Fooling around with installing Jaunty on my laptop (twice, since the first time I managed to wipe my old /home by installing / on it – genius…) got me in the mood for tinkering.

Today while sitting in the company bakkie stuck in traffice I discovered an old CD holder, and lo and behold in it I discovered, among other things, Windows 98, 98SE, ME and 2000PRO!

I could not wait to get home and fire up a Win98 VM to relive my early tech days…

One thing that is readily apparent is that the Windows98 installer was rather easy, once you got past the initial drive setup and reboot before actual installation can begin part. It was certainly ahead of the installers that I had to wrestle with on Mandrake Linux and RedHat back in the day.

Even today the installer is more intuitive than the Ubuntu Jaunty alternative disk installer. The live disk’s install sans Live environment is better though.

Optional Components

Interestingly Outlook Express was an optional install. You could have your windows without it. I did not check very closely but it would seem that Internet Explorer was an optional feature as well.

It is telling that Microsoft is again returning to this kind of optionality of key components with Windows 7.

Also telling is that Outlook Express has not improved much since the version offered with Windows 98.

Performance During Installation

Installing Windows 98 takes a looooooong time. Much longer than Windows XP did when I installed it in virtualbox, and certainly longer than Jaunty did when I test ran the RC in Virtualbox. The old FAT filesystem definitely has something to do with this, formatting of the 1gb drive (I had to enable large file support because it was “Larger than 512mb” – WOW!) took disproportionately long, and copying of the files is taking long (still 48 minutes left while I am writing this – it started out as 70minutes.) I remember back in the day we would copy the files over on to harddrive via command line prior to installing Windows and then running setup.exe from the harddrive to bypass this.

Finishing Installation

After agreeing to the EULA and typing in the Username, Product key and whatnot, setup detects plug and play hardware. This also takes a while. Fourteen minutes to be exact. Why it took so long with no hardware attached is beyond me – a legacy of outdated programming I guess.

First Boot.

Setup reboots a few times during installation. First boot is actually not, it only continues to set-up hardware. While the installer is user-friendly, the actual process is a pain in the butt. I remember sitting with six to eight machines in the workshop waiting for all of them to finish installation. I could assemble six computers in fifteen minutes with an electric screwdriver (most office systems were very simple – One Motherboard, One Processor, Network Card, Ram, One CD Rom, Floppy, Hard drive, Connect Power, Slam Case shut and boot – I used to set out the components carefully on the workbench and time myself… good times…) and then came the hours of installation and driver installs…

First (real) boot… – and then all hell breaks loose.

After severral boots during installation I got to boot into Windows for real. Suddenly the OS started looking for the Win87 cd. I inserted it – the very same one I used to install – and the files it were looking for were not there! I tried everything, but about 20dll files are missing, or at least not found.

Now everytime I boot it complains about these missing files, and promptly states that severral windows services will not be available.

Just Great.

Another annoyance is the plethora of hardware that are lacking drivers – that much I expected, I mean this is a 10year old operating system. What annoys me is that these prompts show up everytime you boot, and there is no way to tell the OS to not ask again, and you cannot do anything until you have either installed the hardware or clicked “cancel” a bunch of times.

Welcome Screen

Ah yes, the wellcome screen. As annoying today as it was then. I cannot understand why Microsoft has not come up with a better alternative than this. I told it never to annoy me again.

Tooling around

There are no surprises in the Win98 environment – what you see is basically what you get. Windows back then was really bare bones. Surprisingly – to me – is that windows today, although looking a lot prettier, offers much the same functionality out of the box as back then.

The good thing for the average home user is that the way of doing things is mostly similar – right click on desktop gives you background properties and resolution. Start still stops the computer when you want it to.

When running into problems I right-clicked on the taskbar to launch Task Manager, and it was not there! I know for a fact that by Windows 2000 it was available as a taskbar shortcut because just today I needed to access it on a clients computer.

Go Figure.

Conclusion

I noted this only a few paragraphs ago, but I cannot get past this – Windows today is strikingly similar in packaging to Windows 98. When you install Windows Vista (and I will confirm soon enough my suspision that it is true for Windows7) you get the following that you also got in Windows 98:

• Notepad.
• Wordpad.
• Outlook Express (Called Windows Mail in Vista.)
• Internet Explorer.
• Media Player (Win98 had what is now called “Media Player Classic”)
• Mostly the same games – a few new ones came along.
• Almost the same Icon set with a few updates since Vista.

I noticed that a lot of the utilities besides the more well-known programs have been recycled almost without change since Windows 98: Take a look at the clock utility where you set the time in Windows XP and Windows 98. Take a look at the regional settings utility up to Windows Vista. Network Properties Window?

Could it be that I have had my eyes glazed over by shiny new looks and missed the gross lack of innovation in Windows?

Granted that there are a lot of under the skin improvements in the various newer incarnations of Windows, things that the average user will never knowingly experience. I am not saying that the newer versions of Windows are worse than the older versions – in a lot of areas they are better. The areas where there was almost no apparent improvement are just so very important that it is a shame that in the nine years between Windows 98 and Vista there is nothing WOW except for some nice looks. I don’t believe that in all the time it took to develop Vista the only area of focus was in under the skin improvements, that there was no time or scope to improve something as dated as Windows Mail. Especially not with the lack of quality that is presented in Vista.

And here is another thing – Windows Vista Basic only allows you to run 3 programs at the same time. Now take into account that the basic features in Vista and Windows 98 are so similar, you get the same basic functionality out of the box, and get this – Windows Vista Basic Edition is less capable than Windows 98!

The sad reality is that instead of making the more expensive versions of Vista more capable, Microsoft has decided to make the less expensive versions less capable – you litterally pay more for less, and even more for the same thing dressed up in a fancy suit.

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