June 29, 1998
Making Windows 98 Work
By Bob O'Donnell
Well, it's finally, officially here. The unenthusiastically anticipated update to
Windows 95 known as Windows 98 is now available for purchase, both as a separate upgrade
and bundled with new computers. And love it or hate it, you're going to have to start
dealing with it in your organization at some point in the not-too-distant future.
In fact, given last week's court decision to overturn the ruling against Microsoft and
its previous policy of requiring OEMs to bundle Internet Explorer with Windows 95 -- and
the impact this will likely have on the Justice Department's case against Windows 98 --
any hopes for a government-led bust of the Windows 98 party are pretty much lost. The way
I see it, Windows 98 is here to stay.
That's not to say Windows 95 is going to go away, however. Microsoft officials said the
company plans to continue selling Windows 95 for an unknown period of time. In addition,
most PC OEMs will still allow you to order your systems with either Windows 95 or 98 (or
NT 4.0, of course) pre-installed. But, given Microsoft's past history with operating
system updates, I have to presume that these plans will be relatively short-lived. By
sometime this fall or, at the latest, the end of this year, I'm predicting it'll be
Windows 98 (or NT) or bust.
So, the question, then, is how do you best make it work? What can you do with Windows
98 to make it a valued, or at least a begrudgingly accepted, part of your environment?
Even better, what kinds of cool things have you found you can do with Windows 98 that are
different from Windows 95? I'd love for readers to share their responses to these
questions in this week's forum
so that we can start building up a base of useful knowledge based on practical experience.
In the meantime, I can tell you that my limited experience with the final shipping
version of the software has been mixed. I installed the final upgrade version on a freshly
formatted partition on a Pentium II-based Dell Dimension XPS H266 system that I've been
using and discovered that yes, it does need to confirm a previous version before it
installs, and yes, a Windows 95 CD will work to get past that confirmation stage.
More importantly, I was surprised to find that the final Windows 98 install code
couldn't properly recognize several components of the system, including the PCI-based
Matrox Millenium II video card, a Brother MFC4550 Multi-Function Printer/Fax machine
attached to the parallel port, and a Pacific CommWare TurboExpress 920 fast serial port
card, which is a plug-and-play ISA device. In the case of the Millenium it found only a
standard PCI VGA adapter, it completely missed the printer, and it gave me a yellow
exclamation point on the serial port card, presumably because the drivers for the device
aren't on the CD. So, I ended up having to install quite a few drivers before I could get
this system (which is less than a year old) to be in decent working shape.
Now, I realize it isn't necessarily Microsoft's job to have every possible driver
available on the CD. I also know that most people will install 98 over an existing 95
installation that presumably has all the necessary drivers in place, but still, the
overall installation experience was pretty disappointing. On a positive note, the newly
updated Properties dialogs for devices in the Device Manager provide much more detailed,
accurate information about the drivers used by particular components in your PC.
I also found the Maintenance Wizard to be a handy new tool that, like the built-in
troubleshooting tools I wrote about in a previous
column, will benefit many users. However, as I also said in that column, I believe
many third-party utility companies will see their sales suffer as a result of these
various utilities being included in the base OS. The fact that some utility companies have
recently cranked up their public relations efforts is a sure sign, in my opinion, that
they're getting nervous about it.
It's still much too early in the process to make any profound judgments on Windows 98
and its overall impact on the marketplace. But it's definitely not too early to get
started on figuring out how you're going to make it work in your organization.
©
Copyright 1998, by InfoWorld Publishing Corp., a
subsidiary of IDG Communications, Inc. Reprinted from InfoWorld,
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