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Windows 98

Windows 98 came after Windows 95 and before Windows Me

I have so many gripes with Windows 98 that documenting them all here is a daunting task. So daunting that I won't attempt it. What follows is just a small smattering of Windows 98 experiences.  Newer reports are at the bottom of the page. 

Fragile Monster

The Introduction of Windows Me prompted an article called Millennium relieves some of the nightmare in the San Jose Mercury News on September 9, 2000. The author, David L. Wilson, writes a newspaper column where he helps people with their computer problems. Here he confesses that "the vast majority of my attempts to solve people's problems are fruitless, and those failures rarely get into the paper." He says that half the time his readers have to re-install the operating system. He says: "Windows 95 and Windows 98 are both maddeningly fragile monsters, prone to frequent annoyances and occasional catastrophic glitches that can leave bewildered users utterly flummoxed."

Walter's Opinion

Walter Mossberg, writing in the Wall Street Journal on September 7, 2000 about Windows ME, referred to its predecessor, Windows 98 as "scandalously unreliable." On December 14, 2000 in the Wall Street Journal he said "The huge flaws in Microsoft's Windows 98 operating system became increasingly apparent with age...Microsoft...should be deeply embarrassed by this state of affairs".  

New NIC Card  

September 4, 2000. Windows 98 SE.  On a laptop computer that already had a pcmcia network interface card (NIC) defined to it and was working on a LAN with no problems, I added the definition of a new NIC card. Rather than sharing a single NIC card amongst multiple laptops, I had sprung for a new NIC card that would live permanently in this particular machine. I was not trying to use two NIC cards at the same time. 

The installation started as expected, Windows 98 detected the new hardware and I pointed it the drivers on a floppy disk from the manufacturer. Then it wanted the Windows 98 SE CD-ROM.  Why?  The driver for the new NIC card is on the floppy disk. The networking software needed by Windows 98 is already installed and working just fine. I can only assume that Windows 98 is too stupid to realize that the networking software is already installed. 

I do as told, it copies files from the CD-ROM and requires a reboot. I'm not paying too much attention to the reboot process because I was not expecting trouble. Oops. It found new hardware on the first boot after installing the new NIC card. I missed the details of what hardware it found. Needless to say, there was no new hardware. It installed drivers for this new hardware automatically and wanted to be rebooted, yet again. 

The next reboot was uneventful. However when I then went to the PC card applet in the Control Panel to look at the properties of the PC card, the window is too small to display the full name of the NIC card. It chops off the right hand part of the name and the display can not be scrolled.  

Networking Bug    

December 17, 2000. The NIC card discussed above works fine. Today however, I wanted to share a directory on my LAN that resided on a FAT partition on an NT4 workstation machine. No problem, I thought incorrectly. After all, the NT4 machine was already sharing a directory that the Win98SE machine could see. It would not see the second directory however. To make a long story short, the problem was that the share name specified on the NT4 machine was over 8 characters. NT4 warns you that a long share name is not usable by MS-DOS networking clients. I guess the NT4 programmers don't know about all the bugs in Windows 98 SE. 

ScanDisk   

Windows 98 Second Edition. I ran ScanDisk on a hard disk that had about 1.4 million clusters (11.2 Megabytes). In the bottom right corner of the window, it tells you which cluster is currently being examined and the total number of clusters. When the current cluster number goes over a million, that's all you see. It says "Cluster 1,234,567 of " and truncates the total number of clusters.  December 4, 2000. 

Desktop 

Windows 98 Second Edition. I do not use Active Desktop. Every now and then, for whatever reason, I lose the custom arrangement of the icons on my desktop. It is as if I right clicked on the desktop and said to arrange the icons or auto-arrange them. But I did nothing. January 17, 2001. 

Performance Monitor and Safe Mode 

Windows 98 Second Edition. Booting into safe mode destroys the Performance Monitor profile which has to be rebuilt from scratch the next time a normal boot is done. That is, you have to chose all your favorite stats to monitor all over again. April 2001. 

Shutdown 

A classic Windows 98 problem is that it often will not shut down. Much has been written on this, but the Langa List newsletter by Fred Langa reported on January 29, 2001 about  a web site with lots of useful information on the problem. 

Running SLOW due to wasting CPU 

Windows 98 is prone to wasting cpu horsepower. This has happened to me on three different computers running Windows 98. The main symptom is that the computer is slow. Brutally slow. It might take 10 or 15 seconds to open Windows Explorer for example. Somewhere I read a virus might be the cause of a very slow computer. Considering this has happened to me on three different machines, I doubt that explains it. Two of the three machines had up-to-date anti-virus programs. 

Following are the details from one of the computers with this problem. 

System monitor shows 35% of the cpu is being used when the computer is doing nothing except running the system monitor. At times over 40% of the cpu is being used. Ctl-Alt-Delete will show that only two programs are running: Systray and Explorer. As far as I know, this is the bare minimum needed by the operating system. On a well behaved Windows 98 system, the cpu usage to run System Monitor and nothing else can be as low as 1%. 

Windows 98 is version 4.10.2222 A on an HP Pavilion 6630. The OS was installed on November 9, 1999. The C disk uses the FAT32 file system, was defragged and scandisk reported no errors. There are about 100 fonts installed on the system. There are 63 meg of ram and the cpu is a Celeron A at 500 Mhz. The level 2 cache is 128k. The machine has a Phoenix BIOS 4.0 Release 6.0 according to the messages it displays at boot time. The BIOS setup says the core version is 4.06 and the BIOS revision is 1.06 from 11/15/99. 

The computer is very slow. How slow is it? It has taken over 20 seconds from the time I double-clicked on My Computer until it opened. It takes about 25 seconds to open Windows Explorer. It took 5 minutes and 45 seconds to boot. The only programs that run at boot time (according to the msconfig program) are scanregw, systray, system monitor and loading the power profile. I put system monitor in the startup list. It took 4 minutes and 20 seconds until I saw any icons on the Windows 98 desktop. Five minutes after powering on, System Monitor started. The hourglass went away from the mouse pointer at 5 minutes and 20 seconds and System Monitor showed 100% cpu usage until 5 minutes and 45 seconds, at which point cpu usage dropped to zero. If it only stayed there.

When System Monitor cpu usage falls from 100% it stays between 1% and 3% if I do nothing. But if I move the mouse the cpu goes up to 20% and stays there. Frustrated I move the mouse repeatedly, over and over and over. Moving, moving, moving. Remarkably, the cpu usage goes back down to 2% or so while the mouse is moving. Stop moving the mouse and cpu usage goes up to a stead 35%. Re-installing the mouse driver had no effect. 

Reboot again and wait for cpu usage to drop. Then I use only the keyboard (no mouse) to run Notepad. I type data into a new Notepad document and then cancel out of it. Cpu usage resumes at about 3% and remains low. Good. Then I use the keyboard to run Solitaire. Ugh. Cpu usage jumps to over 80% and remains there even after shutting down Solitaire. Moving the mouse repeatedly, lowers cpu usage to 70%, but it jumps back over 80% when I stop. 

Re-boot again. Use Ctl-Esc to bring up the Start button menu. Use the keyboard up and down arrow keys to go up and down the list of programs. Now the cpu is 12% busy and stays that way for over 5 minutes while I do not touch the computer. Still using only the keyboard, I start Solitaire and wait. I don't do anything in the game at all and don't touch the computer for another 5 minutes. Cpu usage remains steady at 18%. Then I play Solitaire with the mouse and when I stop, the cpu remains at a constant 26% busy. Shutting down Solitaire has no effect, the cpu remains 26% busy and the only thing running is the System Monitor. 

To see what was running just after a re-boot, I ran the System Information utility. It shows quite a lot of 16 and 32 bit modules loaded. In the section on currently running tasks (nothing else was running except for System Information) it shows: kernel32.dll, msgsrv32.exe, mprexe.exe, mmtask.tsk, explorer.exe, systray.exe, wmiexe.exe, msinfo32.exe 

I booted to DOS and ran SCANREG /FIX which is a health check for the registry. Nothing was wrong. 
Scandisk found and fixed errors but this did not help.
Defragging the C disk did not help.
Deleting temporary files in C:\WINDOWS\TEMP and Internet Explorer did not help.
Deleting all the cookies (there were over 500) did not help. 
Emptying out the recycle bin did not help. 
Uninstalling Comet Cursor did not help.
Booting to safe mode made no difference, its slow there too (even though Performance Monitor will not run). 
Lowering the number of colors displayed from 16 bit hi color to 8 bit color (256 colors in English) did not help.
Changing the monitor from a generic definition to the correct monitor type did not help. 
System resources are 97% free. 
Disabled the screen saver, no help. 
Got rid of desktop wallpaper, no help.
I restored all the drivers that I could using the HP recovery CD number two. It made no difference.
I booted using the first HP recovery CD and tried to restore the whole system. It hung. (not a Windows 98 issue)

I tried changing the swap file to a fixed size, that is, the initial and maximum size were made the same. This was done so that Windows 98 does not have to monitor the swap file size and adjust it. It did not help. 

March 8, 2002. A reader was nice enough to tell me about an article called System Monitor Displays Incorrect CPU Usage (Q227131) on the Microsoft Knowledge Base. It says there that "Microsoft has confirmed this to be a problem..." and that you can safely ignore it. 

October 28, 2002. A reader was nice enough to point me to this web page with a long discussion of possible reasons that Windows 98 might be running slowly. 

The web site of  PC Pitstop showed only one performance problem with this computer, other than the fact that the cpu was 54% busy (which I thought was the only problem). It said the un-cached disk performance was only 12% that of similar machines. Specifically, is said the hard disk transferred .29 MB per second and that the average for similar computers is 2.43 MB per second. 

Then I tested the computer using Mijenix Fix-It Utilities. It reported that the hard disk failed the Random Seek test, but did not say anything about what this means. It also said the computer failed the VGA registers test. 

The hard disk is a Maxtor model 91021U2 - PM according to the BIOS. Maxtor has a free utility that tests their hard disks called PowerMax version 2.5. I downloaded it and ran it and it said the hard disk failed a test and provided an error number. Specifically, it failed the S.M.A.R.T. self-test.  I contacted Maxtor ...

I emailed to HP since this is happening on an HP Pavilion 6630. They responded quickly with many suggestions. The majority of their suggestions for slow computers had to do with freeing up system resources, which is not my problem. The first thing they said to try however was getting rid of duplicate entries in device manager. Sure enough there were many duplicate entries which I removed as per their instructions and re-booted. Windows loaded a bunch of new drivers. Things got worse. Now the cpu is 70% busy when the computer is doing nothing. 

The exact instructions from HP for the removal of duplicate entries was: 
   Click the (+) sign next to each Device, in exception to the hard disk controllers, the mouse and the keyboard
What the heck does this mean in English? I muddled through.  

One thing HP suggested is disabling Power Management in the Control Panel. There was no such option, perhaps their instructions were for Windows 95, it did not say. 

May 21, 2001. A reader of this page wrote to explain why disabling power management might solve the problem. Some BIOS are constructed to conserve power by reducing the processing power of the CPU when there aren't any requests of a certain type. When such requests come in, it boosts the CPU back up again, and then drops it back down. To Windows 98, this looks like the CPU is somewhere around half utilized. (thanks Jacy)  

Out of Space? Not Really. 

May 22, 2001. Windows 98 Second Edition.  Once upon a time I was copying files on my LAN. The source computer was running Windows NT4. The target computer was running Win98SE. Using Windows Explorer I requested that about 20 megabytes or so of files be copied to the D disk of the target Win98SE machine. In the middle of the copy operation, Windows 98 complained that I had run out of space on the D disk and asked if I wanted to invoke the Disk Cleanup function. The NT4 machine kept on copying files while I contemplated what to do. Eventually the NT4 machine finished with no errors. I opted not to invoke Disk Cleanup in Win98 but instead checked on the free space in the D disk. There were over 24 megabytes free! Windows 98 lied.  

Update. January 22, 2005. A reader of this page offered the following advice on this problem: "In Windows 98, the "out of space" error appears when the free space on the C: drive gets down to around 30 Meg or so. It's more a warning than a state of fact. The reason you got the error when copying to the D: drive is because the all-wise gurus at Microsoft thought it would be a good idea to have Windows first write everything being copied to a temp directory on the C: drive, THEN copy it from there to the destination drive. I have experienced many times when Windows refused to copy or download files (or install software to a drive with 80 Gigs free), because I didn't have enough free space on my C: drive. I solved this problem by adding the following lines to my autoexec.bat file": 
set temp=m:\temp
set tmp=m:\tmp

Passport Security Problem with Windows 95, 98, ME

Passport is cracked. By Brian Livingston in InfoWorld magazine. September 10, 2001. Microsoft's Passport authentication program, which is used by tens of millions of people to log on to Hotmail accounts every day, is trivially easy for a Trojan horse to compromise on Windows 9x and Me systems. A breach can expose a user's financial information, including credit card numbers that were typed in by a user and stored on Passport's central Web server. The author also wrote a follow-up article. This problem is distinct from the other problems with Passport, such as those identified in a white paper by researchers at AT&T Labs (see www.avirubin.com/passport.html). To name only one, redirection of browsers to Microsoft's Passport server is not protected by SSL (Secure Sockets Layer). This makes it easy for an ISP employee to intercept account numbers. The specific flaw is that Windows 9x and Windows Me allow any application to "see" the user name, password, and phone number used to access a dial-up ISP. Windows NT, 2000, and XP guard against this. Microsoft knew about this problem with Windows 9x and Windows Me and chose not issue a fix for it. With e-mail viruses and worms planting silent Trojan horse programs on millions of PCs, all the data a rogue programmer needs is out in the open.

Windows 98 may suffer from a serious security bug if you installed the Windows XP Internet Connection Sharing client. eEye has issued a security advisory with the full details and there is a Microsoft bulletin. December 21, 2001.

FYI:  If you having a problem with Windows 98, see this page at windows.about.com for a list of articles on debugging Windows 98 problems. 
FYI: For a list of bugs in Windows 98, see this story from ZDNet. 
FYI: O'Reilly publishes a book called Windows 98 Annoyances with a companion web site. 

FYI: Microsoft has a web page on their tech support site called the Windows 98 and Windows Me Error Message Resource Center where they explain common error messages. They also invite you to send in an error message so they can research it. 

Jim Eshelman reports at the Windows Support Center that IE6 and Win98 don’t get along. He says that IE6 destabilizes the Win98 shell, particularly Windows Explorer. A variety of hangs, failures, and misbehavior start happening right after IE6 is installed on Win98.  June 26, 2002. 

Why Microsoft really extended support for Windows 98, by Peter Deegan at Woody's Windows Watch. February 4, 2004.