what is the difference between windows xp and windows 98 in technical point of view?

Question

apart from xp is stylish and has inbuilt drivers..... i want some technical answers.............

Answer 1

technically speaking, Windows 98 is about 8 years old. XP is not.

sorry for all the technical mumbo jumbo. i'm a supergenius and it's hard for me to speak in laymens terms.

Answer 2

Hello there,

BIG Question!.

The difference are like comparing a car to the Space Shuttle. Both are vehicles, both get you from point a to point b. They have a lot of surface similarities.

XP is a completely new code compared to W98. The difference can be compared to Windows XP to Apple OSx. With this comparison, not only is the guts different, but the user experience is different too. With windows xp and W98, they tried to keep some of the end user experience the same so that people wouldn't think too much about the upgrade progression.

Enter VISTA. TOTALLY new interface. You will have to relearn everything, with very little being the same. At this point, you might as well switch to Linux.

Tom

Technically, Windows 98 is a 32 bit os, just as XP, however, win 98 has memory and processor limitations. Windows 98 has NO security consideration while with NT 4.0, W2K and WXP were designed with security in mind.
Windows 98, while supporting a bad version of user profiles, doesn't really offer itself to a multi user environment.

Tom

Answer 3

Windows 98 was designed to be able to talk to hardware directly. This resulted in operating system problems on a routine basis.

Windows NT, 2000, XP, and Vista include a Hardware Abstraction Layer which is the mediator between the operating system and the hardware.

Other differences involve the file system. Windows 98 could only support FAT16/32 while Windows XP can support NTFS 4.0 (Windows NT) and NTFS 5.0 and FAT16/32.

From a security point of view, well Windows 98 had no security at all while Windows XP offers better security such as folder and file permissions through NTFS, browser security, and the Windows Firewall.

While Windows 98 had (audio and video) media capabilities, Windows XP extends those capabilites. A utiltity called dxdiag.exe is included with Windows XP for Direct X diagnostics and information.

Answer 4

My response:

I can't provide you with an exhaustive / comparative list of differences between Windows 98 and XP, but there are a number of obvious differences that I can highlight:

1. With respect to Windows 98: an announcement was made in December 2003 that Windows 98 will no longer be supported by Microsoft. That means if there is a serious operating system exploit discovered (and hackers are able to penetrate your system over the Internet, for example), Microsoft may or may not release a fix for it -- depending on the severity. After the initial "End of Life" announcement, Microsoft extended "paid incident support" for Win98 until June 2006, but new hotfixes won't be available. A hotfix is a "patch" used to fix serious problems (such as exploits often used by hackers). To quote: " Paid incident support is now available through 30-Jun-2006. Extended hotfix support for Windows 98 and Windows 98 Second Edition ended on 30-Jun-2003. " (Source: microsoft.com)

2. With respect to security, Windows XP is far more secure than Windows 98. Windows XP is also one of the most current versions of Windows, which also means that it is also supported by Microsoft. Having said that, if there is a security exploit discovered in XP, it is usually addressed / corrected by Microsoft within a reasonable amount of time.

3. If your computer can run Win98, it may not be able to run Windows XP at an efficient speed. Windows XP overhead is about 2x or 3x more than Windows 98. For all intents and purposes: if your computer is more than 5 years old, it may or may not be able to run WinXP. It depends on: how fast the processor is (greater than 500 MHz recommended for WinXP), how much RAM you have (greater than 256 meg recommended for WinXP), and how much hard drive space you have (greater than 10 gigabytes recommended for WinXP).

4. As for Windows ME: it runs on the same technology of Windows 95 and 98. Windows ME is not as popular as Windows 98 and it has been said that ME has greater incompatibility issues. Windows NT, 2000, and XP all use the same technology for their core functions (also known as the operating system "kernel"). That being said, all future releases of Windows will incorporate the NT technology. It would therefore be a waste of time to upgrade to Windows ME (in my opinion).

Answer 5

There is a big difference between the two. The one that I find most beneficial is that XP will automatically load most drivers for you (like a jump drive for example) where as in 98 you have to do it yourself.

Answer 6

XP Home and XP Pro have different things. In the Home version, you can do a lot more things as it can be set up for multiple accounts and the Administrator can control who can see or do what. The Pro version has a built in security suite and back up that the Home version doesn't have. And multi tasking is faster and easier in both versions, at least it is for me.

Ron

Answer 7

About 10 years of difference.

http://www.microsoft.com/technet/archive/win98/reskit/part6/wrkc28.mspx?mfr=true