Richard Berger wrote:
[...] lets face it, you don't need the bloat,
and win98se has been around long enough to have the bugs worked out, plus,
whatever extra you get with XP can be added to 98se.
Dickey B
Win9x, even in its most recent incarnation, is not as stable a system as
WinNT/2K/XP, nor is it as capable. If you haven't encountered this fact,
you just haven't worked your system very hard. (Bloat is another issue -
there is no technical reason for WinXP to be so bloated, but that's MS's
marketing strategy, and in any conflict between marketing and
engineering, engineering loses.)
And, sorry, your last point is simply wrong: many of the extras that
come with XP are not available for Win9x. What's more, they won't be,
since XP is not a DOS extension, like Win9x, and what's written for XP
won't run on Win9x without extensive rewriting, which MS will not do.
That's what "no more support means." Future extras and upgrades will not
be available for Win9x; MS has closed the door on that OS. BTW, MS will
phase out DOS support in its future OSs. To run a DOS program in WinXP,
a virtual DOS machine must be set up, which adds complications.
As for the bugs being worked out of Win98SE, again, you just haven't
worked your system hard enough to encounter them. The reason MS
abandoned Win9x is that it was clear that it could not be made into the
stable, multitasking system that people want and business needs. That's
why MS chose to develop NT into Win2000 and WinXP.
