ECN Electrical Forum
Discussion Forums for Electricians, Inspectors and Related Professionals

Both my laptop and desktop systems still use Xp, but as for discontinuing support for the operating system I haven't heard anything yet. I did hear windows 8 will no longer have the traditional desktop screen, instead it will be like the ipad's version.

And to think I still have a windows 98, all it needs is an audio driver.

According to Wikipedia first week of April 2014 is the end of support of XP

I am still running several W/98 machines. The software may not be supported at microsoft but that just means they have finally fixed all the bugs

Software never goes bad, you just start getting hardware that won't run on it. (drivers) but before you give up, look at the manufacturer's site. There may be a driver for an older piece of hardware that still works. If you run old hardware, the old software is perfect for it.
New software is just a trap to make you buy new hardware.



Want to see a screaming fast machine? Run W/98 apps on a machine that was made to run XP. (any P4 with a gig or so of RAM).

Bill Gates seems to have dropped that deal about loading XP on another machine too. It used to be that you had to jump through hoops to move the registration from one machine to another. Now it just goes through when you do the register on install option. I haven't tried to run the same S/N on two at the same time tho. I bet it will gripe about the first one the next time you hook into microsoft.com and it runs the verify routine.
I know the last one you registered the software on works tho. (downloading media player or one of the other things that wants to run verify)

Youtube has videos of folks running WIN95 on modern 3GHz machines and WIN7 on 386's, etc.

Although I use XP at home and WIN7 at work, WIN98 seems to have had everything I needed. The only problems you run into are missing drivers and internet browser capability.

I am not sure what internet browser capability you lose.

You can go to oldversion.com and get the appropriate version of Firefox for W/98. You can also get the old versions of flash and whatever else you need.

It really depends on what you are doing with that machine. My main machines are on XP with some upgraded products (like Word) but my "appliance" machines are still W98 (weather station, MP3 players etc) mostly because the software I run is not XP friendly but I still want to be able to get to the internet and they all hang on my network.

For the few hardcore DOS users out there, you can run DOS on XP using a free program called DOSBOX but it runs seamlessly on W/98.