Funny thing happened at the Goodwill store today. I snagged an old pre-HP era Compaq Presario for a flaming $7.50. I did not know the processor, RAM, etc - but it was cosmetically clean and had a "Designed for Windows 98" label on it. Figured it would be good for old parts, or whatever.

Surprise - it only had a couple programs installed, boots to the original wallpaper (I had one of this series new eons ago), and is fully functional. It has an AMD K6-2 processor @533MHz, 64MB of PC100 RAM, 2GB hard drive, factory CD-RW and an added DVD-ROM drive. No AGP slot, but slot 0 is open for a PCI video upgrade. IOW whoever had this PC hardly used it, so it's not corrupt, and bloatware wasn't as common back then as stores wanted to sell you software.

The real surprise, it runs shockingly well. Every function is quick, the system overall is responsive.

I can't help but think of my Xp desktop that has 2GB of RAM just due to my multitasking out the wazoo, but even more so, my Vista Home Ppremium laptop that has 2GB of RAM just to wake up in the morning.

It seems the more we move forward, the more we slide backwards.

I'm surprised it runs Win98 decently with just 64MB of RAM because I remember a lot of page swapping with 64MB but decent performance with 128MB.

For win98 64 meg isn't bad - I sold lots of machines that way, back then. Of course a little more was better, but much like when XP first came out (lots of 256 machines), it didn't seem like you needed a tons of RAM at first. Once you start adding some other applications (AV, etc...) it slows down, but until then... It's amazing how smoothly a clean install of an OS will run when you are used to using one that's got lots of stuff installed.

thekid72 said:I am tempted to up the RAM to 128, find a larger hard drive and install Win2000 on it as a basic file server.I've never used Win2000, but when I tried XP Home on my 466 MHz Intel 810i with 256MB, it was sluggish, however it runs fine with 512MB.

does firefox even work in win98?

thekid72 said:
The real surprise, it runs shockingly well. Every function is quick, the system overall is responsive.

Yeah that is why I stuck with 98. Since XP runs like crap on my 450mhz/64MB/8GB system, XP must be a pig. I think I'm going to switch platforms because 98 is not supported anymore.

FunnyStuff said:Since XP runs like crap on my 450mhz/64MB/8GB system, XP must be a pig. I think I'm going to switch platforms because 98 is not supported anymore.OTOH I've received far more malware attacks with XP than 98. I run with an Airlink USB wireless adapter because it supports WPA even with 98SE, even though the specs don't mention it.

larrymoencurly said:I'm surprised it runs Win98 decently with just 64MB of RAM because I remember a lot of page swapping with 64MB but decent performance with 128MB.I also run 98se with only 56m of ram (8 shared with Monitor)

98se is one of the BEST OS's ever released