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Technology Stocks : How high will Microsoft fly? -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Dave who wrote (62177)	10/25/2001 9:14:25 PM
From: t2	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 74651

You must be referring to those articles in the various Windows magazines that said everybody would run out to upgrade, when in fact it turned out that most people were smart enough to realize that there was nothing in Windows 98 that wasn't available for free, and that Windows 98 was largely just a weapon in Microsoft's fight against Netscape. Actually, what I meant was that Windows98 upgrades were a huge success. The computer technology analysts (such as IDC and others) were not expecting it. If as you say there was not much in Windows98...we know there is a lot in XP..most important being the stability, imho. I think it will be HUGE! I think those with the old PCs will start replacing them and this could be the catalyst for consumers. I agree that adoption on the business side will be slower...but you never know. The PC replacement cycle is approaching early next year according to Michael Dell. BTW--I walked in a computer store and was told that selling was going better than they had expected...I guess these retailers may have been paying too much attention to the so called experts in setting the sales targets. Just my observations..curious to see the initial sales reports.

To: Dave who wrote (62177)	10/26/2001 10:14:49 AM
From: rudedog	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 74651

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.