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Old PC Operating Systems
By Martin English | March 20, 2005
Software doesn’t wear out
The Washington Post has an article on how aging operating systems are still widely used. The article states that “The research firm IDC estimates that of the roughly 514 million paid-for copies of Windows on desktops and laptops worldwide at the end of 2004, almost 21 percent were the aging Win 95, 98 and Millennium Edition releases.”
Cars wear out. Clothes wear out. My computer hardware will eventually wear out. But my software and the OS that works best to run it on, wont wear out. Why is everyone so hung up on the latest version of stuff _if_ the old version is doing the job? For a home user, Office2003 (or whatever the latest version is) doesn’t provide any extra functionality over, say, Office97.
This sounds like a message for the users, but maybe it is a wakeup for the OS manufacturers. So many people that still see their OS as viable and are willing to use it… The OS companies have to provide a real and justifiable reason to sell a new release. Especially when the changes that make a new feature possible often times bring instability, data corruption, or regressive preformance issues.
In fact, your kid will do wonderfully on their schoolwork with Office 97. It’ll look great when printed on that old Laserjet 4. You run almost zero virus risk if you have a cheap hardware firewall on your cable connection and limit where your kids can surf. Just to make sure you’re not exceeding the limits of the hardware. As secondary or tertiary boxes, there is no problem whatsoever with old versions of Windows.
Btw, most of the users referred to in the arcticle are not candidates for a Linux system… The default footprint of a modern Linux distributions is too bloated for the sort of hardware that can get away with win98 or or earlier.
Links:
UNOFFICIAL Windows98 SE SP1 1.6.2
98 Lite
XP Lite and 2000 Lite
Live Windows CD
Win98 USB details
NT 4 USB Fix
Topics: Code, Languages, Microsoft, Technology, Work | No Comments »
