Young People Try Windows 98

[James]

 

Windows has changed a LOT over the last 24 years – but not nearly as much as some of our staff. What will they think of an operating system that predates their birth?

 

 

[BiotechBen]

Great OS. Many fond memories.

[da na]

I deal with this era hardware a good deal and I admit, I prefer to stick to XP because I have trouble using 98 lol

[BiotechBen]

Just now, Mel0n. said:

I deal with this era hardware a good deal and I admit, I prefer to stick to XP because I have trouble using 98 lol

Grew up on 95 and 98 on gifted computers, 95 was immaculate, 98 r2 was pretty good.

[DeanCaffery]

This brings back memories!

95 and 98 were too good

[ToboRobot]

OG or SE Windows 98?

[Misel22]

How did Linus not use TweakUI?

[Bitter]

Fun fact, those CDROM drives with play/pause buttons on the front were also stand-alone CD players if you fed them power and had decent sound quality.

[Vishera]

I remember playing Age of Empires II,Hercules and Jazz Jackrabbit 2 on the family's Windows 98 system.

Though back then we spent more time outside playing with friends in real life

 

38 minutes ago, Caroline said:

The Briefcase feature was so useful and SIMPLE in 98 and XP....

Windows 7 has it too:

[deepend]

I still have a windows 98 se machine setup on my desk to this day.  I guess I never let go.. lol  Mostly use it for games of the era.  But it is still useful in many other ways.

 

[AnonymousGuy]

Windows 98 was "back in the day" where your OS would commit suicide after 12 months and require a full reinstall.  Everything would get progressively slower and shittier even if you weren't installing anything.  Or if you changed any of your hardware it would shit itself and require a full reinstall.

 

3D pipes was also the best screensaver.  You would watch and wait for the tea kettle easter egg to appear at one of the joints:

 

[Vishera]

58 minutes ago, AnonymousGuy said:

Windows 98 was "back in the day" where your OS would commit suicide after 12 months and require a full reinstall.  Everything would get progressively slower and shittier even if you weren't installing anything.

Almost all Windows versions have a bug: A memory leak that progresses over time.

The older the OS installation and the more used it is the higher the overall RAM usage.

 

Microsoft have never fixed this.

 

I once had a 5 years old OS where the idle RAM usage balooned from 1.2GB to 3.5GB and the thing is that it was a fairly clean OS,

No bloatware or unnecessary stuff running in the background...

 

1 hour ago, AnonymousGuy said:

Or if you changed any of your hardware it would shit itself and require a full reinstall.

Even Windows 7 had this issue,though not as bad as it was in 98.

In Windows 7 you could at least use the Sysprep tool to reset the configuration and drivers to the default Microsoft basic drivers .

[Needfuldoer]

If you really want to confuse them, give them a Quadra running System 7.5 and have them troubleshoot an extension conflict (without Conflict Catcher).

 

EDIT: And the Mac tank game Linus was thinking of probably was Spectre or one of its spinoffs and sequels.

 

 

Edited August 8, 2022 by Needfuldoer

[Bitter]

27 minutes ago, Vishera said:

Almost all Windows versions have a bug: A memory leak that progresses over time.

The older the OS installation and the more used it is the higher the overall RAM usage.

 

Microsoft have never fixed this.

 

I once had a 5 years old OS where the idle RAM usage balooned from 1.2GB to 3.5GB and the thing is that it was a fairly clean OS,

No bloatware or unnecessary stuff running in the background...

 

Even Windows 7 had this issue,though not as bad as it was in 98.

In Windows 7 you could at least use the Sysprep tool to reset the configuration and drivers to the default Microsoft basic drivers .

Windows 10 seems to have tamped that down substantially. A PC we use at work is often running a week or more between reboots, sleeping and waking each day.  My mining rig is running 10 as well and goes 15+ days running 24x7 between reboots. I've also re-used the same install across several PC's by just chuckin the SSD into different sets of hardware and usually after a reboot it all just works well enough.

[vetali]

1 hour ago, AnonymousGuy said:

Windows 98 was "back in the day" where your OS would commit suicide after 12 months and require a full reinstall.  Everything would get progressively slower and shittier even if you weren't installing anything.  Or if you changed any of your hardware it would shit itself and require a full reinstall.

I feel like every Windows OS I've used has felt like that aside from 7, 8.1, and 10. I skipped ME because my grandmother was an early adopter of ME and we decided to dodge it as a result. XP was fine after SP2. I remember base XP and SP1 being bombed by viruses. Updating it was a teeth pulling process that Windows 98 used at the time, kinda shown in the vid in a quick blurb. Vista sucked at release... required frequent reformats until drivers caught up and SP1 came out. SP1 fixed a lot of issues I had with it.

 

7 was a less bloated and more stable Vista. I stuck with it until 8.1 which was my favorite Windows version. Windows 10 still holds my record of roughly 4 years before formatting without any issues and survived multiple hardware changes. A close 2nd favorite version of Windows. Windows 11 has been rough for me so far.

 

I was too young to remember Windows 95 despite using it. Windows 98 was when I started getting into PCs and light gaming on them.

[whm1974]

21 minutes ago, vetali said:

I feel like every Windows OS I've used has felt like that aside from 7, 8.1, and 10. I skipped ME because my grandmother was an early adopter of ME and we decided to dodge it as a result. XP was fine after SP2. I remember base XP and SP1 being bombed by viruses. Updating it was a teeth pulling process that Windows 98 used at the time, kinda shown in the vid in a quick blurb. Vista sucked at release... required frequent reformats until drivers caught up and SP1 came out. SP1 fixed a lot of issues I had with it.

 

7 was a less bloated and more stable Vista. I stuck with it until 8.1 which was my favorite Windows version. Windows 10 still holds my record of roughly 4 years before formatting without any issues and survived multiple hardware changes. A close 2nd favorite version of Windows. Windows 11 has been rough for me so far.

 

I was too young to remember Windows 95 despite using it. Windows 98 was when I started getting into PCs and light gaming on them.

I started with Windows 95 OSR, when I moved out due to my Stepfather getting in legal trouble. then 98 SE.

[Beerzerker]

2 hours ago, AnonymousGuy said:

Windows 98 was "back in the day" where your OS would commit suicide after 12 months and require a full reinstall.  Everything would get progressively slower and shittier even if you weren't installing anything.  Or if you changed any of your hardware it would shit itself and require a full reinstall.

 

3D pipes was also the best screensaver.  You would watch and wait for the tea kettle easter egg to appear at one of the joints:

 

You know, Win10/11 is so advanced by comparison it will automatically reach out and "Find" things (Updates) to assist in it's own suicide and you don't have to wait the full 12 months for it to do this.

[ToboRobot]

I'd pay for a modern update to Windows 2k pro with the classic UI with modern drivers and none of the modern crap.

[Needfuldoer]

2 hours ago, AnonymousGuy said:

Windows 98 was "back in the day" where your OS would commit suicide after 12 months and require a full reinstall.  Everything would get progressively slower and shittier even if you weren't installing anything.  Or if you changed any of your hardware it would shit itself and require a full reinstall.

  

15 minutes ago, Beerzerker said:

You know, Win10/11 is so advanced by comparison it will automatically reach out and "Find" things (Updates) to assist in it's own suicide and you don't have to wait the full 12 months for it to do this.

I haven't had to do a clean reinstall due to OS corruption since the Windows NT 4 and 98 days. Even then, it was only because that was easier than properly fixing the problem I caused. What are you guys doing to your PCs?!

[AnonymousGuy]

1 hour ago, Needfuldoer said:

  

I haven't had to do a clean reinstall due to OS corruption since the Windows NT 4 and 98 days. Even then, it was only because that was easier than properly fixing the problem I caused. What are you guys doing to your PCs?!

Yeah, since 7 I haven't ever really had to do a full reinstall.  Maaaaybe once on 7 when I switching from like Z87 to X99 that it couldn't handle it and it was quicker to do a reinstall than figure out what the fuck was going on with the boot.  

 

98 was so bad I had a CD burned with a disk image of 98 with all my drivers installed.  That's how often it would shit itself.

[AnonymousGuy]

2 hours ago, vetali said:

 Vista sucked at release... required frequent reformats until drivers caught up and SP1 came out. SP1 fixed a lot of issues I had with it.

Vista was always pretty bad.  It was like the Crysis of OS's: either ahead of its time and/or really shit optimization.  I remember some Readyboost whatever feature that was supposed to make your boot quicker and all it did was make your computer unusable for 5 minutes.  

 

I didn't have a single computer run Vista long term, I went back to XP until like 2011 or so and then moved to 7.  Skipped 8 completely with whatever their dumb cunty UI designer was doing.

[Bitter]

8 minutes ago, AnonymousGuy said:

Vista was always pretty bad.  It was like the Crysis of OS's: either ahead of its time and/or really shit optimization.  I remember some Readyboost whatever feature that was supposed to make your boot quicker and all it did was make your computer unusable for 5 minutes.  

 

I didn't have a single computer run Vista long term, I went back to XP until like 2011 or so and then moved to 7.  Skipped 8 completely with whatever their dumb cunty UI designer was doing.

Readyboost worked fine if you had a decently good USB 3.0 drive but was pointless if your HDD was quick enough, it was just a low latency cache.

[AldiPrayogi]

My old PC had Win98 and WinXP on it. That thing was so nostalgic

[Luscious]

Slight correction here but it was Windows 95 for home users and Windows NT in the office that were the game changers, not Windows 98. 98 was more an under the hood and less of a cosmetic update to 95 than anything else. And if you were rocking an Abit BP6 back in those days you were the absolute baller 

 

As for CD audio, you would connect a jumper lead from the back of the CD drive to a small header on your sound card. Trying to work with 2-channel 16-bit 44.1k sound was a real struggle not just for processors back then but hard drives able to hold multiple 650MB uncompressed audio compilations. So to get around that it was all hardware driven bypassing Windows completely - CD drives back then did all the work giving you the headphone jack and volume dial on the front. A far cry from the world we live in now where 4K video editing is doable on a laptop with 32TB of m.2 on board.

[Fascinated Viewer]

Born 2001:

For me it would have to be windows XP in primary school (America Elementary school) when I was 8 years old remeber all the good games I played