3 ms·

I think they're saying compared to Win95, not NT.

• lproven 5y ago
  Yeah, I know, I got that! :-) I didn't put in a lot of Win95, because it was before I went freelance. Then my work box ran NT 3.51, but a lot of the office ran W95 and I had to support it. So I did get quite a lot of experience on it. Later on, though, I put in W98 & W98SE for people with cheap & nasty PCs that couldn't run NT, and I supported a lot of boxes that were out there. It did have somewhat better driver support, yes, but every version of Windows ever has had better driver support than the preceding version. It was not significantly more stable, and on low-end or heavily-loaded boxes, I'd say _less_ stable. More types of software? About the same, I'd say. Better? On a narrow range of hardware, maybe -- things were changing fast then and by '99 or so new kit couldn't run 95 any more. It was a gamers' OS. The much-maligned WinME had better hardware support still -- for example, proper working Firewire support -- but by then everyone hated it. After a few updates it was a very stable release, it looked nice, it was a bit cleaner and faster to boot and to shut down, and it supported more memory. There was a particular period when very cheap, or old, PCs couldn't usefully run Win2K let alone XP, which really wanted 256MB of RAM or more, a big fast DMA EIDE or UltraIDE hard disk and so on, when WinME could deliver a decent internet experience on a single-core box with between about 80 to 128 MB of RAM on the low end to say 192 MB on the high end -- kit which gave a rotten experience with 2K or XP. But 98 wasn't a particularly sweet spot in my recollection.
  • muststopmyths 5y ago
    fair enough. I guess I misunderstood your response :)