Further to Sera’s comments (and yielding respectfully to her point):
The Good:
- Easy to install.
- Much better than Win’95. Departure from DOS kernel, and hence more stable.
- Lots of applications written to run on this platform. Lot more than any other consumer platform.
- Great for everyday ’’mom&pop’’ user - whose needs are word processing, spread-sheeting and browsing - this is all you need.
The Bad:
- Frequent unexplained crashes. Esp. due to unknown and unique conflicts with other programs. Esp. at shut down time. There is no single patch that can fix this. YOu can lose documents and work in progress unless you save often. So get used to do Ctrl-S (save) every few minutes.
- Security still isn’t half as good as in the Linux world. It doesn’t help that 90% of the hackers hate MicroSoft and are writing virus and other micro-bugs against their OS. One click with poor judgment and you can be had! Your security ports could be open to the world.
- Certainly not the power-user platform. Needs to be rebooted every few days and if you run a lot of applications, almost every few hours.
- Like all MicroSoft OS’s there’s a huge network dependency and poor CPU resource management algorithms. In lay terms - if the network is slow all applications can run slow. This is very annoying because there’s no reason the speed on data pipes should affect the performance of stand-alone applications like word and excel.
The Ugly:
- There’s no ignoring the business practices that got MicroSoft where it is today. Apple built the first real GUI based OS. Mac OS is still superior today (Mac X) - but suffers from lack of developer support and availability of applications. At the enterprise level Unix and its sister OS Linux is superior by lightyears. Given these facts, the purist in me want to urge others to shun MicroSoft products. The cynics among us say it’s too little too late. But I feel it’s better to light one candle than curse the darkness. I say bring on Linux and ’’murdabaad’’ to everyone who gets ahead with mischief and cheating.
-------------
Windows 98 is ok as an OS for dummies. Trouble is, each of us thinks someone else is a dummy. I am the same way. It is not good enough for me. It crashes. It won’t shutdown when I want it to. And of course, when it wants to shut down, the famous blue-screen-of-death appears at its own discretion. Not a happy camper.
Being purist as I am, I think MacOS would have been so much better had that become the world standard for computing. Bay-Sharam Microsoft hijacked the world and our futures with its evil business practices. Never having innovated anything, simply imitating others - and doing a bad job at even that - these faaltoo people have come to dominate our desktops. I hope Gates is jailed. I think even VMS, and Linux are super-cool. Most people think gui is a must for humans to operate computers. I disagree. Most humans are intelligent. They would have figured out. And Linux is graceful. There is a consistent method. And the stability it brings is incredible.
Anyway - back to Windows98 - the bad news is we’re stuck. You may want to try Windows ME and that other WIndows X-whatever comes out. That’s more of our hard-earned money in the pockets of the thugs and hijackers in Redmond.
On the other hand, if you think you’re one of ’’those guys’’ - the less intelligent, the simple minded (euphemism for morons) - then Windows98 is good news for you. Happy rebooting and blue screens.