Sunday, January 10, 2010

Reminder: win98 was really, really bad

I threw win98 on that old laptop to see if the win wifi card would work, since I inherited the original win98 install/recovery CDs. Didn't work even under windows.

Things I forgot I hated:
  • installing windows
  • freaking long software keys you have to key in
  • rebooting every time you change anything nontrivial.
  • installing windows drivers
  • that "invisible drummer" please wait animation
  • "Windows has found new hardware..."
A modern linux vs. old windows isn't a fair fight, but get this: it took 2.5 hours to get win98 installed and browsing the net. The linux distro I put back on it after that was up in 13 minutes -- I timed it. Both installs including fdisk'ing the the hd clean and reformatting. The Win98 time would have been longer but I located/downloaded/burned the drivers on a seperate machine's CD burner while it was installing, so I wouldn't have to wait. I didn't even apply any service packs, which would have added more time.

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