Windows 98 is a good product. It is the default standard home user operating system on PC's today, with the corporate world going to WinNT and Win2000, Win98 was released for users at home. It is simple and easy to use and sets up nicely on most PC's, being compatible with the vast majority of hardware out there.

On one hand, I love it, for it's ease of use and ease of setup. My kids can operate it (oldest is 8 years old) without significant difficulty. The vast majority of popular software is all written for Win98 and it is not difficult to setup a fully functional working machine.

On the other hand, I hate it. It is canned, pulling everyone into the same box, as MS tries to consolidate all of the PC users of the world into their ever growing umbrella, it's hard for me; having taken so much time to learn Unix, to accept anything Windows based. I have it, literally, because I'd loose the rest of the hair on my head trying to teach the family to use anything other than Windows at this point.

There is no real other choice. Red Hat Linux is emerging with several new packages added for it; but it is not as popular as Windows. The overwhelming majority of software available today is available only for Windows. Continuing changes both in Hardware and Software are driven by MS, due to their market share, which keeps making things work outside of agreed standards, which limits their compatibility to only Windows based systems. The plug and play standard was a good example of this, but that's off this particular subject.

Windows 98 broke into many new standards, allowing things such as network routing (in se or second edition), the whole dial-up networking implementation of PPP allowed users to get away from complicated third party software to connect to networks via modems. The user interface was totally redesigned and allowed for a far more customizable one than Win 3.1 ever did. All of the new features, which broke new ground, were great, except that most of them came at the expense of established standards, which impeded the development of competitive hardware and software.

Windows 98 does not manage system resources as effectively as it should. The use and tracking of RAM by Windows leads to an average 15% system speed degregation over a 24 hour period, requiring Windows to be restarted daily to run at optimum efficiency. The hard drive formatting schemes available required either extremely high blocks limiting disk space (Fat16) or made the drive incompatible with previous software (Fat32). Fat32 is a definite improvement over Fat16, but at the cost of computability.

Some of the neat little features make it cool. The menus that appear to slide in, instead of just popping up are cool. The ability to switch between Windows Explorer and Internet Explorer by typing in a new address in the bar on top, yet still run Netscape at the same time.

Some of the new features are lame: The active desktop viewed as a webpage? I haven't found a practical use for that thing yet. The whole "channels" issue was also lame. The whole silliness of Win95/98 actually needing Windows Internet Explorer to run.

It networks extremely well, with both the network neighborhood and MS Networking setups making the network setup a snap, as well as the dial-up networking setups. It leaves a lot to be desired in regards to network security, with ports left open, and a million small exploits to gain access to a computer running Windows 98. This was highlighted with the whole port 139 (windows networking port) issue that allows other access to an unprotected machine if setup wrong, and also allowed several different connection killing exploits, prior to the series of patches and "upgrades" released to fix this. The lamest part of all of this is that Windows has been capable of routing since the first edition of Win95, but the features were undocumented and the how-to had to be figured out by people all over the world, since MS wanted to leave this feature to the more expensive NT setup.

When networked, Win98 requires firewalls to ensure it is secure from the latest exploits. Since the operating system is so widely used, I guess it is only natural that those mischievous enough, will write scripts to attack it. This is the primary reason that firewalls are necessary; to provide the protection that the operating system fails to provide for you.

It's a good product, and the masses obviously love it. I use it; I have to and quite truthfully, I can't do everything I do on it on a Unix box...yet.




Recommended: Yes