In this area we look at a very cool and timely modification that anyone can do to their Windows 98 or 98se installation to get the speed of Windows 95 without sacrificing the stability and added 'features' of Windows 98. We encourage you to visit the 98Lite site, the link is listed at the bottom of this page and on our opportunities page.

98Lite was developed by Australian Shane Brooks, who now lives and works in the USA. A hobby programmer, Brooks was less than impressed with the way Windows 98 bogged down his laptop computer. Also, he didn't need, or use (and neither do we ...Ed.) the universally loathed Internet Explorer and the downright sluggish integrated desktop. Indeed, we at SYSK lamented the loss of performance that came with the installation of the 'bigger, better' Windows 98 operating system over the 'thinner' but inherently less stable 95. We like Windows 98's stability and increased network functionality, but this comes at the cost of system speed, especially on lower-rated systems. Brooks decided to try 'gutting' 98 and replacing the explorer shell and a few other components with the 95 equivalents. After numerous interesting hybrids he developed an installer that would install only the components he wanted, and 98Lite was born. Brooks discovered that by replacing the larger and slower 98 explorer shell with the 95 version, overall speed was greatly increased. There were bugs and incompatibilities however, but by further experimentation he has gradually eradicated all but a few known issues, none of which are 'mission critical'. In fact, all are purely aesthetic and in no way harm the functionality or stability of the operating system. So when Bill Gates stood in front of Congress and told them that Windows 98 couldn't possibly run without IE, we now know better. Shane Brooks has created an IE free zone in 98Lite. Of course, if you still want to use IE, you can still run it within 98Lite. You can run any of four basic versions, all of which you can change via the control panel at a later stage if you so choose. There is the lightning fast 98Micro, which Brooks claims to take up less than 70 MB of hard drive space. Then the 'Sleek' , 'Chubby', and 'Overweight' versions, the latter of which offers IE/desktop integration for those that choose to use it. We like how you are free to choose which type of installation you want, which is how it should have been right from the Microsoft factory. As we write this it looks as though the US justice system will force MS to dis-integrate IE from it's future operating systems anyway, but the implementation of this could be years away yet. This way you have the choice to install it or not today.

From the early beta versions grew the Standard, Professional and Enterprise versions. In the beginning, 98Lite was DonationWare. Now, Shane charges for the Professional and Enterprise versions, but the Standard version is still free for anyone to download. We recommend that if you run a 200mhz or less computer, and you wish to run Windows98 or 98se, then you will be blown away with the performance increase from changing to 98Lite. Even if you run a monster machine the increased speed is intoxicating. With thousands of users world-wide, 98Lite has to be the best thing that happened to Windows since Bill borrowed the best bits from UNIX and made it easy for technophobes like us here at SYSK to work on computers.

We love the fact that this circumnavigates Microsoft's insistence that you use their browser, or at least have it installed on your computer if you want to run Windows98. We have heard from other sources that Microsoft coders purposely fiddled the winsock dialler in 98 so that other browsers like Netscape or Opera wouldn't work properly, thus inducing people to use the 'more stable' (yeah right...Ed.) IE browser. We urge you to check out this very cool site and learn more about 98Lite. You may also want to register with Shane and receive any updates, fixes or changes that become available. Here at SYSK we run the Pro 2.0 version on a PIII-500 and it is blisteringly fast . We use the 'Chubby' desktop and can verify that it is a lot faster than the standard Windows 98se install.

We would like to point out at this stage that 98Lite is NOT endorsed by Microsoft. It contains no Windows files and you must own a 'legal' version of 98 to keep things above board, (although there is no check to ascertain if you are using a pirated copy). 98Lite is an installer that manipulates the standard Windows install to allow us to choose what we really want to put on our hard drive. Using it DOES violate your End User License Agreement (EULA) with Microsoft, though what this means in a practical sense is that if you rang them for support (or to wait on the phone for 2 hours, whichever comes first...Ed.) they would not help you once they heard you were running what in their opinion is a 'hacked' version of Windows 98.

The formula is simple. If you want increased system speed and less rubbish on your hard drive, 98Lite is the OS for you. But don't take our word for it, check it out for yourself.

http://www.98lite.net

 

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