WTF?!? No Win98 drivers in the box?!?

[Kruzin]

The sound in UT was distorted.
The fix was a minor tweak in the game .ini file. (I'd have to go find it again, don't remember the exact line to change atm)

[Montanan]

--No Win98, might have to Pass on Parhelia

Surely matrox isnt going to ignore the masses of people with win98 on business and home computers etc..

I cant stand to upgrade to windows 2000 bloatware, the upgrade is hardly worth the hassel and headaches it will cause with older software and hardware.

ANy beta person or someone in the know, shed some light on the lack of win98 support please, much appreciated.

[Reckless]

I've not read all the previous comments but I for one cannot even see the point in supporting Win9x/Me any longer. Harsh maybe, but I've been a Win2K (with lots of games) its since release and with XP the capability is apparently as good as its gonna get!

You will see that if you use 2K/XP, Microsoft OS's are not as crap as perhaps the general perception is.

No Win9x comes close in terms of reliability so why stick with it (bar the fact that most people seem to object to paying for an OS upgrade?!).

btw: Win2K is NOT bloatware - it does need a bit more fine tuning than Win9x but there's little problem in that.

btw2: Most 'complaint' of Win2K/XP comes from people who had trouble then ditched it and went back to Win9x. OK, I can see why people get frustrated but if you make it work it's the best option. Personally I don't see a need for a 2K->XP upgrade as all it is Teletubby graphics, the kernel is 'almost' the same. My oldset system is 5 years old and it's ACPI compliant so I've had no grief in that dept.

[Greebe]

You know... I like Win98, but lets get real here. It has shit memory management and as a power user just doesn't cut it. Far too many reboots on a daily basis regardless of how tweaked it is can't compare to Win2K or XP.

Any business that's running Win98 only does so because of a few things... custom software that's poorly written or completely incompatable, too cheap to upgrade (milking it for every penny they can get) or ignorance.

Nuff said.

[Electric Amish]

Originally posted by Greebe
You know... I like Win98, but lets get real here. It has shit memory management and as a power user just doesn't cut it. Far too many reboots on a daily basis regardless of how tweaked it is can't compare to Win2K or XP.

Any business that's running Win98 only does so because of a few things... custom software that's poorly written or completely incompatable, too cheap to upgrade (milking it for every penny they can get) or ignorance.

Nuff said.

Hmm... Our company runs 98...

They just upgraded our servers to Win2k from NT4.0.

There's talk that XP is in our desktop future.

amish

[Reckless]

ROGER THAT Greebe!

All our customers (I'm a Windows developer) I know are running Win2K Pro (NONE are XP and have any plans to). They went from Win98 to 2K for laptop support.

[Dr Mordrid]

I also advise that Win9x is just not near as solid as Win2K. In addition IMHO WinME was nothing more to me than a marketing ploy and XP I wouldn't touch with a cattle prod 'til the service pack comes out.

Dr. Mordrid

[R.Carter]

Originally posted by The PIT
XP blue screens for me with infinite loop. So at the moment thats out. However I've got some old games that only work under 98 and don't like win2k. So if theres no 98 drivers there maybe no P for me. Win2k is my work OS.

If you are seeing the Infinite Loop or NV Loop/BSOD error under Windows XP then you might want to take a look at this page for some help.

[Umfriend]

No Win9x comes close in terms of reliability so why stick with it (bar the fact that most people seem to object to paying for an OS upgrade?!).

I used to run W95 and was VERY satisfied with it. The ONLY reason I bought the Me upgrade was because I needed USB support due to new hardware. This increased the cost for new hardware by some 30%.... W95 was 2.5 BTW, advertised as an OS that supported USB..... NOT

Meanwhile, the OSses get bigger, it gets harder to get the middleware out that I do not want. Upgrades get more and more expensive and I know that I'll end up having probs with the XP activition sh1t because I like to mess around with my kit a lot.

If M$ would only upgrade the "real" OS components of the OS, the upgrades would not have to be this expensive. But no, somehow I need MS Explorer, Outlook express, media player, instant messenger and GAWD knows what apparantly. Oh, did I mention that upgrades become more and more expensive?

And now, due to the mess M$ has made of it, Matrox only supports Xp/W2k... I do not mind paying for an "upgrade", but with all the bloat, the upgrade that I'd really need would prolly be CPU and memory...

Finally, these updates become more and more expensive, and with them, I get all this funky middleware that I DO NOT WANT!

As for reliability, never had many probs with W95 (more with Me). BSODs were an exception and at that time I actually used the PC without rebooting a lot. Experiencing weird issues with the NT4 we have over here at work though. As opposed to having to pay for an "update", I'd think it'd be better if they gave me a patch.

And I hate it that these updates become more and more expensive.

Umfrustratedfriend

[Pace]

Umfriend: I agree

However, with the new ruling from everyone's favourite Gov't, Microsoft will now have to separate the middleware.

But the thing that annoys me is how Win2K needs almost twice as much as Win98 and NT4 combined. How easy is it to cut out the crap from Win2k? In Win98 I didn't install most of the options on the setup list, I might even get WinXP SE if it comes with a similar installer.

Listen Microsoft, I want Internet Explorer! I don't want Minesweeper (and while you're at it MS, cut down the size of IE )

P.

[xortam]

Hey guys ... what specifically are you referring to as middleware? Are you sure you're using the term correctly?

[The PIT]

Originally posted by R.Carter


If you are seeing the Infinite Loop or NV Loop/BSOD error under Windows XP then you might want to take a look at this page for some help.

Don't worry read that. Most of it is dumbing the machine down in the bios. There also a bit of bullshit in it. Like it only occurs with faulty video cards. Pity that the problem occured with two different cards (Okay same drivers) and the card works perfectly under XP at work. The only differance is ones an Intel chipset and the others Via. The solution I used since that win2k worked perfectly for six months I went back to it. Problem solved. Hasn't crashed once in months except where the IBM hard drive needed a bit of DFT.

I've also going to have to get another steering wheel since Microshaft haven't released drivers for win2k/xp.

[Jon P. Inghram]

Well, the OS won't be a problem for me now... but the empty spot in the wallet has fragmented my parhelia.cash file.

[Umfriend]

xortam: Good question, and I think this is still under debate. Personally, I count items as IE, Mediaplayer, MSN Messager, Outlook Express etc as middleware. In principle, Notepad would qualify as such as well, although I think any decent OS rollout should at least have a simple editor. (although we could always use "Copy con: >autoexec.bat", or what was the line again?)

I may be wrong....

I think a "pure" OS primarily has code that interfaces between programs and hardware. (Device) Drivers effectively are part of the OS IMO. The TCP/IP protocol is considered by me to be part of OS. IE is not. No matter how hard you need it to run m$ winblows.

GAWD, I hate M$ like some junkies hate heroin. Did I ever mention that those bloedy middleware upgrades of M$ become dearer and dearer every time?

Umfrustratedfriend

[Reckless]

For some reason I get the impression that whatever shape OS Microsoft delivers someone will find fault with it. Also, this is the first time Notepad has faced charges for being middleware - err, get real.

Applications are just that applications. They do not slow the system down just by being on your disk.

Are people upset that Win2K's disk footprint is large or is it more when running it requires more resource (memory?)? The disk footprint is indeed large but disks are huge and cheap (unless your mad like me and have SCSI!).

A basic install of Windows 2000 will install and start running a bunch of services that you may not necessarily need/want. Again, knowing your OS will enable you to tune the number of auto start services down the 'required' minimum. If you actually properly looked at a Win9x system (using a proper process monitor) then you'd also see lots of bloaty stuff. The difference is Win2K doesn't hide it as much.

This is a reasonable resource for service information : http://camica.netfirms.com/services.htm

Other rubbish like Media Player 7.x doesn't have to be used either. I hate it and instead run Media Player 6.4 (already pre-installed) or WinAMP. I have the Media Player 7 codecs (free d/l from MS webby) so I don't miss out on anything.

A slight problem with IE 'cause as we all know the Explorer shell is built around it. It's possible to configure most of it away - you just need to know how to do it. Just grab a copy of the Win2K TweakUI and turn a lot of the stuff off. No active desktop (fully off!), no shell extensions, etc.

The price of an extra 1GB disk and 64MB of RAM is nothing when compared to the massive improvement in reliability. CPU is indifferent in this argument as the Parhelia has a minimum spec of a P3-600 and that's well enough to run a Win2K VERY well (I've got two systems: P3-550 and P3-1Ghz).

It is expensive to purchase - £200 or so but you can get a real cheap deal if you're a student - sadly I'm way past that but my daughter is now eligible for it Windows XP home is around £100 but you lose some potentially interesting features compared to the Pro version.

Best of luck!