Living with Windows

Home Office Computing, Sept, 1998 by Philip Albinus

Need an example? Look no further than Windows Explorer or Control Panel. These modules once resembled their stodgy Windows 3.1 File Manager and Control Panel counterparts: a box full of icons. Now Windows Explorer looks like IE 4.01, complete with browser-like Forward and Back buttons in the toolbar and an address line where you can type either a DOS-style file address, such as C:\Program Files\Quicken, or a Web address to jump to an online site.

Not only do Control Panel, My Computer, and Recycle Bin offer views resembling Web pages, they also include a smattering of HTML code to give you more information about the contents of folders along with their bare-bones property lists. Move the mouse pointer over a disk icon, for instance, and you'll see how much free space the disk has. We especially liked the warning that appeared when we clicked on the Windows folder, stating that we could potentially cause programs to stop working correctly if we modified the folder's contents.

Changing to a traditional icon or list view is as easy as clicking a pull-down menu, but the browser metaphor is certainly snazzier and more helpful than the cut-and-dried look of Windows 95.

Nothing But Net

Windows 98 shines when working with the Web. In our admittedly unofficial tests, Internet Explorer 4.01 felt more stable and less prone to crashes than previous releases of IE, just as the OS itself did compared with Windows 95. If the majority of your home office tasks take place on the Web, the newlywed pair of IE 4.01 and Win 98 is worth a long look.

But legions of Windows 95 users are already browsing with IE 4.01, available free for the downloading from Microsoft's site (www.microsoft.com/ie) or third-party libraries such as c|net's www.browsers.com. If you'd like to join them, be prepared to set aside at least 50MB of hard-disk space to store the new browser. Expect a slight performance hit as well--IE 4.01 isn't ideal for slower, older PCs.

Call us free-market radicals, but we still prefer Netscape's Navigator browser (www.netscape.com)--which, like Internet Explorer, is readily available for free download. If Navigator is your favorite way to maneuver through the Web, it'll work fine with Windows 98, but you won't be able to use the OS's seamless file management/Web browsing features.

Although the integration of Windows Explorer and Internet Explorer is almost enough to make us give up Navigator, we're not in the least tempted by the Active Desktop feature that represents Microsoft's exceptionally pushy brand of push technology. By default, the Windows 98 desktop displays a vertical Channel Bar of Web-site icons. Most of these take you to Microsoft-related sites such as the Microsoft Network and MSNBC. A few featured sites don't belong to Microsoft (Warner Brothers, America Online, Disney, and PointCast), but you can be sure those companies paid hefty fees to appear in the Channel Bar.

Automatic delivery of favorite-site content sounds great in theory, but Web searching in the background while you try to work in the foreground is a notorious system hog. Unless you have an ultra-fast Internet connection and at least 64MB of memory, your MMX Pentium PC may start to feel like the 386 desktop you bought eight years ago.