98 voluntarily installs all your device drivers without being
inquisitive
It supports FAT32 filesystems and thus optimises access and and
increases the FSI of your HDD (on my 4.3GB disk, I got 500MB free)
It incorporates the new buzzwords like DVD, USB, AGP, Infra red ports
etc,
It looks like WIN95 after a trip to the beauty parlour having smooth
scrolling windows and lotsa new themes. MS Plus is inbuilt in Win98
It has an "active desktop" which means that you can view and
update any internet content on you desktop(i.e. keep jpeg files or gif animations on your
desktop) and it is not as slow and buggy as the one provided by Win95+IE4.0
It is highly customizable having the ability to be viewed in a variety
of ways,
It enables large hard disk access of greater size than 2GB ( it can
address my 4GB drive as one drive which is not possible with win95)
Installation is easy enough for the college guards to accomplish
IE4 is tightly integrated into Win98 and gave me consistent 33.6
connects on tcp/ip
It has a host of new system utilties like the link checker, system
monitor, fat32 convertor, sysinfo, maintenance wizard, scheduled tasks, system monitor
etc.
It has done away with Win95’s plug-&-pray to give some
semblance of plug-&-play
The DirectX API is newer than that of Win95 and gives better
performance
It has a well made startup disk with various diagnostic tools
It has support for a new technology called VPN( Virtual private
networking) and supports the PPTP( point-to-point tunneling protocol) which enables users
to log on to another network privately after using a public network like the internet as a
backbone. This may replace WAN after security problems are sorted out.
It really brings out the best in your hardware ( I found drivers
installed for atleast 5 devices of whose existence I was unaware of e.g. infrared ports,
PCI Bridges etc.)
You get cool OpenGL 3D screen savers inbuilt and also TweakUI with
which you can virtually change just about anything that you want.
The help files, being in HTML format , are easy to access and use
The FAT32 system cannot be converted back to FAT16 which means you
cannot uninstall even by formatting since Win95 won’t install on FAT32; and though
hackers have made utilities for 32-16 conversion, I suggest you steer clear of those
FAT32 disks cannot be compressed by drivespace/stacker etc.
USB,DVD,AGP are only technologies accessible to those with new comps
and that excludes most of us
The WebTV feature is only available in the US and Canada as of now
Though I noticed a speed increase on my PII, I cannot guarantee whether
that benefit trickles down to the 486 class machines
Unlike OS/2 Warp; 98 still fragments your HDD and the bundled defrag is
slower than a CR train
Uninstallation information takes up 50MB of space
Stability problems, though reduced are still present
There are some conflicts while using old DOS games & programs.
