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Arman Danesh

Now that I've had a couple of weeks to play with Windows 98, I have to ask: what have I gained by switching operating systems?  Microsoft claims Windows 98 fully integrates the Windows environment with the Internet. Browsing the hard drive should seem the same as browsing the Web.

 But, from a user's perspective, this deep integration doesn't seem to make any real difference. After all, in Windows 95 - with Netscape Communicator or Internet Explorer 4 - a user could double-click on icons representing Web pages (local or remote) and immediately view them in their preferred browsers.

 Any attempt to view an HTML document, in fact, would seamlessly display the document.

 Fine, Windows 98 now displays these documents inside a regular Windows Explorer window and provides the ability to show Web sites in the list of available data source in Explorer.

 But this difference is purely cosmetic and does nothing to enhance a user's ability to work with information on the Internet.

 Most users learn to perform computer-based tasks by rote: they learn a series of steps to connect to the Internet, search the Web and print a Web page.

 With Windows 98 they learn a subtly different series of steps but gain no great boost in functionality or capability. Windows 98 doesn't seem to have made the process inherently simpler or more intuitive.

 Also, let's consider the famed Active Desktop.

 Now, Web pages and other dynamic content from the Internet can be placed on the desktop as part of the Windows 98 background. This is an interesting concept, but of what value?  For the average home user who dials into the Internet once or twice per day, active content on the desktop will not be very dynamic: updates can only occur when a user chooses to connect.

 It wouldn't be wise to allow the computer to connect whenever it wants to update content as this could result in uncontrolled online time billed by the minute.

 Also, the way one adds content to the Active Desktop is not immediately obvious. In my experience of users being introduced to Windows 98 where I work, none are aware of the Active Desktop and even those who are, have no interest in using it.

 To top it off, Microsoft promised improved stability, greater ease of installation and use, improved plug and play and mostly better speed.

 In my experience, this is highly questionable. As for stability, I have seen exceptionally stable Windows 95 systems on our network become horrendously unpredictable, with random application crashes and even total system crashes on at least a daily basis.

 Claims of speed are also dubious. On one system where I recently installed Windows 98, upgrading from Windows 95 to its newer incarnation has slowed the machine to a crawl in many ways.

 Booting takes longer, swapping occurs more often and in higher volume, which means opening new applications, and switching between open applications is far slower and, most notably, network connection speeds have slowed dramatically.

 It is almost as if there is extra network overhead in Windows 98 which makes the computer itself a bottleneck when connecting to our Ethernet network. Interestingly, some of this seems attributable to the Internet integration features of Windows 98, including the Active Desktop and far prettier, but seemingly slower, Windows Explorer.

 Also, the talk all along has been how much better Windows 98 is for the networked world: better Internet connections from home, easier configuration of connections and improved tools for the local area network.

 But Windows 98 seems to support less network hardware, such as modems and Ethernet cards, and has trouble recognising even the most generic modems and Ethernet cards during upgrades on relatively new systems.

 One wonders if the emphasis Microsoft placed on integrating IE 4 wasn't a smokescreen for the fact Windows 98 really has little to offer and in some areas even takes away from the Windows platform.

 I for one am disappointed. I think it's time to switch to Linux.



Internet integration largely cosmetic while speed and stability suffer