Windows 98... how to explain to a customer why it's not good anymore

[mgsstar]

Maybe they only use the computer for browsing and printing and feels that it is not necessary to upgrade.

[Hans Christian | Teri]

Call me old but Windows 98SE is one of the best OS's from Microsoft ever.

[FireFox]

All you need to say is 'Support ended in 2006' that should be sufficient :P

[Midnight]

There's no software developer willing to support it?

 

Personally, I liked 98. ME was terrible.

[WoodenMarker]

I frankly experience this a lot with my work. some guy brings in a pentium 4 running xp and the thing wasn't displaying right. I told them that their gpu failed and the guy is like 49 and has 2 kids with him around the age of 14 and 16, so the 16 year old having checked his email once and "knows how to plug in a computer" is now a computer "expert". And said so if we were to get a really awesome gpu it would run battlefield 3 right? I thinking quickly told them I would have to see what kind of port they have on the system and said to watch this video about the subject of bottlenecking on the monitor while I was doing that (I pulled up the linustechtips ncix video) so it turns out that it actually did have a pci express 16x slot... one of the kids had apparently while I was gone walked over to the gpu section of the superstore and was holding in his hand a gtx 690 and asked if it would work. Well... Technically yes but... "But what" said that guy who was with them who now seemed to be getting all defensive because he was not in his "element" working on cars at his autoparts store. 1st of all you only have a 250 watt psu and that would need to be upgraded. "ok". And you only have 512mb of ram... "so we'll buy a brand new power supply and as much ram as I can afford" But its getting old I said. "old, this computers only 7 years old" and thats when I snapped and started pointing all around the store "Look around you... the world has passed this pc by... no one is running xp anymore we have 8 core processors and 32 gigs of ram... not 40 gig ide hdds..." Listen i'm not gonna let you walk out of here screwed over with a gtx 690 in a pentium 4 system... because no one would be happy, For the same price I could build you a nice balanced i3 rig with tons of room to grow over 7 years. 

 

 

At the end of the day everyone was happy, but this is one of the more rare occasions where people are not stubborn and are willing to learn

This was a good post. It made me smile. Thank you.

[lutzee]

Telling people support ended, its old etcetc often doesn't work. I find the best option is to tell them that it has a serious security floor that was fixed in newer versions, scare them a bit works rather well.

[Blackterror25]

just say

 

"The percentage of users that use that old software is just to small for developers to bother making it and dumping more money for the development of it. That's why it is no longer supported by most developers, and it isn't going to get any better as time goes on."

[Lays]

I did this with my stepdad, I explained it all in car terms, while we were in fry's and 5 minutes later he was bringing me boxing asking can we get this lol.

 

 

Now he asks me whenever he sees something online he doesn't understand and I explain it to him.

 

I think what I did was, "Cpu is like the computer in your car, it keeps track of everything and runs everything properly" "the motherboard is like your block, it stores all the parts to make them work" "The power supply is the gas tank, it's your fuel" etc etc.

 

I may have used diff terms at the time I can't remember lol

[Yuval]

Tell him that it is outdated, you can get a much simpler experience yet similar, with many new features and that it is compatible with much more software, regardless to the fact that it is 15 years old.

[solomongrundy]

all you have to tell them is if they do any banking/ buying stuff online, they are vulnerable to having their information stolen because the old OSs are not supported by Microsoft anymore.  You have no security if you keep using Windows 98.

[Raboo]

I use Windows 98

 

 

JK

[ictdude1]

there is no support for it and they dont make software for it anymore

[hunterman1043]

You should've sold him an old SCSI printer. lulz.

[leipero]

Call me old but Windows 98SE is one of the best OS's from Microsoft ever.

Agree, I would say that XP is quite "longer" more complete system, but Win98SE was flawless when working properly. 

 

To OP, some people don't need those PC, and in that sense, newer systems are not necessarily better. You can connect big LCD screen (with VGA) on PC from that era, it will support it just fine, and it will work very well for what is supposed to do. Office work experience is far better in older versions of Windows (both XP and 98) compared to newer (even with Aero disabled). So from that point of view, you don't need to convince them anything, just fix their problem if you can.

[looney]

nothing wrong with 95, I'm still actively using 2 95 VM's for legacy purposes. 

[legopc]

bla bla bla securety issues they could steal aaaaalllllllll your information 

[stevv]

It's usually the other way around for me... customers with really old desktop/laptops (we're talking about pentium III !!) wanting to install the latest OS (but from experience, I do it anyway... they usually come back convinced it's too old and slow :P ).  

 

Last method if they don't want to upgrade... find out what they do...  even if all they do is "just online surfing"... ask if they access banks and security related sites and the better security of the newer OS's, and old hardware break and they can loose data (doesn't work for people who have nothing on it haha).

 

Convincing people to upgrade hardware isn't the hard part, once you ask them what they plan to do.  Wait till you tell them they have to buy software.  :rolleyes:   Selling anything for "backup" is also hard.