Windows 95/98

There are no major differences as far as the OS is concerned (compared to NT)....However, there are numerous "cosmetic enhancements" regarding multimedia and such in Windows 98.

My advice is not to install Win98 on anything slower than a P200MMX since it does run significantly slower than Win 95.

I sorta disagree with the first answer. Win 98 has many fixes inside the engine that win95 doesn't have. Win98_se is 75%-100% stable depending on what you do and how much you try to do at the same time. 98 has support for more addon devices/ driversthan 95. The desktop has more features if you choose to use them. You can do more "housekeping" things with the desktop that you couldn't do with 95. As long as you don't try to open up 10-15 windows, clog up your memory with memory hogging screen savers and desktop patterns win98 performs adequately, not robustly but adequately.

Bo

and to add to the 2nd answer, unless you had Win95b(osr2), you could not use Fat32 for big drives.

Win98 has this.

i think win98 is way better than 95. if you are thinking of upgrading, you might look into WinME which is Win98 with more fixesand some other enhancements

This answer is from an EX-Microsoft Windows/IE Support Engineer. I do have to agree with some of the answers given here so far. The original WIN95 OS was strictly a FAT16 and would not recognize anything past 1.9 gigs of drive space, any drive larger than 1.9 gigs had to be partitioned even if you used LBA. It was a slower OS with a lot of bugs initially. That was pretty much resolved with WIN95 OSR2 release and the introduction of FAT32. With the release of Internet Explorer 4.0 you gained most of the features that were later incorporated into the first release of WIN98, which was merely a rehashing of WIN95 OSR2 with all the bug fixes, IE4.0 and Microsoft Plus, updated drivers for USB ports and some additional Multimedia tools, all rolled into one package. Microsoft also added troubleshooting tools to help Microsoft determine where the problems were occuring in a users system. WIN98 SE fixed the bugs that the first release of WIN98 had, which, by the way, did not exist in WIN95 OSR2.

I would have to agree that WIN98 does reguire a lot more RAM and system resources to run than WIN95 does. But I must disagree that WIN98 (any version) is the better option over WIN95 OSR2. I have installed and run each of these systems on various hardware platforms and to be honest, I prefer WIN95 OSR2 with IE4.01 or above on my personal machines over WIN98 any day. I currently have several machines at home and run WIN95 OSR2 (tweeked to the max),WIN98 SE, NT4.0 SP6a, Windows2000 Professional, Linux Redhat 7.0, BEOS 5.0 PE and AIX 4.3 as my current job requires me to work on all platforms. My favorite machine to work on, the one that causes me the least amount of stress and grief, is my custom PC with an AMD K6-2 300 3D CPU, ATI AGP 16MB Graphics card, 64MB PC100 RAM and my faithful WIN95 OSR2 w/IE 5.5, I've never had an error message, system crash or lockup once on that machine, what else can I say?

Forgot One big thing?
Power Management in 98 is very good.

If you have Windows 95 OSR2, I would not upgrade to Win98 (or Win2000, for that matter) unless you are having major problems with your system. In spite of Microsoft's public relations spin, the upgrade can be a pain in the neck with hidden, unexpected gotcha's. But, as mentioned in the other replies, FAT32 is a welcome improvement over FAT16, especially with today's typical hard drive sizes.

If you do decide to upgrade, I would strongly suggest purchasing a new hard drive and installing the new operating system on that drive (which you would set up as drive C on your system). I know that it's a pain to re-install all of your software, but you can eliminate anything you don't really need. Most importantly, you will get rid of all of the junk that Windows has accumulated on your current system, especially if you ever installed and then uninstalled anything. And even just with use over time, Windows is notorious for mucking up the registry and collecting garbage that is almost impossible to identify (and thus remove).

Hard drives are so cheap now that it's really a small cost to pay for the improvement.

If you do upgrade, good luck....and allow yourself plenty of time, just in case.

First off, I have run Windows since the 3.0 version, which really sucked. 3.1 was a God send, 3.11 deemed "Windows for Workgroups" was much better. Then every "upgrade" was always a pain, especially 95. The "Full AR" or "Full Installs" are always better. I also recommend a new hard drive and a full install. As far as 98 goes, the scanreg utility is awesome! Not to mention that if you need to re-install it, 98 allows you to keep your old settings instead of having to re-install each of your programs, they stay in place and you can resume easily. Something 95 osr 2 couldn't do! Plug and play is much better. USB support is better. Networking is better. Yes, 98 is better than 95 any day!

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