buh-bye, Win95

I've been doing so much with so little for so long that the, "This program requires Win98," window stunned me. I'd been running a continuously upgraded upgrade of Win95 since the winter of 1996 and getting along just fine, thankyou. Sure, the kid's laptop is 600 megaherz, but I don't play games or download mp3s so this old Pentium 120 has been plenty fast enough. When they installed the cable service they said 133 mghz was required - one of the machines around here is a PIII 450 - but this old dog still hunts: networked into the cable via a Linksys router, the downloads are faster than the cpu can paint the data to the screen. But it's there and a lot faster than the 28.8 Sportser external that's attached and still working.

In order to install CityDesk I had to upgrade. Somewhat.

I've been using a networked CD-RW drive for a year or so since mine died (a work-around has been as good as a fix), but there's been a used one sitting around just waiting for a reason to crack the box along with a sound card to replace the one that went south about the same time. A copy of Win98SE came with a 6gig hard drive from a sidewalk sale (now I've got room enough to double boot Linux!) and I've a license for 98lite that has been waiting since August of 2000 to be put to use. I went up to their site, got the latest release and created the install diskette.

The whole process took about 4 hours. FDisk->Format->install Win98 via 98Lite took about an hour. Re-installing and configuring all the usual applications and setting the machine back up to the way I like to work - took up the rest and in fact, is a never ending process.

This computer runs better than it ever did, using Win95's Explorer, without web integration, on Win98. I didn't mention that the video driver had become corrupted by one of my nephew's games which enforced a 256 color, 640 by 480 regime onto my 17" monitor. I moved to one of the faster machines for graphics work but heck, that's where the scanner and printer is anyways! Now, wow! My screen looks as good as any of my clients'!

You're reading this by way of CityDesk. It certainly wasn't for the money - just goes to show the things we do for love.