A buddy of mine says, "OH, you have to get Windows XP! It's the greatest thing since sliced bread!" Personally, I think the fact that we were able to land on the moon a little more impressive than that, but I digress. After 2 weeks, he's reinstalling everything. I've been running Win98 for a few years with no problem. Sometimes, the newest thing is not the best.

Bad thing: running an old OS means MS is not writing important security patches for it, anymore.

Good thing: Windows 98 is so old that no one in their right mind has written an exploit for it in years.

Actually, Microsoft has extended their 98 support for another two years.

Oh..so that's what that smell is. At least it appears to be working OK. :sweat:

Hate XPSP2, relative to what?
 

XPSP2 is a pain. True.

But it is less pain than no SP2. The two articles below discuss the "pain" of having a Windows based pc and the "pain" of having to maintain it properly and the "pain" of neglecting that responsibility.

http://www.usatoday.com/money/indust...honeypot_x.htm

http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20041130-4426.html

As for not being able to uninstall SP2, for whatever reason, here is a link to instructions for doing so. I have used this successfully in the past. I had to uninstall a whacked install of SP2 because the machine was non functional. The SP2 did it, but only because the machine was infected BEFORE I installed SP2 in the first place.

Moral of the story, if you insist on running XP, use SP2. It needs to be installed properly, a nontrivial task. But the consequences of not installing it are considerably more ominous.

I run SP1a, do the service changes myself and keep my anti-virus and patches up to date.

A little work that goes a long way to keeping a machine happy.