Dave - I don't know what you mean about Win98 - it added 32 bit FAT, better resource management, better networking, the ability to support NAT for home networking and internet sharing, and a bunch of other new stuff. True, it was in many ways a bug fix on Win95... but I can't see anything that was related to Netscape. I would suggest that the various releases of IE were more directly targeted at Netscape, and those were available for Win95 users as well as Win98 users.
As far as upgrading to XP, I have upgraded pretty much everything I have, and the upgrade has been largely painless. You say "Don't look to the 1/3 of the installed base who still use Pentium IIs and Pentium IIIs to drive this upgrade" - but that's exactly where I saw the biggest benefits from XP. It improved the performance of older machines which were struggling under Win98 to the point where they have pretty decent performance again - and one of those was an 8 year old Pentium 90. The only thing to keep in mind is that more memory helps performance - unlike Win98, which did not make effective use of memory over 64MB, XP does, so more memory gives more performance. And at today's prices, I was able to add 128MB to that old Pentium for less than $50. That old box has never run so well.
You also say "It's just too painful to have to upgrade all of your peripherals and drivers and reinstall everything. "
That's not the case either - I didn't upgrade anything (except the added memory, and I did that after the OS upgrade just to see if it would boost performance). I just plugged in the CD, answered a few questions (way fewer than in past installations), and came back a half hour later to a fully functional XP machine.
It seems like you are talking through your hat and have not actually verified any of the things you are claiming. |
