Kaaay well...
My experienes with 98 were awesome in the times of migrating from Windows 95 to 98 (which was a nice change). Everything went fine even when NT was around. It all came down to hell when Windows 2k came out... then apps started to throw their native errors about needing 2K/XP (and it was annoying). Then it all started to crash with my trivial tests trying to make those apps and games run in 98 with no avail. Yeah, it was fast and cool back then in my 300Mhz (not to mention the nVIDIA drivers I had back then for 98 worked WAY BETTER in that comp rather than in my mom's one with XP... lol!) but, it wasn't nice when I wanted to use something and it said it needed 2k/XP.
Merranvo, I understand your point, but you will never find cracks for -every- type of app/game that will make it run in 98... mostly because 98 is slowly sinking in the forgotten pit, and thus the crackers that do that stop doing cracks for making them work. It's all based on popularity: Why to crack something only 5/100 people will use? that's not a way to become famous, not to mention the hard work cracking it.
Of course, I was really p*ssed when I found that after getting Slave Zero (which is an awesome game by the way) it won't run in XP... it took me some time to find a suppossedly "buggy" crack that made it work in XP... okay, the game runs fine and all... but I don't have 98 anymore, and would have loved to play it in 98 - more speed
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Programming and doing stuff in 98 was a kind of a pain too. I used to program some stuff in VB 6.0 back then (and still do) and it was stupid to reset the comp, wait a scandisk and then come back, with your project unsaved (stupid VB) just because I couldn't get it out of a bad trial-and-error Winsock command sequence. Playing some games was tricky too - VESA mode games when alt+tabbed did crash and sometimes they could even crash Windows in the process: Not very good. Also, sound card and MS-DOS games were a bad mix together if the drivers weren't MS-DOS/Windows multitasking-compatible... I still remember the damn error when you alt+tab, or close a program when it crashes "auto-detecting" your sound card, and then it says "This device is being used by another process" so there goes, another restart.
XP has some downsides on this too - if you have an awesome sound card and want to play some old game (say, Lands of Lore (which is annoying to play under DOSBox, ew! sluggish as hell), Tyrian 2000 or Stargunner) with a real good sound... XP doesn't detects it, or the game ends up with a runtime error... the VESA driver doesn't work, joystick isn't emulated right... etc. But then again it's based on popularity: Who plays old games anyways?.
Technology is gonna change we like it or not. I know I won't get Vista because my computer hardly runs nice with XP, but you'll see, in one, two, or three years, I'll be upgrading, beause I'll get a better computer for using it, or I may stay with XP, after all... it's my ideal OS... tweaking it right
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My blood boils everytime I see some game or app that requires 512Mb RAM, a GeForce 47356366352 FX 7564333+++ and like 40Gb of disk space (I'm being exaggerated) ... and I hate it, I hate to see why everything advances so fast and I don't have neither the whealth or the possibilities to upgrade, no matter how much I want to, but I have to just live with it. Sadly, this is no real world, and we can't improve here - we're ruled by electricity, the big companies, and the capacity of our limited hardware - . It isn't the same to look at Arnold and say "I want to have arms like his" and start doing excercise and all that stuff in years, than to see Quake 4 and try to make it run in a 300Mhz... no way. Luckily, we can change our "hardware" and "software", but the computer, without our help, it can't by itself.... what I'm saying here is a way of saying you can't push the computer to be what you want unless you help it to be.
Of course, there goes people who say "go buy some RAM, a new video card, and a new motherboard - oh, while you're at it, also get a new mouse, that one sucks" and people in some other forums where my mom once went asking why Lineage II crashed on her comp (she mistakenly put her video card on there, which wasn't the real problem) and they all were bashing her on there telling her to buy a new video card - when she plays just fine now without any needed upgrade.
One thing is to have a job, save up some money and buy stuff for your computer. Other thing is to not be able to have a job (by various reasons: age, location, family, your pet, aliens, etc.) or at least a non-fixed job, HARDLY get some money you can save up for your comp (if you don't end up spending it in something you need), for someone with a nice life to tell you to buy something it's unthinkable for you. For someone who earns $1k monthly, a $150 video card would be nothing, but for the ones who can't earn that much, every drop of their sweat counts for the effort of trying to save up that much. Gotta think in both sides.
Without anything more to say... here I leave this.
