Bye, Windows 98

[Hybrid]

...so firefox should cater to 1% of the market? Uh no that is not how anything works in any type of business.

Using that logic, Fx/Thunderbird would only come in a Windows flavor (Came to this thread belatedly; am a Win98SE user at the moment but will be upgrading once I decide on which direction to take. And agree about the archaic nature of Win98...come on, guys, time to upgrade. OS's don't live forever.)

Anyone who actually runs Windows 98 has NO knowledge in computers. They are equipped with a grade 5 intellect and cannot sufficiently program a VCR to stop flashing 12:00. They have problems making toast and are scared of online banking. Anyone who first used Windows 98 was using what was available...anyone still using it might as well buy a typewriter and save some dollars on their monthly power bills.

Windows 98 users should be castrated to prevent propogation of their sub-species. And if someone is sitting their griping about cost of upgrade? Linux is free! I would have cut out 98 support long ago. Who cares about 98 users, really.

PS: Linux and OS X both contain more than 1% of the market share for OS's. MS is not "all that" anymore.

[hambot]

Ya got it backwards. To run Windows 98, you really have to understand computers. XP is for the computer illiterate.

[Shining Celebi]

...so firefox should cater to 1% of the market? Uh no that is not how anything works in any type of business.

Using that logic, Fx/Thunderbird would only come in a Windows flavor (Came to this thread belatedly; am a Win98SE user at the moment but will be upgrading once I decide on which direction to take. And agree about the archaic nature of Win98...come on, guys, time to upgrade. OS's don't live forever.)

Anyone who actually runs Windows 98 has NO knowledge in computers. They are equipped with a grade 5 intellect and cannot sufficiently program a VCR to stop flashing 12:00. They have problems making toast and are scared of online banking. Anyone who first used Windows 98 was using what was available...anyone still using it might as well buy a typewriter and save some dollars on their monthly power bills.

Windows 98 users should be castrated to prevent propogation of their sub-species. And if someone is sitting their griping about cost of upgrade? Linux is free! I would have cut out 98 support long ago. Who cares about 98 users, really.

There's a wonderful way to get people to use Firefox, alright.

I happen to have Windows 98SE on this computer, and Windows XP on the other. And you know what? I like this one better. IMHO, Windows XP is ugly, slow, and bloated. There's an excessive amount of unneeded services, processes, and options to disable. None of the latest worms I know of have affected Windows 98SE, but all of them have affected Windows 9XP. I've been running 98SE for around eight years now, without being afflicted by any virii or spyware, at least not any that makes its prescence apparent or is detectable by any of the programs I'm running. Having had much experience in cleaning Windows XP installs, it also seems to me that were I to get any on here, it would be a LOT easier to clean off than on XP. I've been able to install any and every application I've ever wanted to.

Why does having no desire to pay significant money and to go through significant trouble to "upgrade" to an OS I would see as a downgrade make me stupid? Certainly, eventually, one day, I plan on upgrading. My next computer will not have Windows 98SE installed -- it'll probably be Kubuntu and Windows XP dual boot setup (with me primarily using Kubuntu, having XP only for certain applications that probably won't work in WINE and do not have counterparts). But I'm quite pleased with what I have now, and I'm going to regret moving away from 98SE when the time comes.

[The Ex Omega]

...so firefox should cater to 1% of the market? Uh no that is not how anything works in any type of business.

Using that logic, Fx/Thunderbird would only come in a Windows flavor (Came to this thread belatedly; am a Win98SE user at the moment but will be upgrading once I decide on which direction to take. And agree about the archaic nature of Win98...come on, guys, time to upgrade. OS's don't live forever.)

Anyone who actually runs Windows 98 has NO knowledge in computers. They are equipped with a grade 5 intellect and cannot sufficiently program a VCR to stop flashing 12:00. They have problems making toast and are scared of online banking. Anyone who first used Windows 98 was using what was available...anyone still using it might as well buy a typewriter and save some dollars on their monthly power bills.

Windows 98 users should be castrated to prevent propogation of their sub-species. And if someone is sitting their griping about cost of upgrade? Linux is free! I would have cut out 98 support long ago. Who cares about 98 users, really.

There's a wonderful way to get people to use Firefox, alright.

I happen to have Windows 98SE on this computer, and Windows XP on the other. And you know what? I like this one better. IMHO, Windows XP is ugly, slow, and bloated. There's an excessive amount of unneeded services, processes, and options to disable. None of the latest worms I know of have affected Windows 98SE, but all of them have affected Windows 9XP. I've been running 98SE for around eight years now, without being afflicted by any virii or spyware, at least not any that makes its prescence apparent or is detectable by any of the programs I'm running. Having had much experience in cleaning Windows XP installs, it also seems to me that were I to get any on here, it would be a LOT easier to clean off than on XP. I've been able to install any and every application I've ever wanted to.

Why does having no desire to pay significant money and to go through significant trouble to "upgrade" to an OS I would see as a downgrade make me stupid? Certainly, eventually, one day, I plan on upgrading. My next computer will not have Windows 98SE installed -- it'll probably be Kubuntu and Windows XP dual boot setup (with me primarily using Kubuntu, having XP only for certain applications that probably won't work in WINE and do not have counterparts). But I'm quite pleased with what I have now, and I'm going to regret moving away from 98SE when the time comes.

Good luck with that then.

Atleast you're moving AWAY from Win98 instead of trying to keep using it like a 70's shirt.

[douray]

...so firefox should cater to 1% of the market? Uh no that is not how anything works in any type of business.

Using that logic, Fx/Thunderbird would only come in a Windows flavor (Came to this thread belatedly; am a Win98SE user at the moment but will be upgrading once I decide on which direction to take. And agree about the archaic nature of Win98...come on, guys, time to upgrade. OS's don't live forever.)

Anyone who actually runs Windows 98 has NO knowledge in computers. They are equipped with a grade 5 intellect and cannot sufficiently program a VCR to stop flashing 12:00. They have problems making toast and are scared of online banking. Anyone who first used Windows 98 was using what was available...anyone still using it might as well buy a typewriter and save some dollars on their monthly power bills.

Windows 98 users should be castrated to prevent propogation of their sub-species. And if someone is sitting their griping about cost of upgrade? Linux is free! I would have cut out 98 support long ago. Who cares about 98 users, really.

PS: Linux and OS X both contain more than 1% of the market share for OS's. MS is not "all that" anymore.

Comments like this remind me of something: I really do love Mozilla products, but sometimes I absolutely *despise* a lot of Mozilla fans. Too many of them are just too damn smug.

PS: Yeah, yeah... the Mac and Linux share is 6.9%, according to the stats cited earlier in this thread. Still pretty insignificant compared to the share attributed to Windows. We're talking numbers, not the quality of the system.

[ehume]

My in-laws ran a Win 98 machine I gave them for years. They most used it for e-mail, on a dial-up line. Recently they upgraded and gave me the old machine back. I set it up in the basement and re-familiarized myself with it. It's an old TigerDirect 300MHz AMD K2 with 64MB of RAM, and a HD that is broken up into four sub-2GB logical drives.

It is fast. It is lightning compared to the Dell 2.6GHz hyperthreading P4's we have running Win XP with 0.5GB RAM.

Of course, if I really wanted a fast machine I'd run Win 95. That ran "like a striped ape" by comparison with Win 98.

My in-laws ran that Win 98 machine, and did well with it. They didn't need more. And I can see someone using it now who wants a fast machine.

@Shining Celebi: when you consider moving on, try a Mac Mini. Then you can run your legal copy of Win 98SE on that, as well as having a superior OS in the Mac OSX.

[pikaunforgiven]

um..... you cant run 98 on an intel macintosh, you can only install xp on it if you want to do it painlessly. 98 "might" work if you want to force it to, but nobody has ever gotten it to work as far as i have seen.

[Andu]

I think pikaunforgiven is right there. You can only run WinXP on an Intel Mac along with Mac OSX

[Hammer 2.0]

Shining Celebi, moving to Linux is a good way of getting a state-of-the-art OS running on older hardware, I'd give it a go with your current box. I'm sure you would be pleased with a product from the *ubuntu family, I'm running it myself on everything from a PII 350 MHz to an IBM/Lenovo T60 laptop. The win32 apps I need that don't work in Wine, fortunately can be run using the now free (as in beer) VMware Server.
(I know this is probably semi-offtopic, but atleast it's in a positive spirit :)

[BenBasson]

My in-laws ran a Win 98 machine I gave them for years. They most used it for e-mail, on a dial-up line. Recently they upgraded and gave me the old machine back. I set it up in the basement and re-familiarized myself with it. It's an old TigerDirect 300MHz AMD K2 with 64MB of RAM, and a HD that is broken up into four sub-2GB logical drives.

Exactly. An old OS for an old PC.

It is fast. It is lightning compared to the Dell 2.6GHz hyperthreading P4's we have running Win XP with 0.5GB RAM.

Until you do anything mildly taxing, of course. The CPU difference alone makes your comparison hard to swallow, really.

[Andu]

Well I'm wondering how recent Linux distributions are resource usage wise. I've heard they are asking for more and more resources nowadays. I guess there are distributions like Debian that could be less of a hog for low end systems.

[ehume]

It is fast. It is lightning compared to the Dell 2.6GHz hyperthreading P4's we have running Win XP with 0.5GB RAM.

Until you do anything mildly taxing, of course. The CPU difference alone makes your comparison hard to swallow, really.

You're right, of course. But how often do you tax your CPU? The annoying bits are waiting to open a directory, waiting for the context menu to appear, etc. And, of course, one runs Office 97, not Office XP, and one does not work on massive graphics. For normal uses, it's quick.

I experienced the same phenomenon when I went to New Zealand in 1999. We took an HP notebook (the kind with the mouse hanging off on an arm) with an 75MHz 486DX and 32MB RAM. I installed Win 95 on it and it just flew. But all we used it for was email, writing and web browsing.

[Hybrid]

Comments like this remind me of something: I really do love Mozilla products, but sometimes I absolutely *despise* a lot of Mozilla fans. Too many of them are just too damn smug.

PS: Yeah, yeah... the Mac and Linux share is 6.9%, according to the stats cited earlier in this thread. Still pretty insignificant compared to the share attributed to Windows. We're talking numbers, not the quality of the system.

There are no alternatives to Mozilla Firefox in Linux.

I'm not smug, 98 runs on FAT, no error recovery, no journalling, and singularly one of the worst filesystems to date. NTFS was a milestone compared to FAT. 98 had nothing back then and is laughably archaic today (standup time of 8 days according to MS). If you want to run Windows and prefer a lighter version, use 2000.

There is nothing that can promote 98 over what is available today. I stand by my statement and defy any real, technically proficient user to make a defensible claim for 98. We are not talking about what runs sufficient on your 300 mhz Celeron here. We are talking about a real PC and not some hand me down from 1998 (we are all aware of Moore's Law).

If you knew anything about software you would have been running NT and then 2000. Those that ran 95 and 98, ipso facto have demonstrated their lack of technical ability when it comes to a PC.

I am fully aware we are talking numbers for alternative OS's. But a 7% rating is significantly higher than 1%, be them both rather small.

You have got me wrong, I am not a Mozilla fan or a Linux Zealot, I am someone who is speaking plainly about my opinions. Do not label me please.

[douray]

...Anyone who actually runs Windows 98 has NO knowledge in computers. They are equipped with a grade 5 intellect and cannot sufficiently program a VCR to stop flashing 12:00. They have problems making toast and are scared of online banking. Anyone who first used Windows 98 was using what was available...anyone still using it might as well buy a typewriter and save some dollars on their monthly power bills.

Now *that's* labeling. I don't think anyone is implying that Win98 is a superior system. Yeah, it's obsolescent. But that doesn't necessarily make users of the system (who for the most part are just using what they can at the moment, I'd bet) slobbering cretins. It's just that some people probably can't afford to run out and buy a new PC or Mac every six months, Moore's Law or not. Simple-minded elitism doesn't do any good, either.

[James]

There are no alternatives to Mozilla Firefox in Linux.

? .. so there are no other browsers. How about Mozilla Suite/SeaMonkey, Opera, Flock, Konqueror etc.

Do not label me please.

Well then stop labeling/insulting people who use Win98 for good valid reasons.