Review Windows 98 4.10.2222 A
Windows 95 created waves in the market when it was launched. 98 did the same too even to a greater degree (It out sold 95 in the first three months). So what’s the hype about win98? Its the interface mainly. Microsoft couldn’t ignore the impact of the Internet so what better way to jump onto the net bandwagon than by using its brand new OS. Microsoft uses the term web integration. What they basically mean is that Internet explorer is now a truly integrated part of the OS (Remembers Microsoft’s stand at the anti trust trial). Everything is now web this or web that. All those places where you can browse files on your system, you can now access the net too. Somewhere in between all this comes Active desktop. Active desktop is basically content push. You subscribe to particular service (stock ticker, cricket scores etc) and the OS pushes the content to desktop. Not many people understood the concept. The ones that did weren’t happy about it. It only tends to slow down the system anyway. But thanks to active desktop you can now put up wallpapers in JPEG and GIF format without having to convert it to BMP.
You can customize the way icons react to clicking. The new and improved way is single click to open and hover to select. If you aren’t comfortable with it you can revert to the classic view.
Explorer windows now have a web view option, which allows you to preview pictures and HTML files.
Of course all these features were available for Win 95 users if they had upgraded to IE 4 and installed the shell enhancements.
UTILITIES
Defragmenter now comes with Intel optimizers, which rearranges the files on your system so that they open faster. The theory being that the OS maintains a list of most often used applications and during defragmentation , these applications are brought to the front of the disk resulting in lower access time.
DriveSpace in its new version offers better compression. You can now create compressed drives that are larger than 512 megabytes (MB). DriveSpace 3 compressed drives can be as large as two gigabytes (GB).
The disk cleanup utility allows you to remove unused files and applications. It would have been nice if the utility could ACTUALLY find out unused files. All it does is integrate recycle bin, Add/remove applications into one utility.
Windows 98 is a boon for the average user and the beginner. The help is pretty good. New users would find it easy to navigate and find stuff.
The experts would find just about the same as win 95. A few clicks reduced, that’s all. Drivers have been updated. Complete USB support & support for FAT32 is also present. Another useful change is the ability to drag shortcuts into the start menu, rearrange, and delete… in fact the entire options for any ordinary file is present for items in the start menu.
The OS is a lot more stable than 95. System files are well taken care of.
Win 98 has taken over the market and will stay prominent for at least 10 more months. 98% of the users who surfed to my site used windows 98. Other operating systems were negligible.
Windows XP is the is the nest best OS available to date. VERY stable and VERY user-friendly (and definitely the most visually appealing). If you have high-end system and you want the best OS available, go for XP, otherwise stick to Windows 98. Windows ME is a strict NO NO. Microsoft just launched it as a placeholder until they could launch XP.