My Windows 98 SE install is exactly 35 months old.
The 1200 Mhz Athlon hardware is getting a little dated but it still works well enough. My motherboard has a defective component that starts a high pitched tone which can only be turned off with a total powerdown. This has happened over the past year and a half about 10 times, although no more frequently now than at the beginning.
My biggest problem with Windows 98 is that the system and program icons get swapped around. It has been happening a lot more over time. The system boots correctly, but I only get to do a few things before they swap now. I remember how it started a couple of years ago with the shortcut arrows getting remapped. Now more and more it\'s entire icons. More and more of them, quicker and quicker. I figured that it\'s some cache getting filled. As of today it had gotten to the point of being a problem needing to be fixed.
I just did a
google groups search for Win98 icons swapped. On the results page was a link named
Windows 98 Icons change suddenly, from there I found this:
increase the size of the Windows icon cache....you can use ActivIcons for as long as you wish, free of charge!
This is great software. The default for the Win98SE icon cache was set to 1024 (KB?) I bumped it to 4096. Now the Start Menu is noticably faster. Much faster.
Although the
ActivIcons program offers lots of options, the only explicit change that I used it for was to change the icon cache size.
A totally unexpected byproduct of this programs use is that my system shutdown time went from an average 15-20 seconds to 4-5 seconds!!!
Sweet.
Peace, the anti-Bush.
