I strongly disagree with Peter's statement. I would have long since upgraded from Win98SE to Win2K if it was able support two of my crucial utilities: the Norton Navigator file manager, which is far superior to Windows Explorer, and DATMAN, which turns a DAT tape drive into a WORM file system. Since they don't work on 2K there is obviously no point considering XP, and my other important applications, such as Visual SlickEdit, Mozilla and Photoshop, still work quite nicely on 98SE.

So, far from being clueless, some of us use Win9X because it is better to use an OS that crashes annoyingly often than to use one that just plain won't run the software we depend on. (And if I was willing to significantly change what software I use, I would skip 2K/XP and move to a properly modularized OS.)

P.S. In the case of Norton Navigator, Symantec never released a follow-on after Win 95. In the case of DATMAN, the developers could not figure out from Microsoft's documentation how to build a working Installable File System (IFS) for the NT kernel, even though they had the IFS working quite nicely on Win9X. (Another secret Microsoft doesn't want to reveal?)


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