"It's surprising how many consumers or businesses still use these older versions, particularly Windows 98. Their continued use partly accounts for an extension of support for about an additional 18 months--from January 2004 to July 2006," Jupiter Research senior analyst Joe Wilcox told BetaNews. Yea, because XP stinks, resource and hard drive hog! I still think Windows 98SE is still the best OS from MS. What the latest news on Longhorn? Anyone know?

I think Longhorn is unofficialy on meritorious disregard. Many folks, not satisfied with being burned by XP, are anxiously waiting for the chance to throw money at M$ early next year. As Adrian Cronauer might say, Amazing coincidence? You be the judge: July 06 support for w98 ends; Mr. Bill bails out. ===================================== If at first you don't succeed, you're about average. M2

"I still think Windows 98SE is still the best OS from MS." Fortunately you are in the dire minority. I can tell you do not use XP on a consistent basis or hardly at all, XP is by far superior to 98SE, even Win2K is superior to 98SE but you may not agree. There are some alleged screenshots of the 5479 build of Vista (formerly Longhorn) on the web but officially the last build that I have tested is the 5472 and evidently M$ is about done except for the tune ups here and there which IMO is probably going to be consistent in every build released to testers until the OS goes gold. The internet is a series of tubes!

This is now 4 turgid posts in two weeks, what a waste of forum space. Yes another W9x/ME is it not wonderful thread, support has ended it is dead and it is time to move on. My adopted brother works for a large orginisation who supply large corporations with PC's and have never ever used W9x/ME as it is only MS-DOS (30+ years since CP/M) with a GUI, they still install NT4 SP6a when requested on older PC's. Last but not least you will be hard pushed to run XP on your PC Specs, not a chance of Vista, it is Bloatware personified, I have been testing Viata Beta and not impressed..

I'm still using W98SE which I've honed to run fast, very reliably and securely on an Athlon 1800+ with 512M RAM. I see no reason to suddenly "move on" just because MS have stopped support. Sure, NT based systems are technically superior and XP is more user friendly (which means you are less able to tailor it to your needs). I also think that it is often the hardware that systems such as XP are usually put onto that makes some of the difference (software writers have always assumed the latest and greatest). BUT, of-course the time will come when I'll have to ditch it. These are some of the likely factors which would lead me to do so: 1. Programs getting so bloated that they would kill W98SE (even assuming they are still available). 2. No AV or anti-malware programs for W98SE (how long?). 3. DVD copying (if I should ever wish to). 4. No software available for replacement hardware. 5. Something or other that I might wish to do that is only possible on a newer OS because of software and/or hardware limitations. The time will surely come but right now I can do everything I wish (and that's plenty) so I'm not about to change just because others are sometimes unable to comprehend my reasoning or have some crackpot idea that only new, or newer, is good. Inverto's comments about Vista say it all. DerekW