4 ms·

Here's a seemingly ridiculous but serious/non-rhetorical question: other than staying up to date with more efficient hardware, what feature or capability does W

Here's a seemingly ridiculous but serious/non-rhetorical question: other than staying up to date with more efficient hardware, what feature or capability does Windows 11 have that Windows 98 did not? OneDrive? BitLocker? ... Cortana? The difference between the sum of Windows licensing fees you've paid through the years and the cost of the Windows 98 license is the price you've paid to stay updated. Considering the fact that you cannot use Windows 98 today other than as a historical curiosity, I feel like what we're paying for is actually not software but a sort of annual (or triennial) ransom.

eropple 3y ago
This is just off the top of my head, but let's give it a go. Security, across all axes you'd care to evaluate. Actually-working multiprocessing, including across big/little architectures. SxS. A graphics subsystem that doesn't torpedo the computer if something goes wrong (and which continues to improve, e.g. DirectStorage). WSL2. WSA. BitLocker. Solid-state TRIM. Multiple desktops/task view. Aero Snap/Peek. The user-facing bits are emphatically not my favorite, but, even if I spotted you Windows 2000 so that you were on the NT kernel, there's a ton of stuff that's improved even from version to version, let alone over a twenty year gap.
- kgabis 3y ago
  All right, but apart from that, what have the Romans ever done for us? /s
  - eropple 3y ago
    Let us use more than 4GB of RAM?
riffraff 3y ago
Windows 98 was vastly less stable and secure than its successors. When it crashed you may also get a screwed file system since there was no journaling. It was effectively single user and passwords were kept in a substantially rot13 user readable file. I have not used windows in fifteen years or so, but already XP was miles ahead of 98.
Animats 3y ago
A real OS underneath. Windows 95/98 was still derived from DOS, not the NT line. NT 3.51, NT 4, and Windows 2000 were pretty good, but there were many complaints at the time that they didn't run 16-bit programs very well. This kept many people on the older product lines. Windows XP brought the two lines together, but there were many rough spots. Mostly involving the 16-bit subsystem. It was a rocky transition. By Windows 7, Microsoft pretty much had it right. A solid NT kernel. The Static Driver Verifier to prevent third-party drivers from crashing the kernel. A classifier system at Microsoft to analyze crash dumps and bring similar ones together for the same maintainer, so bugs got fixed. The 16-bit heritage programs were mostly gone. At last, a really good OS from Microsoft everyone could use. It's been downhill since then. I used Microsoft's NT line from NT 3.51 through Windows 7, and was doing some development on a Linux machine. When the Windows machine broke down, I realized I didn't need it any more.
merb 3y ago
NTFS? ActiveDirectory? UEFI? 64-Bit? Directly 11/12? Microsoft Hello (which is local to the is and supports U2f and thus webauthn , just not supported that much sadly) I’m a Linux/macos person, but I would never say that there were no important things since windows 98. especially since their kernel is/was so different
recursive 3y ago
Volume mixer.

eropple 3y ago

This is just off the top of my head, but let's give it a go. Security, across all axes you'd care to evaluate. Actually-working multiprocessing, including across big/little architectures. SxS. A graphics subsystem that doesn't torpedo the computer if something goes wrong (and which continues to improve, e.g. DirectStorage). WSL2. WSA. BitLocker. Solid-state TRIM. Multiple desktops/task view. Aero Snap/Peek. The user-facing bits are emphatically not my favorite, but, even if I spotted you Windows 2000 so that you were on the NT kernel, there's a ton of stuff that's improved even from version to version, let alone over a twenty year gap.

kgabis 3y ago
All right, but apart from that, what have the Romans ever done for us? /s
- eropple 3y ago
  Let us use more than 4GB of RAM?

riffraff 3y ago

Windows 98 was vastly less stable and secure than its successors. When it crashed you may also get a screwed file system since there was no journaling. It was effectively single user and passwords were kept in a substantially rot13 user readable file. I have not used windows in fifteen years or so, but already XP was miles ahead of 98.

Animats 3y ago

A real OS underneath. Windows 95/98 was still derived from DOS, not the NT line. NT 3.51, NT 4, and Windows 2000 were pretty good, but there were many complaints at the time that they didn't run 16-bit programs very well. This kept many people on the older product lines. Windows XP brought the two lines together, but there were many rough spots. Mostly involving the 16-bit subsystem. It was a rocky transition. By Windows 7, Microsoft pretty much had it right. A solid NT kernel. The Static Driver Verifier to prevent third-party drivers from crashing the kernel. A classifier system at Microsoft to analyze crash dumps and bring similar ones together for the same maintainer, so bugs got fixed. The 16-bit heritage programs were mostly gone. At last, a really good OS from Microsoft everyone could use. It's been downhill since then. I used Microsoft's NT line from NT 3.51 through Windows 7, and was doing some development on a Linux machine. When the Windows machine broke down, I realized I didn't need it any more.

merb 3y ago

NTFS? ActiveDirectory? UEFI? 64-Bit? Directly 11/12? Microsoft Hello (which is local to the is and supports U2f and thus webauthn , just not supported that much sadly) I’m a Linux/macos person, but I would never say that there were no important things since windows 98. especially since their kernel is/was so different

recursive 3y ago

Volume mixer.