>Did you try Win98 beta? Did it work better than Win95?
>

Up until yesterday I had been running Win98 beta 3 since mid-January on one of the test machines here; it was pretty stable, especially when compared to older Win95 installs that had IE 4.0 added after the fact with Active Desktop enabled. I installed Release Candidate 0 yesterday; nothing disasterous happened yet. No problems with any of the applications that I run routinely here (VFP, VC++, IE, Outlook, etc.) although I haven't done much to exercise it yet under RC0.

I have yet to run it on a marginal machine - the minimum box I've used in testing has been a TX-based AMD K6/200 with 32MB of RAM, and it performs noticably better with 64MB of RAM. If you want to use dual monitor configurations, you'll probably want to use a Pentium II system based on the LX or new BX chipset with an AGP and a PCI video card (I've used a Matrox Mystique (PCI) in conjunction with a Diamond Fireport GL (AGP) with excellent results.) If you want Active Desktop, more memory is a given; machines get sluggish very quickly with inadequate physical and virtual memory. I've found that a separate partition for use as a swap file, if possible on a separate hard drive from the primary applications/system drive on the machine, makes a world of difference in performance. I'm currently running on an LX-based Pentium II with 128MB SDRAM and a dedicated 384MB swap partition on a secondary hard disk.

RC0 shipped as part of the April 1998 MSDN subscription. Beta 3 shipped as a part of the January 1998 distribution, and was due to expire in June; there is no expiration date on RC0.

Ed