Windows 9x. Does it Suck?

[Four and Twenty 0]

i used to dual boot with an nt variant and a 9x variant but no i just use my favorite nt variant at the time

[RobEubank 0]

I have one Win98 machine (not SE) that has been running stable for nearly 4 years now. It's now my wife's machine. I spent a bit of time just after install tweaking the BIOS, IRQ and OS Registry. It has NEVER Crashed or Locked up regardless of what I've thrown at it. It's the only system on my network I'll never change OSs on. Besides, the printer doesn't have XP drivers.

 

ASUS P3B-F (BX) Motherboard, 256 MB SDRAM, Viper V770 with Creative MPEG Decoder Daughter board for DVD, Creative Soundblaster Live!, 3Com 3C905TX and Adaptec SCSI Controller for the Scanner. It's not the fastest rock on the planet but unlike any other system I've ever seen, it is crashproof (so far). 8)

[Mr.Guvernment 0]

Quote:

Honestly I think WinME is better than 98 and 98 better than 95, especially when using a VIA chipset.

do i slap u now or later..LOL


the only reason MS came out with ME was cause 2k had come out and 98SE was the last thing out for home users so alot of home users got upset, so all they did was take 98SE - add the 2k interface and some new options and sold it as the new home o/s.

ME was not an O/S - ME was nothing more then a badly patched up 98SE.

[ACiD StOUt 0]

Sucks or not. Well, this depends on what you want to do with your computer. Win95 sucks. Win98 sucks. WinME sucks even more than 95 and 98 together. And Win98SE sucks if want to do more than one thing at once. No matter what, but even on a very sleek Win98SE system (with is definitivly faster than any comparable WinXP system) it is nearly impossible to surf, chat, listen to mp3s, manage more than 3 Word or Excel documents at once while running a small http/ftp server in background. I mean Win9xMe never had anything to do with multi-tasking in any way. However, Win98SE is the most stable & fastes Windows which is not based on the NT kernel.

I use WinXP Pro and Win98SE on the same machine. Since I don't need NTFS at all, I use Win98SE to defrag (with SpeedDisk 2001) the XP disk and for some kind of emergency- & backup-system. Well, I boot Win98SE maybe three times a year (if ever) since I use O&O Defrag Pro for XP, which runs smoothly in background allowing me to continue working. However I noticed that O&O Defrag Pro is just like any other defrag program for WinXP, too, somehow not as efficient as the defrag programs for Win9xMe. I don't care as long as everything runs stable & fast enought for me.

 

btw: does anybody know how to get rid of this stupid delay when accessing avi-files on WinXP??? This drives my crazy sicne I have to wait about 4-5 seconds (sometimes even more) after clicking on a movie file before XP allows me to open, move or delete it. And this sucks!!! ;( However, mpeg-files do not seem to have this problem.

 

Greets,

ACiD StOUt

[tweaked 0]

95 didnt introduce plugn'PLAY, it introduced plugn'PRAY.

2k was the first OS to really deliver on the promise of plugn'play.

 

ahhhh, I remember those early days of my youth using windows 95 fondly... "general protection what?" "whats with this bluescreen?" "freaking run this program damnit!" "I said SAVE! SAVE! Not crash and DIE!" "what do you mean your out of resources? There isnt anything running!"... Of course if I hadn't learned at an early age how to troubleshoot a PC i woudn't have this lucrative career i haver now...

 

Thank You Microsoft, You gave me Job Security.

 

Thank god XP still hiccups a LITTLE (mostly user error), otherwise i would be out of a job.

 

ME didn't come out because of 2k, ME came out because MS wanted to milk the uneducated (non 2k using) masses for more $$$.

 

needless to say, i started using 2k when i got the first beta of it i could find (beta 2? pre rc1?) and i havent used a 9x system at home since. 2k in early beta form was FAR more stable than 9x ever was... getting drivers for everything was a biatch tho. (damn you creative)

 

 

at work i still support 98se and the occasional 95 (dont ask why ;( ) but i refuse to run win9x on my systems there. i just support it from memory.

[Mr.Guvernment 0]

Quote:

btw: does anybody know how to get rid of this stupid delay when accessing avi-files on WinXP??? This drives my crazy sicne I have to wait about 4-5 seconds (sometimes even more) after clicking on a movie file before XP allows me to open, move or delete it. And this sucks!!! ;( However, mpeg-files do not seem to have this problem.

Greets,
ACiD StOUt

i am assuming because it needs to load the codec to show the preview window on the left hand pane. you can turn that of you should be okay.

[ACiD StOUt 0]

Quote:

i am assuming because it needs to load the codec to show the preview window on the left hand pane. you can turn that of you should be okay.

Sorry, but there's no preview window or something like that. No matter which type of view I use in Explorer (detail, preview, small icons or big icons), there's always a delay when accessing avi-files. I created two new entries in the registry: '. divx' and 'divxfile'. Now every time I click on a movie with a '.divx' extension it's opened with media player and, believe it or not, there's NO delay! But if I forward the '.avi' extension to 'divxfile' the delay appears just like '.avi' points to 'avifile'. What's wrong? Does anybody know? I don't want to rename all my avi-movies into divx.
I know Windows XP does something when just selecting avi-files cause CPU usage goes up to 100% and it takes quite some time to display time, date and filesize in the status-bar of Explorer. But what does it? I mean, there are no Class-IDs or anything connected with avi-files anymore. I just removed them, but the delay stays.

Regards,
ACiD StOUt