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.
But how many of those things weren't already available as free downloads?
The only thing I know about that was in Win98 but not available as a patch to Win95 was USB support, but that's largely irrelevant to the upgrade question because for the most part only new machines needed USB, and new machines shipped with Win98, so you didn't need to upgrade for that.
True, it was in many ways a bug fix on Win95... but I can't see anything that was related to Netscape.
IE was "integrated" into Win98, and was intentionally made harder to uninstall. I believe this is all in the court transcripts.
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.
Out of curiosity, what kinds of scanner, printer, video capture card, and other peripherals did you have installed? Did the products of Microsoft's competitors still work flawlessly (AOL Instant Messenger, Netscape Communicator, Opera, QuickTime, etc.)?
By the way I agree with you about memory: it's so stinking cheap now that if you want to upgrade your computer, it makes much more sense to spend $100 to get another 512 MB than to subject yourself to an XP upgrade.
Dave |
