Living with Windows

Home Office Computing, Sept, 1998 by Philip Albinus

Let's be honest: Does the world need another invitation to try a taste of AOL? We think the regular AOL disks that litter the environment are enticement enough to try the online service, and find the Channel Bar to be overkill if you're accustomed to using Web browser bookmarks to check your favorite sites. Fortunately, you can turn off the channels and get to work.

Performance Anxiety

PC processors have grown many times faster over the past few years. Software hasn't. In fact, applications have become heavier and more bloated with extra features, multimedia clips, and animated help files. And while you wait for Windows 95 to launch, you may have wondered why you paid for a PC with a blazing chip.

Microsoft has streamlined Windows 98 to load and shut down quicker, and tweaked Disk Defragmenter to rearrange application components on your hard disk to launch faster (after you've opened and closed them a few times for Win 98 to monitor their behavior). However, you'll need an advanced Pentium II-class system and ample memory to take advantage of these performance boosts. If you have an older machine, you're out of luck--Windows 98 will perform about the same as Windows 95.

For this review, we used a Gateway Solo 2500 LS notebook with a 233MHz Pentium II processor, 64MB of RAM, and Windows 98 preinstalled. Although we had no complaints about launching such typical sluggards as Microsoft Word 97 and Excel 97, we still had to endure a tedious wait when we powered up the notebook.

If you're still waiting for the day when Windows appears before your eyes as quickly as the image when you switch on a TV set, you'll need one of the new PCs starting to appear with special fast-boot BIOS ROM code. Or you'll have to pay a slightly higher electric bill and adopt a desktop that, like the newest Compaq and Hewlett-Packard consumer models, can enter a notebook-style "sleep" mode instead of actually switching off. On such a computer, Win 98 can schedule tasks such as defragmenting the hard disk or downloading Internet pages while you sleep.

To improve performance in a broader sense, Windows 98 provides a ton of new drivers for up-to-date peripherals, which will be immensely helpful when you add hardware such as a DVD-ROM drive to your system. Some other new hardware-related capabilities are flashy, but less universally useful: Got a spare monitor? You can finally mimic the Macintosh desktop-publishing trick of using two displays simultaneously (for, say, your page layout and your toolbar palettes). Got an ATI Technologies TV tuner or All-in-Wonder card connected to your cable TV outlet? As of press time, you're the only customer for Microsoft's TV Guide-like WebTV for Windows 98 viewer.

By contrast, we're truly impressed with the operating system's support for the Universal Serial Bus (USB) standard, which lets you simply plug a device such as a scanner or printer into a USB port without having to install an internal SCSI card. With USB, the promised days of plug-and-play will have finally arrived. It's about time.