Patch fails and corrupts the game ...

[MarkShot]

With all that said, I agree that you if your main use of your PC is to play games or do just one or two things at a time, then Win98 SE is an excellent choice.

[Jane Doe]

- Stability degrades over time and rebooting becomes a norm

well that's a euphemism![:D]
I nearly can't go online for more than an hour and whenever i try to d/l something off the internet more then 10mb big, i absolutely have to cross my fingers, or else the darn blue screen of death suddenly pop out of my screen, which is killing me a little more everytime that happens.
But to overcome its shortcomings, i too have a dual boot system, but with linux. Whenever I need to go online or i need to d/l bigger files, i switch to linux which is the best in term of stability. I even succeeded in playing SPWaW with it, and if you wanna play your old dos games, i'm sure the linux dos emulators will work better than ms-dos.
I use Mandrake Linux which is the most convivial, they say, of them all.

it'S not because i have win98se on my computer that i actually like it though, but with most of the games i play, it's ok, but when i actually work on my computer, i prefer linux.

[Marc von Martial]

ORIGINAL: MarkShot

With all that said, I agree that you if your main use of your PC is to play games or do just one or two things at a time, then Win98 SE is an excellent choice.

Hmm, you say " - Not very stable; especially when playing games " and still say it´s an excellent choice for gaming [;)][:D]. Gotta love that logic, LOL.

[MarkShot]

If I was doing a lot of coding (depending for what), then I might favor Linux; but I am not at the moment. I at one time a few years back had Linux, DOS/WfW, and Win95 OSR2 in a triple boot configuration.

Regarding my seemingly contradictory statement. I don't think XP makes games any more or less stable (with the exception of system resources running low or leaking under 95/98/ME) than 98. But a game CTD or DTD or freeze under 98 usually requires reboot but not under XP. However, if all you were doing was playing the game, there is functionally little difference between rebooting or relaunching it (except that rebooting takes longer).