What's the problem with this? (Microsoft Windows 98 Second Edition)

Member Name: theanarchistkid

Product:	Microsoft Windows 98 Second Edition
Date:	19/02/01 (1165 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Solid, powerful, easy.

Disadvantages: A bit sluggish sometimes.

It is a well known fact amongst the computer literate that Microsoft Windows has hundreds of bugs, error, ‘features’ and other little idiosyncrasies that are set to annoy. Amongst the people that know very little about computers however, Windows appears complex and difficult to understand. So, who is correct?

Well the correct answer is neither of the above. Windows is actually a mightily powerful and efficient piece of software. Just to start things off, I’m going to drift slightly off topic and discuss good old Microsoft for a minute or two. So, everybody hates them, right? Well no actually, Microsoft has an increasingly large portion of devotees who are starting to realise that they are a very good company.

Microsoft have always been accused of using dodgy business tactics to get ahead, but the truth is that they haven’t really done anything that another company wouldn’t do. The most important thing to take into consideration though is, ‘If Microsoft were to go bankrupt tomorrow, what would happen?’ Being realistic, this would never happen but if people keep moaning and suing Microsoft, well, you never know.

The answer to this question is that the world would be in big trouble. Think about it, no more technical support for Windows, no more bug-fixing, no upgrades and think about the effect that it would have on all technology shares. The whole market would plummet. This isn’t being at all sensationalist and it does offer an accurate representation of what would happen. Maybe it’s a bad thing that a company like Microsoft has the ability to bring down the world, but as I see it, they’ve got themselves into that position fairly so I don’t have a problem with it.

Now, quickly whizzing back onto the topic if Windows 98, I will give a quick rundown of its new features:

Dual Monitor Support – Not actually as useful as some people have said due to the fac
t that it takes a lot of getting used to. It allows a user with 2 graphics cards and 2 monitors to use them all at the same time to produce an extra large desktop area. I’ve tried it out once and it isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. It’s a real pain to get used to and I wouldn’t really have a practical use for it. However, for people such as web site designers I could see it being quite useful.

General Aesthetic Improvements – Yes, it all looks a bit better. There are now a load of animations which accompany various actions and everything gels together nicely. Menus slide out rather than just pop up, title bars have graduated fills on them and everything somehow looks a bit more 3-dimensional.

Control Panel Modifications – Nothing too drastic here, just that there is now a new icon for digital cameras and scanners which is VERY useful and makes setting such things up much easier. Generally, hardware installation is a smoother process with less conflicts and problems.

That’s about it as far as new features go, but there are some subtle improvements and certainly some under the skin ones. For a start USB is implemented very well and is much more stable than it ever was under Windows 95 OSR2, so it is now possible and easy to have several devices connected up to your USB ports. On Win95 OSR2, USB support was pretty sketchy to say the least and was plagued with compatibility problems. These have thankfully all been sorted out with Windows 98 however, so there are no problems.

All of the usual applications are present such as Wordpad, Notepad, Calculator and several extra accessibility apps which are designed for people with disabilities. There were some of these present in older versions of Windows, but I’m pretty sure that the application which magnifies portions of the screen is brand new. All of the standard ‘games’ are still here so anyone who enjoyed Minesweeper in
older versions of Windows, will be ecstatic to hear that it is still present. There is a new version of Media Player to keep MP3 fans happy although this version still doesn’t support playlists, although I think that the latest version does.

Performance wise, Windows 98 is OK. It’s supposed to be marginally quicker than Windows 95 but on a system with 32Mb RAM it is much slower. The minimum RAM I would recommend for Windows 98 is 64Mb and I would suggest that if the user wants more speed, they should upgrade to 128Mb or maybe even 256Mb if they are going to be using intensive applications. Windows 98 is slightly less responsive than Windows 95 but it is still far from slow. There are a few utilities included to help optimise your PC although essentially these appear have little noticeable effect on the speed at which things run.
The minimum spec that I would suggest for running Windows 98 comfortably is around a Pentium 200, 64Mb RAM and at least a 2Gb hard disk if you want to install lots of applications. You can get away with less but it is a painful experience. Having said that, certain Dooyoo members have it running fine on a P90 with 32Mb RAM, so maybe I'm mistaken. ;)


Windows 98 is famed for being very unstable and constantly hanging but I wouldn’t agree with this. Sure it comes up with the odd error message, but more often than not it manages to recover from these without requiring a reboot. This makes a nice change from Windows 95 which often needed reboots and even reformats when there were serious problems.

Overall, Windows 98 is an improvement on Windows 95, although of course, you could now plump for Windows 2000 or ME, both of which are likely to have new features and improvements.

Summary: