My dad is asking me for advice on upgrading his P-III 750MHz Win98 desktop which is gradually grinding to a halt.
If the machine is gradually getting slower, and he is running the same apps he always has, then this is a good sign that it's time to re-install Windows 98. Win98 machines tend to slow down over a period time. Their registries fill up with garbage, various "enhancement" software (like browser plugins and system tray nonsense) get installed over time. It's also very possible that he has some malware on the machine slowing it down. My rule of thumb for Win98 is to reinstall every 6 to 9 months. More aggressively if you browse indiscriminately.
That being said, I had great luck running Win98 under vmware when I bought my wife a new laptop. I gave it to her with one very big string attached -- it must run Linux. But all of her favorite stuff was on Win98. So she ran vmware (actually copied the entire filesystem over from her old machine). Over time, she realized that it was faster to run Firefox and Thunderbird natively in Linux. She slowly weaned herself off of Windows (without much prodding on my part).
You notice that I don't mention "upgrading" to Windows XP. For most people, who just run Quicken, a browser, email, TurboTax, spreadsheets, a word processor; Windows XP does not really buy you anything. It handles networking a little better. But if "old school" works for your dad, you might consider sticking with it.
Alan . -- TriLUG mailing list : http://www.trilug.org/mailman/listinfo/trilug TriLUG Organizational FAQ : http://trilug.org/faq/ TriLUG Member Services FAQ : http://members.trilug.org/services_faq/
