This Program has Performed an Illegal Function .... (Microsoft Windows 98 Second Edition)

Member Name: rob_writer

Product:	Microsoft Windows 98 Second Edition
Date:	05/07/01 (2544 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: What else is there, Good for some things

Disadvantages: Crashes, Slowdown, AHHHHHH

You may ask why I bother to write a review of Windows 98 SE now, when after all its 3 years old and its successor is now well established. The answer is because I still use it, and I bet lots of other people do, and anyway, this gives me my chance to rant about how much I hate it.

Windows 98 was the successor to Windows 95. It didn't change much, just a few new bits here and there, the usual claims of better performance and stability and new versions of programs. It was so crap that Microsoft had to release Windows 98 Second Edition, which fixed all of the bugs and security issues of the first release. That?s a great start surely, but wait - it doesn't end there! To fix a few more problems a fresh install of Windows 98SE requires a trip over to Windows Update to download yet more 'Critical Updates', the likes of which left unchecked may let people gain control of your PC over the internet. Nice to know your PC's safe then!!

But then on the other hand, everyone makes a few mistakes every now and then. They could be forgiven if their OS ran perfectly. But alas, that doesn't happen. I know my PC isn't a powerhouse. As a Pentium 3 700Mhz with 64Mb of RAM it cant compete with the latest 1.8Ghz Pentium 4 machines, and it desperately could use a bit more RAM. But the fact remains that the minimum requirements for Windows 98SE are (quoted)

'486DX or 66 megahertz (MHz) processor and 24 megabytes (MB) of RAM.'

I have well over double the minimum RAM and a processor at least 10x faster. I do find this spec a little hard to believe too, as Windows 98 is not much of a step up from Windows 95 and that ran on a lowly 4Mb of RAM. Anyway, back to my complaining. I have two main points to my complaints.

Firstly, why after being on for a few hours does my PC slow down? If I turn it on in the morning, use it all day running and then closing various programs, does it start to grind to a halt? I know why, b
ut I'll keep that for later.

Secondly, why after a month of two of use does Windows start to die. I mean, it still works, but once you've installed a few programs, uninstalled a few of them, and generally just used your PC for a few months problems start to occur. Windows starts to slow down, more and more programs crashed. Last time it even refused to switch off. The answer is a format and reinstall, which takes a few hours and then even more time to get it back to the way it was.

Of course this is all in addition to the frequent crashes that you experience, but these have become such a general part of using a PC that it feels a little silly to complain about them.

Of course, some people would say that it is the software I use that brings me all this trouble, but then when I think about it, most of it is made by Microsoft anyway. Day to I use Word and Notepad to write in, Internet Explorer to surf the web and Outlook Express to read my email. I had this PC since Christmas and when I got it was really fast, but after 6 months of use it had slowed to a snails pace. I will give it some credit, I had probably installed then uninstalled enough stuff to fill the hard drive 4 times over, and this probably meant that there were wrong version of dll's floating about, but by the end of last week I had a PC that wouldn't turn off (pressing the off switch caused it to restart), Outlook Express crashed 9 time out of 10, and certain web sites crashed Internet Explorer. The whole PC was slow, so the only thing to do was format and reinstall.

So I did and it works well, for now. But still, every day if the PC has been used for a few hours it starts to slow down. Programs obviously leak memory when they are opened and closed, but the fact that I am only using Microsoft programs means that they can't blame it on someone else. Fortunately with the often occurring crashes the PC is never normally on for a few hours continuously
.

In Microsoft?s defence, crashes often occur when using a rogue program. The likes of Napster was always a major culprit, but just because one program crashes it doesn't have to take the whole of Windows down with it - but normally it does.

So why don't I upgrade to ME? Because from what I hear it's worse. There isn't a bog difference to start with, but it's meant to be a bit flashier and in my experience flashiness means more crashes. New programs in ME are limited to a new version of IE, a new version of Media Player, better digital camera stuff including a movie editor, and a few other bits and bobs. The new version of IE is nothing to shout about, as both it and Media Player can be downloaded from the Microsoft website, infact newer versions of each of the two applications can now be downloaded. I am currently using the public IE 6 preview, but am staying well clear of Windows Media Player 7. Microsoft really did excel here, in producing a product that is a bigger piece of crap than normal. No, really, this product takes the biscuit. It does everything the neat compact Media Player 6 did, except it does it in a slower, more complex way and is 10 times more likely to crash. Infact, on unpacking a brand new PC for my Aunty, turning it on, the first program I ran was Media Player so my cousin could see the video that came on their Britney Spears CD. What did it do? Freeze the whole PC.

But hope is on the horizon. You see, from the start Microsoft have based their home PC OS on DOS (acronyms all the way!). The Win 9x series (included ME) may seem to be a standalone OS but in reality they run on DOS, just like Windows 3.1 did. It's just that you can't see so much of it now. With each new version DOS has ventured further in to the background, but it's still there. Anyone who has seen BeOS running will know how good a true graphical OS can be if written from the ground up. It's just a shame that BeOS has
no software. Oh, and before you mention Linux let me tell you that I would definitely use Linux if my modem, scanner and printer were compatible. But I got unlucky, and they aren't so when I used Linux it was little more than an ornament, it showed my defiance of Microsoft but it was about as much use as a cardboard box.

Anyway, back to the Windows tale. While we all happily use the Win 9x series, the server people have had Windows NT to use. I guess Microsoft realised that if they based their server OS on the 9x system then no one would use it. Servers need an uptime considerably longer than 6 hours, and people normally aren't too pleased when they crash either. So MS developed what came to be known as the NT kernel, which did away with DOS totally. It even had its own file system! Perhaps a little sick of all the stick they were getting, Microsoft have decided to unify the NT and 9x series in to one project. To this end they called the latest version of NT Windows 2000, and their next major OS release is going to be called Windows XP. But XP isn't just a new version of ME, which was a new version of 98 which was a new version of 95. Windows XP will use a developed NT/2000 kernel, meaning the end of DOS and a definite improvement to stability for us home users. And that can only be a good thing.

So, back to Windows 98. I have hammered it a lot. And yes, it deserves it, but it also deserves a little praise.

If anyone remembers back in the old days of DOS and Windows 3.1. Things were hellish. You want to play a game, then go back to DOS. But the chances were you didn't have enough EMS or XMS or conventional memory. So make a boot disk, but remember to load certain things in to high memory and then set up that soundblaster correctly. Thank the lord for DirectX!!
On the one hand Microsoft?s dominance is a bad, slightly scary thing, but on the other at least it has meant that PC's are easier to use. Just imagine if you
had two real rival OS's to contend with!! Plug and play is a great invention too, back on Windows 3.1 it took me 2 weeks to get a Soundblaster 8-bit card to work!

However, I would like to see a bit more innovation, or at least some blatant stealing of ideas!! Linux has a rather cool feature (or more notably, KDE and GNOME do) whereby you have multiple desktops so you can arrange your gubbins more easily, having say, all your Instant Messenger boxes on one desktop, and all your web pages in another. And why can't home users have the ultra efficient NTFS file system, it's meant to never need defragmenting!!

Now after writing all that, all I have to do is rate it. While I'm not happy with it, what else are people going to use? So let me see......3 stars but a must do better next time.

I have to use it, but it won't stop me moaning!

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