Saturday, February 4, 2006 - Sat, 4 Feb 2006

The unbelievable has happened! My Windows 98 computer just died. The power starts up, I hear the disk drives start, but there is no post beep and nothing on the screen. Pressing the power button or restart button won’t do anything - it just stays on. Pulling the plug turns it off, but it attempts to restart as soon as I put the plug in again. From what I read on the web, it is probably the video card that is shot.

So what’s so unbelievable about that? It’s the fact that the failure occurred two weeks AFTER I set up my new computer and NOT two weeks before!

I don’t plan to try to repair my old computer (alas, it served me well for 6 years). So can I still support Windows 98? Yes, if I purchase Microsoft-Virtual-PC. But I don’t have a copy of the Windows 98 SE Operating system, since it was OEM installed on my old machine, and I would have to purchase that as well.

So far the results of Dick Eastman’s survey indicate that only 99 out of 1607 Windows users (6.2%) are using Windows 98 on their primary computer and another 112 (7.0%) are using it on their secondary computer. As computers die (like mine just did) and people replace their computers, the numbers will diminish over time.

For now, I’ll just continue developing Behold. It should continue running well under Windows 98 in the near future, at least until Version 1.5 with Unicode, or until I upgrade my version of Delphi. If in the future I do get a Windows 98 user to contact me with a problem, I’ll have to see if I can fix that without complications. If there are, then I’ll make a decision as to which way to go at the time. We’ll see when I get to Beta testing if Windows 98 becomes an issue.

In the meantime, I’m continuing to reassemble the referencing in Behold to incorporate the new data structures. Each step along the way, I am finding some old customized code that needs to be handled with the new structures. But work is still progressing.