Adventures on Windows 98, part Final

Ok, so here’s the quick breakdown of how things went during last week, as I toyed around with windows 98 on a laptop. Quick recap, the laptop is generations ahead of what windows 98 was created for, so it should give us a much faster and responsive experience. Or so I thought!

• Speed: Yes, it was very, very fast. IE would crash (more on that later) and restart so fast you wouldn’t even notice it just died.
• Responsiveness: Very responsive. Things just happened when you clicked on them. Very enjoyable.
• Stability: Bad. When it was first installed, it didn’t crash. Now it crashes all the time! I didn’t even install much of anything on it, just the hardware drivers (more on that later), and Opera (a very good internet browser).
• Software & Hardware support: Pretty much dead. Let’s face it, hardware makers have moved on, and it’s not cost-effective to keep on supporting old hardware. I had to jump through very long hoops to get video and networking going, specially since this laptop doesn’t have a floppy drive and it doesn’t support thumbdrives (windows 98 came before that stuff even existed)

So, I’d finally gotten to the point where it was pretty useable… But  then after a few days I could not browse the internet! Internet Explorer (6, since 7 and 8 are not available for win98) would crash just by opening it. Firefox is not available either, so that left me with Opera, which, while great, wouldn’t work very well, crashing every other session.

Well, maybe I could use it for playing movies! Oddly enough, even though the sound driver installed, no sound would play… That kinda ruined the fun of playing games too. I couldn’t even take screenshots to do some kinda of “then and now” comparison.

So, no internet, no games, no music, no video. What am I gonna do? Easy, I’m gonna ditch the whole thing and install windows XP. I’ve just finished the XP install, and it runs like a champ, everything is in there. The moral of the story is, as much as we complain about how unstable, slow, etc our computers get, we’ve come a reaaaaly long way, even from what we thought was pretty good.