I know most of you vote for XP, but I’m not going that route yet. I’m getting the CPU I need to finish my upgrade from my wife for Christmas, and had a Windows failure (after installing the latest Microsoft Ciritical Update, I haven’t been able to get Windows to boot again, thank you Microsoft), so I’ll be re-formatting my HD in a couple of days.
98 is more dated, but may be more stable – I’ve been running it, and had no problems – but ME is a little more friendly to my LAN.
Which do you suggest, barring XP. (I have CDs for 98 and ME, and don’t want to buy a new OS at this juncture.)
I spent years using 98, so even though it sucks, I at least know how to make it do what I want. By the time ME came out I was too tired to play with all of that bullshit anymore and had already been using Debian for everything but games. So I guess I vote for 98. This poll is kind of depressing, though.
What! No Linux option!!
In that case I would choose Win98SE. Old Windows 98 isn’t even supported by soundcards anymore. ME is just SE with a couple of extra features you probably won’t need. But if you can’t find SE pick ME instead.
It has the W2k network stack, I believe. Plus it has recovery options that 98SE doesn’t have.
I really don’t understand why anyone would suggest 98SE? ME has everything included in 98SE, plus a little more. If you don’t like the new ME features, just don’t use them.
SE should be cheaper than ME. And I just turned off the recovery feature (which is the main difference between the two), I don’t need anything that reduces fps for a gaming OS. For some reason I just liked SE better than ME.
ME might have slightly updated drivers and similar but I didn’t notice anything major myself. It also has the system recovery feature. It could be nice perhaps but it also reduces the performance.
SE is a little faster, even if the recovery feature has been turned off in ME.
I refuse to vote in the poll. XP is so much better than either that it’s ridiculous. And it can be found for the cost of two games – Amazon had it for $65 last week.
Of the two, though, go for Me. I think most of the people who hated Me did an “upgrade” on their system rather than a fresh install or something. I installed Me on two desktops and two laptops in our house and never had any more problems than I did with any of the other DOS-based versions of Windows.
Well, if you can obtain a copy of the pirated corporate edition of XP, it may cost you even less than $65. The most common corporate pirate keys have been blocked by MS from any future upgrades, but it’s pretty easy to use the XP key generator to generate a valid unique corporate key-- simply edit the registry, run a MS key entry app, then reboot and you’re good to go with Service Pack 1 and all that.
I do have an official copy of XP Pro I snagged for $40 through some crazy MS promotion, but I prefer to use the corporate edition so I don’t ever have to “activate” due to hardware changes or whatever.
<subliminal>Go to college</subliminal>
Hell, for that matter if you took a class at your local university, you can get all your MS software dirt cheap.
<subliminal>Go to college</subliminal> <subliminal>Go to college</subliminal>
They have a sepcial class of license for people in school, and it allows you to get full versions of XP, Office, VS for a fraction of retail.<subliminal>Go to college</subliminal>
How funny is it that the original poster said very clearly that he already has both CD’s and that he is not considering XP at this time, and half the replies are about the cost of finding the CDs and going to XP at this time.
Since everyone seems to be ignorning your “pick between these 2 oses” and instead sticking their $OS_OF_CHOICE in, i’m changing my choice to Minix. Sure, getting games/anything/the os itself to run may be a little hard, but i’m sure you’ll love spending every single moment trying to get it to work.
Hell, after installing it, you can write your own drivers for all the stuff it doesn’t recognise!
Someone else here made a really good point: If you’re installing the OS clean to a new or reformatted hard disk, that helps a lot. Go with Me and try it out.
I heard people had a lot of problems with 98SE and Me. They’ve been OK for me even with the steady game install/uninstalls. Keep in mind that I don’t leave my Me system on all the time, I shut it down every couple days because if I don’t, it will do it itself :P
I would second Denny’s recommendation of mwave.com for anyone looking for parts. I just bought my XP Pro machine parts and built everything from scratch from mwave. They didn’t always have the best price on individual pieces, but collectively, they were competitive and I liked not having to order from 15 different places. They shipped everything on time and packed well.
I spent $129 for an OEM full edtion copy of XP Pro though…I thought that was a good price until I read some of the hardware threads here. Wish I’d talked to some of you first. $40…shit!
