There was, however, one phenomenon peculiar to stage theatre that drove the performers and crew of a production to distraction: the dead house. You had several hundred live bodies in your theatre, all of whom had paid to be entertained. Yet anything you did, no matter how funny, touching or dramatic it was, died an ignominious death as soon as it left your mouth. Last night the identical shtick had knocked them dead; tonight it was cold oatmeal.

Welcome, then, Windows 98.

The only ones I hear applauding are the Microsoft suits in the front row.

There are reasons for this mild reception and I’ll cover them, but the biggest question "Why upgrade?" isn’t really sufficiently answered by Windows 98 which seems to awkwardly shuffle its marketing material and reply, "Next question!"

Windows 98 is, in many ways, what Windows 95 should have been. From the point of 20/20 hindsight, it is easy to see all the things Microsoft could have done better with Windows 95 and failed to. Part of the reason Microsoft was constrained in making significant "under the hood" changes was because so many users still did much of their work with DOS programs, using legacy (read: old stuff) non-Plug & Play hardware. Making the fundamentals of file systems, device input/output, and user interface for an Operating System reverse compatible is difficult to begin with. Convincing legacy users to upgrade to a system that would completely ruin their ability to run their old software was impossible. So Microsoft took the middle road: change how it looks but leaves the guts of the DOS I/O that it runs on undisturbed.

This meant that your DOS programs would still run (most of them, anyway) and you got all of the new functionality of the new interface. Without this concession to the present users (and a media blitz with a budget equal to Borneo’s GNP), Microsoft would never have penetrated the market with Windows 95 as quickly as it did. The only area it failed to capture fully was the large business industry that is dominated by fuddy-duddies who can’t see an innovation until they’ve already been run over by it.

While there are some useful features about Windows 98’s improved feature set, most folks won’t find enough motivation to buy it. I’ll confess, there are some things in it that would be nice to have, but the only folks standing in line for Windows 98 are either the propeller-heads or those with Microsoft stock. I will buy Windows 98. Eventually. Probably not this year.

So, on to the "new" features of Windows 98:

FAT32 and Drive Management

This was the first big reason to purchase. FAT32 is the update to the tottering FAT16 file system that was originally implemented for DOS. FAT16 defines how the data is laid out on a drive and since it started life formatting floppy disks, it has not dealt very well with the move to 2+ Gigabyte hard drives. FAT16 does not allocate the space on the drive efficiently so the larger the drive is, the less efficient FAT16 uses the physical space. You could lose the use of as much as 20% of your hard drive’s capacity to an ugly phenomenon called sector granularity.

FAT32 makes these problems go away, though it seems like an awfully peculiar fix for the problem: Windows NT uses a file system called NTFS that does not suffer from sector granularity, but Microsoft installed FAT32 as the solution instead. I have yet to puzzle out why.

FAT32 is a great reason to upgrade if you require another 15% space on your hard drive. First caveat: Windows 98 can’t convert your present system to FAT32 if your drive is almost entirely full. Sort of defeats the purpose, eh? Second caveat: Windows 95 OEM Service Release 2 (OSR2) uses FAT32. If you’ve bought your computer with Windows 95 preinstalled any time during the last year, you already have FAT32.

Data Management automation has come a long way from DOS 6 where compressing your files without having defragmented the drive first rendered your drive and data unusable. Now Windows 98 will intentionally fragment your hard drive (I’m not kidding!) to place frequently used files end to end to load them faster when you call for them. Windows 98 also shortens the amount of time it takes to start up and shut down your computer by incrementally loading drivers when you make a call for the device. Windows 95 loaded all of the device drivers up front. That meant the Windows 95 startup and shutdown sequence seemed to take forever. By contrast, Windows 98 loads the device drivers on the fly as you request access to a device that raises the specter of device latency. Think about it: would you rather have the operating system load all of the drives at the beginning so you get access to a device when you ask for it, or p-a-u-s-e during your active use of the computer to load that driver?

I thought that I would appreciate a quicker startup, but when I was reminded about how my copy of Netscape Navigator performs, I changed my mind. You see, Navigator 4 doesn’t load the Java Virtual Machine (the "driver" for Java applications) until you hit a page that has Java. Then you wait for an extra 5-7 seconds to load the VM before the rest of the page appears. Annoying.

Moving the latency from startup to active use begs the questions, "How often does a user turn their PC on and off?" Which is an excellent segue into the subject of...

Advanced Power Management

The most frequent reasons I hear for turning the computer off are that users don’t want to "wear it out" or don’t want to pay the power bill to keep it running all the time. I can appreciate this: I have three computers at home networked together. Such concerns are very real to me.

Since 1994 (or thereabouts) motherboard manufacturers have been making systems that will power down unused devices. The first ones shut down hard drives after a period of inactivity. Today’s systems have the capacity to suspend power usage on almost all devices including the CPU. RAM Memory is provided with a trickle of power to keep its contents intact. When you touch a key on the keyboard or move the mouse, the system "wakes up." This sleep mode can also include devices like Plug and Play monitors that can be told to shut off, thus cutting the biggest power drain in the system: the fat capacitors in the monitor.

All of these features are available in Windows 95 through the Advanced Power Management 1.2 (APM) system. To use these features, you must have a motherboard of recent construction, but that isn’t the bugaboo that disturbs me. It is that Windows 98 data management and APM seem to be working at cross purposes. Why bother making the loading sequence faster if, with APM, you almost never have to turn the power off? Hmm.

Brain Surgery on yourself: Self Repairing Operating System

Microsoft is famous for spearheading the "help files that aren’t any help." With Windows 98, some of that changes. The addition of 12 new or improved utilities let you skip faulty drivers, restore your registry over a damaged one, test for version conflicts on system files and download updated drivers from Microsoft.

Basically, Microsoft has rolled some of their freeware toys into Windows 98. Shortly after the release of Windows 95, some Microsoft engineers developed tools called TweakUI. These were automated utilities to help them get over some of the rough spots of Windows 95 that would be a pain to repair. Many of these enhancements are based on the TweakUI project. All but the last: downloading updated drivers from Microsoft directly. Who tests these drivers for a separate manufacture’s devices? You guessed it: Microsoft. Not unlike asking the fox to guard the hen house.

Other Helpful Items

• Native Support for Universal Serial Bus (USB), FireWire and DVD - I think this is great, as it helps pull these advancing standards into common usage. But what is the immediate benefit for your existing hardware? Zip.
• There aren’t any programs designed to run ONLY on Windows 98. You can stay with Windows 95 until the next upgrade if you choose to. No penalty.
• Internet Explorer integration is complete: when your hard drive contents shows up as a web page, you know Microsoft has been busy. Thankfully the whole web view system can be tuned off as it is neither like the web nor like the Windows 95 interface but is some kind of bizarre hybrid that won’t last past the next upgrade in 2000.
• Microsoft claims Windows 98 is "more stable" and that 3,000+ bugs have been fixed. I’d like to see a list. I’d also be interested in seeing how many new bugs they added. That is why I’m not upgrading until next year when they fix everything they got wrong this time around.
• You can have multiple monitors. Macintosh had this in 1984. I still think it’s a good thing, as it will permit the use of separate screens for input and output. This is a potential boon to me as a coder, as the changes that I make to HTML code on one monitor could be instantly shown on the other monitor. However, for the standard user, this feature probably won’t appeal: it is a power user toy only.

To make a long story short, unless you already have USB devices, or must have access to FireWire, DVD or other devices, wait to upgrade. Many of the visual enhancements of Windows 98 are available FOR FREE from Microsoft’s website Not surprisingly, it isn’t easy to find. Microsoft wants you to buy their new upgrade rather than install enhancements to your present one. To jump directly there, type this URL exactly:

For everyone who want to be first on their block with the new toy, consider that Windows 98 is only a stop gap, designed to make the consumer pay for many enhancements that are already being given away. After Windows 98, there will be no continued support for the platform. Microsoft has stated clearly that they are going to an Operating System based on the Windows NT structure in either 2000 or 2001. The consumer version will be some kind of NT "lite" but will still have the hefty RAM and hardware requirements of its big brother. I’m not willing to pay $109 (list price) for an upgrade that Microsoft itself acknowledges as "incremental." I paid less for the Windows 95 upgrade.

Next month I’ll report on the alternative Operating System called Linux. As I mentioned last month, I’ve set up a Linux box and am amazed at what it can do—and what it can’t. I’ll have the full scoop on this emerging competitor to Windows next time.

Peace,

WebWalker