Q: My computer is three years old now, PIII 800Mhz 256Mem and 64 vid memory. I guess Im forced to upgrade to XP Pro w / c 98 will support cealse. I do not want to 98 ovewrite or extra partition, I would prefer XP on an external drive, but not sure if it is possible. Are all necessary measures to enable.
Re:> Secondly, I am sick of dealing with the excess of problems with win98, this OS is outdated frankly.
Yes 98 is outdated, and will become more so. I have not noticed that there are fewer problems with XP, but it is nice to have a dfferent set of intractible, if minor, problems, which MS might get around to fixing some day, unlike 98 which was dead-ended the day XP was introduced. That is if MS finds enough time to devote to operability bugs between devising security patches.
Memory size is overtaking 98. For over 512K, 98 probably needs a setting in SYSTEM.INI to avoid out-of-memory errors. 98 eventually runs itself out of a certain resource otherwise. By design, 98 cannot handle over 1G of memory, an amount which is about to become the norm. This is an internal design which MS is not going to change. It might work at over 1G, but it was not designed to, according to MS, and is not supported. At 1.5G w9x reboots endlessly in a loop, according to an MS knowledge base doc. Of course, if you have a computer which won't take 1G, you won't have to worry.
Make sure you check your computer for compatibility by running the compatibility test before you install XP. Even though a lot of it may be BS, take the results seriously, because one of them may sting you. If you do an upgrade, then delete/uninstall incompatible programs/drivers/hardware before you upgrade, even if the compatibility test does not specifically say it is required; it is sometimes impossible to uninstall afterward, or undo the registry tangle. There are quite a few drivers/fixes for things XP does not support out of the box, and manufacturers have no XP drivers for (such as pre-XP scanners), so the incompatibility report is not as depressing as it may seem.
Make sure you line up all the security patches for XP (a long list) before you install XP. Install the patches before you ever connect XP to the Internet, otherwise you are liable to get hit by a worm (like I was 4 times) before you get the updates from the MS site. And/Or install a firewall (like the free Zone Alarm) before you connect to the Internet. At the very least get the Blaster patch or get a free Blaster remover from one of the anti-virus sites. The first time Blaster got me, I was filling in the forms to complete my sign-up for MSN, which I'd estimate to be less than ten minutes, probably five. The next was about the same, but I filled out the forms quicker, so I didn't have to re-signup. ( I checked for viruses in between tries.) The next was a little under an hour. The next was similar, and I was waiting for it by having task manager up. I watched as new processes appeared about as fast as I could shut them down. For a while I thought I was gaining. Then msblast.exe appeared, and I got the "Windows will shut down in 60 seconds" countdown.
The new types of virus exploit XP vulnerabilities, as the call them, so 98 is invulnerable to them. In some ways, it is ironic. XP itself is virtually uncrashable (although that doen't go for programs run on XP.) I have never seen XP itself crash. At most the desktop disappears and XP restarts the desktop. That may seem to be a good thing, and in a lot of ways it is, but when XP recovers it is not in quite the state it was before. This turns out to be a good thing for virus writers to exploit. If XP crashed, like 98 would, that would be the end of it. Somehow XP "exploits" allow virus writers to get their program to run on your computer over the Internet. A user does not have to be tricked into running a malicious program in order to get a virus, not in XP.
One thing to watch out for is reinstalling XP over itself as a repair, because that removes all the security patches.
Re:What's holding you back from upgrading win98 to winXP? Do you have any particular compatibility problems w/ software or hardware?
Re:No I do not make calls to Microsoft regularly. However, its to my understanding there will be no more patches or security updates. Secondly, I am sick of dealing with the excess of problems with win98, this OS is outdated frankly.
Re:What do you mean "support will cease"? Why is that important? Do you make frequent calls to Microsoft asking for help?
Re:dell and hp and compaq sometimes put the os/restore disk on another hdd or partition, but i dont know how to use them.
Re:why external? why not just add another drive? its not like you can carry around a bootable version of XP and expect it to work on other systems…
but, yes, it is possible assuming you can boot to USB on your system, you'll want USB 2.0 if you want any kinda of speed out of it though, and I dont know if you can boot off of that. Firewire would be an option tto, but again I dunno if you can boot off of a addon firewire card. If not USB or firewire you'll have to go external SCSI, which is expensive and will require a SCSI controller as well.
just add a sub $100 IDE drive and use it to boot off of.
0 Comments.