how many users are still on Win98?

[dieselstation]

i'm trying to justify the move by my work to stop supporting Win98 products. However, i need some type of study or research which indicates the current userbase of Win98SE?

How many percentage of users are on each operating system?

 

[nweaver]

lots in the biz world. I think 9x is 50% or so.

 

[dieselstation]

i just had a bright idea and checked my website's stats. it says 5% for Win98. ok so it's not a very scientific research.. but my site is about cars.. and it's pretty generic userbase right?

 

[Fern]

Man, what's up with all the win98 threads lately?

Anywho, HERE's the latest report I have. It's from 12/03. Here's a quote:

The study, released this week by technology consultant AssetMetrix, found that more than 80 percent of companies still have some machines using Windows 95 or Windows 98.

Going by website hits won't be very accurate. Most of these PC's will be used in offices and won't do much browsing.

Fern

 

[bsobel]

Originally posted by: nweaver
lots in the biz world. I think 9x is 50% or so.

It's no where near 50%. Based on the linked article (which is inline, but a bit old now) 95 made up 14.7% and 98 made up 12.5%. Windows 2000 had slightly over 50%, with NT having 13.3%, and XP having 6.6%

To the OP, who do you work for, and why isn't your marketing department giving you the garner reports on OS penetration? (or are you the marketing department?). One other thing to consider is the likelyhood of additional purchase in addition to the OS used. E.g. Many of the 9x boxes won't be udpated or have additional software purchsed for them, while the machines with newer OS's will. So, you can't assume that if 98 is on 12.5% of the boxes, your losing 12.5% of sales by not supporting it. The actual number will be substantially less than 12.5%.

Bill

 

[kamper]

Lol at businesses hanging onto ancient compatibility rules. The web app that I work on still "supports IE and Netscape" :roll: Imagine if someone came in here and said they used Redhat 5.x (also ~7 years old) :laugh:

But to respond to the question, I just recently got my dad off of 98. The original install finally gave up and it "only" took 1 or 2 failed reinstallation efforts to convince him to buy xp. I've been evangelising linux (and osx a bit too) but no luck in that department I have never owned or used 98 myself.

 

[jadinolf]

I'm still using it on one computer. Works for me.

 

[bsobel]

Originally posted by: jadinolf
I'm still using it on one computer. Works for me.

Good for you, that wasnt the question.

 

[IGBT]

..last stats I'am aware of..few months ago..25% of all computers worldwide still use some form of w98.

 

[Schadenfroh]

Most of the PCs i see in the local elementary/HS are 9x, hard pressed to find a 2k or xp machine, at the CC it is the opposite.

 

[DnetMHZ]

My office is 95% XP / 5% Win2K before 2K came along that it was 100% NT 4.0

 

[willstay]

The departmental store I am building software for had 50% PC win98. 10% windows 3.11 and rest DOS 6. Since their previous billing software dated back 1990s developed in dBase running over Novell Netware, they had to rely on legacy systems.

Now current software built in .NET, 75% are XP. 25% still Win98 as they still need few information out of Novel Netware and dbase. (Win98 because those Pentium I with 32 mb ram cannot run XP, and also the fact that I couldn't enable XP to connect to Novell - please don't suggest me to read pages and pages of Novel user manuals).

 

[BriGy86]

Originally posted by: DnetMHZ
My office is 95% XP / 5% Win2K before 2K came along that it was 100% NT 4.0

i spose its a fairly easy place to service

that must be nice

 

[jadinolf]

Originally posted by: bsobel

Originally posted by: jadinolf
I'm still using it on one computer. Works for me.

Good for you, that wasnt the question.

And your point is?

 

[Ramma2]

We dumped windows 98 completely about 3 years ago, moving all of our machines to Win 2k and xp. There was HUGE improvement in network performance, and a dramatic decrease in support calls.

 

[bsobel]

And your point is?

We don't care what OS your running. The OP asked "i need some type of study or research which indicates the current userbase of Win98SE?". Antedotole stories about this and that really aren't helping him...

 

[kamper]

Originally posted by: bsobel

And your point is?

We don't care what OS your running. The OP asked "i need some type of study or research which indicates the current userbase of Win98SE?". Antedotole stories about this and that really aren't helping him...

I figured part of his research was asking us what we use

 

[Stan]

I work for ~50 clients. About 5 of them still have 98. I would say about 40 workstations out of the 1000 I service regularly are 98.

 

[egkenny]

Originally posted by: kamper
Lol at businesses hanging onto ancient compatibility rules. The web app that I work on still "supports IE and Netscape" :roll:

This is not a good example since both IE and Netscape are still being used. I have been using Netscape for 10 years and will continue to do so as long as it is supported. I am using the just released Netscape version 8.0.1 which is based on the same Gecko engine as the popular Firefox and Mozilla browsers.

A good reason to dump Windows 9x is because of security. You can't bypass a network login but can easily bypass local logins by selecting cancel.