Only real choice (Microsoft Windows 98 Second Edition)

Member Name: adamdavid

Product:	Microsoft Windows 98 Second Edition
Date:	19/07/00 (22 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Looks nice, easy to use, extensive hardware support, the only real choice

Disadvantages: Unstable

I started using a PC years ago, just before Windows 95 was released and was using Windows 3.1. This was nice and stable and seemed to work reasonably quickly. Then I decided my old PC was too outdated and got a brand spanking new speed demon which came with Windows 98. First impressions were:
Looks nice, is much more friendly looking, wow, what a lot of things there are on the programmes list that I have absolutley no idea what they are for or why I would want to use them!
After using it for a while, I found the system monitor. I ran it and found that Windows 98 uses more than half of the installed memory (I have 256MB). This astounded me since I thought the minimum spec was about 64MB, but system monitor told me I only had 113MB of free memory. Surprising, but not a problem.
After the novelty of the new look Windows had worn off, I noticed that Windows 98 is actually rubbish. It is probably the most unstable piece of crap I've ever used. Windows 3.1 rarely used to crash unless I dod something silly like trying to run Word, Excel and Powerpoint with enormous files with only 8MB of RAM. Windows 98 seems to crash if I look at the monitor in a funny way. There doesn't seem to be a pattern to the crashes either. No particular piece of software or hardware causes the crashes, it just seems to happen without warning.
The first time you see the dreaded "blue screen of death" using the words fatal exception error you panic and think that your computer is about to explode. After you've seen it half a dozen times, you simply hit CTRL-ALT-DEL and start again. I've never needed to reinstall Windows 98 (I've been lucky) and I would like Windows 98 if it was more stable. It has potential to be really easy and friendly to use.
I've never known a piece of software need to be patched so many times either. If it wasn't for the hardware issues, I'd have gone back to using Windows 3.1. Windows 98
could have been such a good piece of software, but because Microsoft have no competitors in the OS market they seem to be able to release any old tosh and sell millions of units around the world. I know that it is incredibly difficult to get so many different graphics cards, motherboards, CD-ROMs, processors, etc to work in harmony, but surely Windows 98 shouldn't be as unstable as this.
The more I use Internet Explorer, the less I like it, and it's built in to Windows. I so want to like Windows 98, and when it's working, I do like it, and to be fair, it's not as bad as I made out. The problem is that it crashes more often than it should and it tends to do it at the most inconvenient times.
Windows 98 teaches new users good habits. Habits like regularly backing up important files and regular running of Scandisk and Disk Defragmenter become routine out of necessity. I also find that I've downloaded almost every patch from the Microsoft site (even though they don't actually seem to do anything).

Windows 98 is the only real choice for operating system. Linux is supposed to be very fast and very stable but has poor hardware support so it looks like I, like most other people, will be stuck with Windows (in what ever form) for the forseeable future. If Microsoft actually developed a proper and stable operating system then it would be worthy of it's market dominance. Instead it's dominance had led to it becoming complacent and cack-handed when it develops it's new products by claiming that this time they've ironed out the bugs.

In summary (if you've read this far), Windows is the only real choice. People say nice things about Windows ME, but I use Windows 98. It could be good, and sometimes it is. But sometimes it crashes (or freezes) for NO REASON AT ALL.

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