Windows 98 - Power Zapper (Microsoft Windows 98 Second Edition)

Member Name: aljones

Product:	Microsoft Windows 98 Second Edition
Date:	03/05/01 (212 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Good for home use; Widely supported

Disadvantages: Not for the power user; Very power and memory intensive

As do most people, I run Windows 98 on my PC. It's a powerful computer, Pentium2 450MHz, 128Mb RAM, so you would think that everything would run smoothly and quickly. Wrong! Infact, Windows 98 seems to plod along at what can only be described as a walking pace whenever you really start to use the system to any real extent. I'm a Computer Science student at Swansea Uni., and as part of my course we do a lot of programming, and a lot of graphics work.

This seems to really kill the OS. Quite frequently I have to sit their, hoping that something might happen in the near future to save me from pressing the dreaded 'Reset' button yet again.

Admittedly, for the average home user who does a bit of word processing, web surfing or game playing, Win98 is a fine operating system. It seems to handle most things nicely, and has a lot of nice refinements over Win95 that make it a far superior operating system.

It's the power users who will notice the downsides to Win98. Basically, it cracks under pressure. Push it, and it feels like your pushing on a brick wall; it just won't budge. Maybe i'm being a bit to harsh. As i've said, most of the time it is fine, but for the work I do you need the full power of the computer that you own.

I also run SuSe Linux, another operating system based on the UNIX system. This is super quick, and uses a graphical user interface as Win98 does. So it can't be my computer that is slow (see my opinion on SuSe Linux, which in my opinion is far superior).

With Win98, I think it falls into the 'Marmite' scale of classification: You either love it, or hate it. Unfortunately, I would have to say that I hate it. It just has too many faults in my opinion. It crashes on a far too regular basis (compared to Linux, which I have never managed to crash), and produces far to many faults while running programs. Having analysed it's power usage, it does seem to require a very
large amount of memory just to run, so it's hardly surprising that when programs are actaully run, you can never get the speed you desire.

Sorry Microsoft, but this is not for the power user. If WinNT became more suitable for the home user, this would solve all my problems, but until then, we are forced to put up with this.

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