Win98 is a performance/reliability upgrade for Win95. Thus it has some 16 bit code still. It has task protection to a certain extent and will still crash if the app (16 or 32 bit) stabs the wrong part of memory.
It sounds MUCH worse than it actually is though. In practice I have been running the OSR2 update to Win95 on this laptop for around a year with minimal hassle. One secret is to avoid loading a ton of new stuff, which tends to exacerbate the main Windows problem, which is lack of true versioning controls on DLL's.
For my day-to-day development, on the other hand, I use Windows NT 4.0. It has none of the aforementioned issues. It is a complete rewrite with no DOS code. It is completely 32 bit and has full protection for all processes. In over three years of use, I have only had one problem, where I had to restart the machine.
So this means that users, who are non-professionals, will get a decent upgrade in Win98 and professionals will wait for NT 5.0. The reality here is that the main benefactors of Win98 will be the support organizations all over the planet. Win98 is MUCH more stable than the original Win95 and slightly more stable and easy to configure than Win95 OSR2.
Windows 3.1, still 16 bit, is a complete joke and a total nightmare to support. There are a lot of people still using 3.1 and I get the impression that they are the whiny ones, who complain most about Windows. Their laziness and cheapness have denied them at least three years of hassle free computing. To avoid seeming that way they whine a lot about how bad Windows is. When they start to upgrade with Win98 and NT 5.0, like our pal here, the whines will die down.
Remember also that Microsoft has the largest slice of both of these markets. Sun only has some of the "workstation" Unix market and most of the server market. The two are not really competing, although Scott McNealy would like to think that they are! |
