Microsoft/Windows/98
Techniques: Windows 98 This article refers to Windows 98 Second Edition, usually abbreviated Win98SE or just Win98 or w98. The original release, usually referred to as "Windows 98 Original Edition", "Windows 98 First Edition", or "Win98FE", was apparently quite buggy and I don't know of anyone using it who has not upgraded to SE.
Reviews
Woozle, 2005-06-25: Win98 strikes me as being a kind of pinnacle for single-user Windows, if you look at usability divided by bloat. Windows 95 didn't need as much memory to run, but it lacked support for certain things which became rather essential soon after Win98's release, such as USB and hard drives larger than 2 GB. In general, it was a successful reworking and enhancement of the basic Windows 95 design; more significant bugs were eliminated by the reworking than were introduced by the new features. After Win98 came the disastrous WinME (which some people apparently do still use), after which Microsoft began to merge its single-user "9x" line (95, 98, and Me) with the multi-user, more security-conscious line started by Windows NT, resulting in Windows 2000 ("Win2k") and finally (so far) Windows XP (WinXP). From our perspective, Win2k and WinXP both have problems, even leaving out the cost (which is a significant factor). Win2k will not run Access 97, and WinXP will not run PTC, an ancient DOS-based credit-card processing application. I need both of these for my business. As a result, I am working on a long-term conversion of all database operations to Linux (so we no longer depend on flaky Access 97 for data processing), and in the short term working on using emulators such as qemu so I am not depending on the Windows filesystem (FAT32) for essential data storage. (PTC needs to be eliminated; everyone else is using internet gateways or web-based credit card processing.)