've looked. They all report about the same. One may be faster 1% here, slower there. But I've NEVER found any sites doing comparisons to show even a remotely significant difference. WHY? I can only assume after all this searching that there is none. And, again, I've tried for myself on a dual boot system, and not found any bene to XP.

As been said before, there are plenty of reasons which to most, out weigh the cost of the upgrade. Many admins have the mentality of 'If it works, why fix it'. Even though it may not work as well as the alternative, it works well enough for them. And theres the cost issue, again a balancing issue. And I dont think anyone has pointed out yet, as it is a small factor, but a factor non-the-less, is retraining of users. Lots of users have enough troubles with computers as it is, but if you go and change a bunch of things, they get irritated.. Its just a fact.

As I said above, the NT kernel isnt designed to make gaming faster, it was designed to make systems run better. If anything Win9x is a 'faster' gaming OS since applications can have direct access to hardware. The key comes when you play a game for two hours, then shutdown the game and fire up Photoshop, 3DStudio Max, AutoCAD, or other large resouce intensive applications. An NT based OS will run much smoother.

Originally posted by: Sunner
Trying to argue that Win9X is better than the NT family in any way other that resource usage is pointless, they're not in any way comparable.

The NT family(2K and XP in particular) have far superior memory management, support for SMP/SMT, superior networking capabilities, support a proper filesystem, "real" use accounts with the security that comes along with that, not to mention, they actually have some security at all, unlike Win9X.

Like VirtualLarry said, if a business is still running Win9X, I can think of three possible reasons, budgets, timeconstraints(which is kinda related to the budget anyway), or legacy applications that won't work well under the NT family.
Luckily we got rid of 9x pretty quickly where I work, moving to NT quite quickly, easily the best infrastructrural upgrade we've ever made.

I'm not sure why I am qouting you here, other then that I agree with what you say. Anwaya I can clearly see a difference between the posters supporting Windows 9x, and those 'not' supporting 9x.. Those posting here for NT based OS's have more industry education and experience.

I will say that for many Windows 9x OS can work fine, but for most, NT based OS's are much more realistic.

 

[McMadman]

I can see programmers writing code with very little care for 9x in the very near future, especially with the whole 16 bit "system resource" limit. I borrowed a copy of star wars battlefront to test it out, and when I tried to install it, resources had dropped so low that buttons weren't displaying properly during the installshield wizard!

After closing some excess programs I had 62% resources, this was barely enough to get by, I alt tabbed to check what the percentage was, and it was at 2%, 60% of win9x's limited resources for just the installer.

The game itself played just fine, only the installer was a problem. Obviously 2k/xp wouldn't have this limitation, and would probably play better due to driver optimizations (I'm using the win98 4.3 catalysts.)

9x is still quite useful for a lower end system that dosen't have the resources that 2k/xp requires, but dosen't have too much time left. Or there are certain games/apps that just don't properly work that compatibility mode still isn't enough for, but a dualboot/virtual pc/vmware into 98 would solve the problem.

 

[Zepper]

Until last week, I was still using Win 98SE myself (just upped to Win 2k) and I've resold a couple of legal copies in the last six months. The official count (per IDC) of win 9x/Me is only 100 Million worldwide... If you actually believe that figure, I've got a bridge in the vicinity of Lon Gisland (sic) for sale ... If the actual user base of the 9x family is under triple that, I'll eat any convenient chapeau!
.bh.

 

[dderolph]

Until last week, I was still using Win 98SE myself (just upped to Win 2k) and I've resold a couple of legal copies in the last six months. The official count (per IDC) of win 9x/Me is only 100 Million worldwide... If you actually believe that figure, I've got a bridge in the vicinity of Lon Gisland (sic) for sale ... If the actual user base of the 9x family is under triple that, I'll eat any convenient chapeau!

... triple... So, you think it might be as high as 300 million?

In this lengthy thread, we've seen every conceivable opinion, of course. The bottom line, as someone said, is that software/hardware makers will continue to support it as long as they think there's a significant number of users still using it. At one point, Microsoft announced they would discontinue support in Jan 2004, but later recanted and announced they would continue support up to June 2006, I believe.

I used Win 98SE for over 3 1/2 years. I just started using Win XP in May of this year; installed it under a dual boot configuration. This is on a machine with an Athlon XP 2200 and 512MB RAM. Both OS run well on this machine. I think it's not surprising the Office 97 apps, under Win 98SE, are snappier that Office 2003 apps under Win XP. Again, that's not surprising due to the ever-increasing bloat in later versions of Office.

I would simply say that Win XP is obviously a more sophisticated OS; no question about that. But, I think some of the comments in thread about Win 98SE being a piece of trash are just plain silly. As a long time user of Win 98SE, I had very little stability problems. I don't leave my computer on for days at a time. If I'm using Win 98SE, I seldom experience a lockup. Now, there was a period of time when I was experiencing some lockups. I upgraded my video driver and problem was solved. So, I suspect the comments here about lack of stability were, at least in some cases, due to such issues as driver problems.

Not surprisingly, I find myself using Win XP most of the time now. One simple reason is that it looks nicer. Win XP uses ClearType technology, and that makes text a little sharper, a little nicer to view than under Win 98SE. As a fairly new entrant into the digital photography arena, I also find XP has some nice built-in functionality for digital photos that Win 98SE does not have. I found that XP also has better support for CD burners. For example, I believe you can open Explorer and simply drag files to your CD-RW drive and those files will be written to the CD; no need to launch a separate program. I'd say XP is also a much better system if you want to set up a computer for multiple users, with each user having their own profile.

So, yes, I'm glad I have XP, but I think you'll see support for Win 98SE from many vendors continuing for awhile. There's still too large a user base to ignore it.

 

[VirtualLarry]

Originally posted by: McMadman
I can see programmers writing code with very little care for 9x in the very near future, especially with the whole 16 bit "system resource" limit. I borrowed a copy of star wars battlefront to test it out, and when I tried to install it, resources had dropped so low that buttons weren't displaying properly during the installshield wizard!

After closing some excess programs I had 62% resources, this was barely enough to get by, I alt tabbed to check what the percentage was, and it was at 2%, 60% of win9x's limited resources for just the installer.

The game itself played just fine, only the installer was a problem. Obviously 2k/xp wouldn't have this limitation, and would probably play better due to driver optimizations (I'm using the win98 4.3 catalysts.)

9x is still quite useful for a lower end system that dosen't have the resources that 2k/xp requires, but dosen't have too much time left. Or there are certain games/apps that just don't properly work that compatibility mode still isn't enough for, but a dualboot/virtual pc/vmware into 98 would solve the problem.

Sorry to burst your bubble, but W2K/XP still have "resource limits". Open Task Manager, click on the "Processes" tab, select "View", "Select Columns...", and check off "USER handles" and "GDI handles".
Now you can watch your resource usage on a per-process basis in real-time.

By default, W2K has a per-process GDI resource limit of 10000. You might think that's a lot, but I bump into it all the time using Mozilla (and now Firefox). It causes the app to redraw all screwy, fonts get missing, dialog widgets go missing, etc.

The worst part is, besides the per-process limit, there appears to be a system-wide limit of only around 16000. (Rough guess, determined empirically.)

So if there is a significant amount of combined GDI resource usage already, system-wide, then exceeding the per-process limit by one app that uses a large number of GDI resources (like Mozilla), will cause *all* apps to redraw totally wonky.

Thankfully, this doesn't cause the entire OS to keel over and die, like Win9x does, and the resources do get properly freed if you entirely terminate the resource-hogging apps in question, unlike Win9x which generally had to be rebooted. But the limits are *still there*, just with a slightly higher number.

 

[McMadman]

Originally posted by: VirtualLarry

Sorry to burst your bubble, but W2K/XP still have "resource limits". Open Task Manager, click on the "Processes" tab, select "View", "Select Columns...", and check off "USER handles" and "GDI handles".
Now you can watch your resource usage on a per-process basis in real-time.

By default, W2K has a per-process GDI resource limit of 10000. You might think that's a lot, but I bump into it all the time using Mozilla (and now Firefox). It causes the app to redraw all screwy, fonts get missing, dialog widgets go missing, etc.

The worst part is, besides the per-process limit, there appears to be a system-wide limit of only around 16000. (Rough guess, determined empirically.)

So if there is a significant amount of combined GDI resource usage already, system-wide, then exceeding the per-process limit by one app that uses a large number of GDI resources (like Mozilla), will cause *all* apps to redraw totally wonky.

Thankfully, this doesn't cause the entire OS to keel over and die, like Win9x does, and the resources do get properly freed if you entirely terminate the resource-hogging apps in question, unlike Win9x which generally had to be rebooted. But the limits are *still there*, just with a slightly higher number.

Whoops, I did forget that the gdi/user resource heaps are there, just nowhere near as in your face as they have been.

The big thing of course is that 2K/XP will actually release the resources better than 9x. And of course it'll still be very possible to write a single program that can totally drain 9x of all resources, but run just fine on 2K/XP, which was one statement I made with that installer.

I am actually amazed that they would have the per application limit and the global limit so very close to each other.