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Win2K vs. Win98

I ran into a funny bit by a man who feels that Tic-Tac-Toe deserves the same prominence as chess. I hope those snobs at the New York Times listen.

Things I Like About Windows 2000 (in comparison to Win98 SE)

• The icons are a bit rounder and cuter.
• When you open and close menus and windows, they fade in and out rather than popping in and out of existence. That's a nice effect (albeit stolen from Aqua).
• The power-off button works.
• The system doesn't hang when you try to shut it down through the Start menu.
• It doesn't try to install one and only one 2GB partition on your hard drive, leaving the other 38GB hanging out there in the Unaddressed Ether.
• It freezes up about a fifth as often.
• It has Freecell.

Things I Don't Like About Windows 2000

• It has no Java to speak of, although this is easily rectified.
• Outlook Express 6 still has no capability to import mailboxes from a file or export mailboxes to a file (don't let the "import" and "export" options in the menus fool you).
• It assigns all your devices (video, sound, modem, and others) to the same IRQ.
• It won't let you move devices to different IRQs. Not through the Device Manager (the options are grayed out), not through BIOS (this is ignored), and not by physically swapping your cards around. Thus you cannot fix the screwed-up configuration that Windows handed you in the first place.
• Did I mention the "handing you a broken configuration and not letting you fix it" part? That really stinks.

Posted by Evan Goer on Mar. 10, 2002 at 10:09 PM