When good enough is all you need
I recently gave away my eight-year old IBM ThinkPad laptop that was still running Windows 98 SE. I finally gave up on it because it got to the point where the CMOS needed to be reset every time you turned it on. But otherwise this sturdy, well-built laptop ran just fine. Sure, the battery had been almost dead for a long time but when plugged in there was no problem. Until a year or so ago my wife used it regularly to do her Internet surfing and email. It was still quite a serviceable system.
Now before you chide me for making my poor wife use such an obsolete system, you should know that I offered more than once to buy her a new PC. But she was used to the ThinkPad and Windows 98 and it did all the things that she wanted to do with a PC. But what about the insecurity of such an old system, you ask. It had software for anti-virus, anti-spyware, and a firewall. I kept up the patches until Microsoft discontinued them. In any event, in the seven years it was in service, the ThinkPad never got any malware. I’m not saying that Windows 98 is as safe an operating system as Windows XP or Vista, but my wife’s surfing habits pretty much kept her out of trouble. She doesn’t download or click on strange links.
I’m also not saying that Windows 98 didn’t have some disadvantages. Obviously, a lot of progress has been made in ten years. What I am saying is that there are hundreds of millions of PC users who would be perfectly well served by an operating system that is simpler and demands fewer resources than Windows Vista or even, for that matter, Windows XP. Maybe the new netbooks will show the way to a simpler, easier setup for home PCs .
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