I am running the latest Beta of 98

Windows 98 ?

I work in the corporate environment and prefer Nt4 on the big metal box but as I also have to run portables, NT is a definite No No.

So as a self-confessed software junkie, I am running the latest Beta of 98, and...... well, it seems more stable but does funny things unexepectedly on the PII266. At least it recovers gracefully. That is why it is a beta !

Now I use a Libretto 50CT for field work. It has Mapinfo on it with the GPS option, so that I can locate mining anomalies with the GPS. One really irritating feature of the Libretto is that it occasionally loses its PCMCIA facility. This ought not to be too great a problem but becomes so when the system disks, on floppy, are 3000km away. I even did the right thing and did a full tape backup. That did not work.

So stuck in Perth (I am based in Sydney, for what it is worth) I had the difficult problem of getting the PC card drivers operating again. So I installed Win 98. I did get the PC Card drivers back, discovered that Win 98 comes with a really useful backup utility, and by using Fat32 increased performance and disk space. Assuming that 98 is more stable than 95 plus sp's 1 to O-O i assume life will become boring.

One niggle is that the Libretto now has 2 power management utilties loaded, and that is a worry. I feel inclined to zap the hardrive and install a virgin win98 on the Libretto. Win 98 was loaded straight onto the new PII266 workstation and zooms along. Shutting down is instantaneous, with no fancy "green" features enabled. Though the stability of NT would be preferred, (I use that on the PPro180 in Sydney), many of the really useful programs I use seem to work better, for the moment, on Win95/98.

Hardware compatibility is the more important issue, and el cheopo scanners prefer Win95/98. One interesting thing I have come across is that another @uthoritative magazine annotates Messy Ducks as necessary for older style CD Roms. Ha. The Win98 startup disk relies exclusively on "outdated?" Messy Ducks to enable the CD Rom on diskette startup.

And if any reader does not know what Messy Ducks is, then either he/she is a Mac User, has never read Brian Livingston's books/columns, or has never used DOS.

And I love the new format !

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Louis Hissink

PC World
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