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> I went with WIN98se simply because I wanted an optical drive with
> a harware decoder, and there were no WIN 2000 drivers available for
> this vendor's hardware decoder's drives. If I had it to do over
> again though, I'd definitely go with WIN 2000....it sure couldn't
> be worse than 98.
Win98 is just a dressed-up Win95, which is mostly just a cosmetic
update to Win 3.1, which is a pretty face on top of DOS. All of them
have fundamental flaws and weaknesses in their design that make it
extremely difficult to write solid and reliable applications.
Win ME is basically Win98 with fewer options. To quote the estimable
Fred Langa, "It's Windows with training wheels. As such, it'll be
great for utter newbies because they won't be able to get themselves
into much trouble. ... any moderately experienced Windows user will
feel stymied and hemmed in by WinME's deliberate limitations."
WinNT, on the other hand, has almost nothing in common with the Win9x
family. It was designed from the ground up as an honest-to-God
operating system, by people (NOT from Microsoft) who had actually
done that successfully in the past. It's far more bullet-proof than
Win9x ever dreamed of being.
Win2k, as I understand it, is the next generation of WinNT.
Everything I've heard says it's better, faster, and more solid than
WinNT, even though it's barely out of the lab. It sounds as though
Microsoft learned from their betters and took NT to the next level of
functionality and reliability.
If I wasn't already on NT, I'd absolutely upgrade to Win2K. IMHO the
Win9x platform is not suitable for mission-critical applications.
Since I already have a very stable platform, I'll give Win2K a few
releases to get even more solid & get some more drivers &etc, but I
will eventually move. Win2K is obviously the future of Windows.
Gary
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