Observations on Win98



It appears, so far, that Win98 is a vast improvement over Win95.

I have loaded Win98, beta 3 on a 701C. This was a clean load with NO handholding. I just said GO, and it handed me back an almost perfectly working OS, which recognized the 701 modem and sound.
The Ir loaded and communicates with an h/p LJ 5P but I have not been able to print yet. I assume this is merely a matter of tweaking.

This load in on an IBM 2.1gig drive with FAT32 implemented. I did not enable the 701 hibernate ability in the bios, but win98 suspends the machine when i close the lid or use Fn-F4..
I have even removed the battery and hard drive for a short time, then i replaced them both and opened the machine and VIOLA' the OS returns with out a whimper.
I did experience a glitch when doing the above with a DOS window open. The machine cycled in some sort of loop until i closed the DOS window, then all was OK.

Another minor bug is the machine will not shut off correctly when the OS asks for a reboot. It works fine when the user asks to shut down however.

I strongly suggest that all 701 users consider win98 over win95 when it becomes available. If for no other reason than the power saving features.

Bill Morrow



This is kind of a follow up on Bill's initial reaction to 98 on 701. Following is my initial impression, this is a released version(official) Win98 installed on top of Win95(original NOT OSR2).

My 701 has the Bill Morrow 40mb and original 720MB hard drive. I also have a TDK Global Freedom 56K as well as Adpatec 1460 SCSI(connected to my Reno CD).

The upgrade was fairly uneventful but took a long time(2.5 hours). I had the same problem Bill mentioned, which was the system did not shutdown when its time to do a shutdown and restart, I had to turn the machine off and on. Once 98 was installed, again, as Bill said, user requested shutdown or restart appeared to work fine.

So far my old applications appeared to work and the couple of surprising glitches was the migration of my MSN 2.5 and Outlook98 was not automatic. There's also a glitch doing dialup registration, BUT, all and all, its rather smooth.

Before I started the upgrade, I had about 134MB of free space left on my drive, after the upgrade, I had 54MB, so it appeared that Win98 did take up more space.

I also tested the hibernation by closing the lid, however, my system did not go to "sleep". I opened the lid and found a message that said to the effect that one of my applications was preventing the system going into hibernation, try close all open applications. At the time, the only open application was Windows Explorer, once I close that, hibernation worked as expected.

My initial impression is launching of applications such as IE appeared to be faster than Win95 and I also like the automatic disk management tools (got a low disk space warning and also got a list of potential delete files).

Steve Chiang


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