Living with Windows

Home Office Computing, Sept, 1998 by Philip Albinus

It's the best thin to happen to new PCs since the Start button but is Windows 98 a winning upqrade? We reveal when it does and doesn't make sense to trade in Win 95

Microsoft Windows 98 Upgrade

Est. Street Price: $90 (list $109)

Publisher: Microsoft, 800-426-9400, www.microsoft.com/windows98

Requirements: Windows 95 or Windows 3.x, 200MB of hard-disk space, Internet connection; 90MHz Pentium with 16MB RAM (minimum), 150MHz MMX Pentium with 32MB RAM (recommended)

MEET WINDOWS 98: WINDOWS 95 WITH A SHAVE AND A HAIRCUT.

Three years ago, when Microsoft unveiled its new Windows 95 operating system after months of testing, it met an astounding reaction: The software flew off the shelves as the masses discovered the joys and frustrations of working with Microsoft's answer to the friendlier Apple Macintosh. The new 32-bit (well, mostly 32-bit) Windows more or less killed one rival operating system, IBM's powerful yet luckless OS/2, and left the venerable Mac operating system among the walking wounded.

This past summer, Microsoft released Windows 98 to a far more muted fanfare. Instead of prompting people to "Start it up," the update to Windows 95 modestly promised tighter integration with the Web, a few performance tweaks, a slew of bug fixes, and an almost imperceptibly improved design. Because Win 98 looks a lot like its predecessor, and because many of its enhancements are actually found in Microsoft's separately available Internet Explorer (IE) 4.01 Web browser, moving from Win 95 to 98 isn't nearly the profound experience the previous upgrade was.

Of course, that makes the decision of whether to upgrade to Win 98 even tougher. To help you decide, we've gone under the hood to uncover the differences between Windows 95 and its newer, spiffier sibling. We point out what's been improved, what remains the same, and what's still sorely lacking. Then we discuss whether you should pay the $90 and move to Windows 98 right away, or wait until you buy your next computer and get Win 98 preinstalled.

A New Coat of Paint

At first glance, the new version of Windows resembles the old. In fact, you have to look carefully to notice any cosmetic differences, although you'll notice that Windows 98 has added a few more icons to the default desktop. Along with the My Computer, Recycle Bin, and shameless Setup the Microsoft Network icons, we found other icons that can help you with your work. For instance, someone at Microsoft wised up and placed the My Documents folder, where we like to keep our Word and Excel files, right on the desktop and in the Documents menu in the Start pop-up menu. If you use Microsoft Office 97 under Windows 95, the office suite creates the My Documents folder on your hard disk, but you have to launch the Windows Explorer file manager to find it. The new operating system puts the default file-save stash in plain view for quick and easy access. Pretty smart.

However, for some reason, Microsoft still keeps Windows Explorer--as opposed to Internet Explorer--off the desktop. For three years, each time we reviewed a new Win 95 PC, we had to drag and drop the Windows Explorer icon onto our desktop so we could launch the file manager whenever we wanted. You must do the same thing with Windows 98. Although you can now technically use IE as a file manager, we prefer to use Windows Explorer to navigate through the files on our hard disk.

The Taskbar in Windows 98 has been slightly tweaked. The Start button still resides in the left-hand corner, and in the right-hand corner you can still find the System Tools tray holding a digital clock plus icons for the programs automatically launched when you start up your PC. But next to the Start button, where Windows 95 displayed icons of your launched applications, you'll now see what's called a Quick-Launch bar containing four small icons--three of them, as it happens, for the Microsoft Internet tools that have launched a flurry of Windows 98-related antitrust action. These include the IE 4.01 Web browser, the Outlook Express email program, and a special icon for viewing channels (Web sites to which IE 4.01 users can subscribe to automatically receive updated content).

Although we love the fourth mini-icon--for Show Desktop, a nifty tool that minimizes all your open applications with one click so you can swiftly return to a clean screen if interrupted by prying eyes--you may find the others intrusive. Because we're dedicated Ecco Pro users, we deleted the Outlook Express icon from the Taskbar by right-clicking on it and choosing Delete. Contrarily, if you're a fan of Microsoft freebies, you can drag and drop icons from the QuickLaunch bar onto the desktop.

Just Browsing, Thanks

Between the launch of Windows 95 and Windows 98, a seismic event called the World Wide Web greatly affected the way the new Windows works and looks.

Several key components in Windows 98 look and operate much like a Web browser. According to Microsoft's usability studies, nontechnical users have an easier time using a Web browser than the rest of Windows itself. Armed with that info, the company's programmers turned the new OS into a virtual browser.