On 24 Sep 99, at 8:55, Alvin Johnson wrote:

> For a Gateway 486 DX2-66 running windows 3.1 with 40MB memory and
> 400 MB free hard drive space, are there any known problems for
> installing Windows 98?

  I haven't actually measured it, but my strong impression is that
Win 95 provides better performance on 486-era CPUs than Win 98 does.
Unless there is some feature of Win 98 that you simply must have on
that machine, 95b or 95c is probably a better choice.

> Can Windows 98 be installed over 3.1?

  Yes.

> can you install windows 98 and retain Windows 3.1

  Not if you choose to update the hard drive partition to use FAT32,
or if you choose to update 3.1 instead of installing 9x to a
different directory.  If you don't do either of these, the startup
menu (press F8 -- or use TweakUI to show the menu every time...)
should include a choice #8 "Boot to old OS".
  [I've never met both of these conditions with 98, so I've never
actually seen this menu choice on a 98 system.  I *have* seen it on
95 -- even if FAT32 was used, in which case it becomes an unhealthy
menu item to select!  It's possible that Microsoft dropped the item
entirely from 98, another reason to opt for 95 on this machine....]

> I can imagine that some programs, especially shareware will not run under
> Windows 98, but I also assume that  major programs such as Quick Books, all
> Microsoft programs, and etc will run without problems.

  Most 3.1 programs *should* run under 95/98.  Some run better than
others; in general, 16-bit apps are likely to run slower than 32-bit
programs, and multi-task less well.

David G

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