The latest beta release of Windows 98 reminds me pleasantly of how Windows 3.1 fulfilled many of Windows 3.0 lacking promises. As expected, Microsoft is continuing it's push with Internet related features such as FrontPad, a basic Web page creation utility, integrated Internet Shell, and support for streaming multimedia over dial-up connections. There are also features to aid network managers, including zero Advisor features that lock down the registry of a system to keep users from changing the system's configuration. This important upgrade effectively allows administrators to enforce policies on how systems may be used.

Microcomputer support managers and power users will be happy to discover a new troubleshooting application, TSHOOT.EXE, that provides a single interface to activate or deactivate all startup parameters, whether in AUTOEXEC.BAT, CONFIG.SYS, SYSTEM.INI, WIN.INI, or the registry. This lets managers control all applications that are launched during Windows startup, and turn them on or off for diagnostic purposes.

Perhaps the most useful system management feature in the Windows 98 beta is the Web based automatic update feature. It lets the user access a web site that contains drivers and components for windows. If new drivers have been added since the last visit, they are automatically installed. This ensures that Windows is kept current.

An interesting upgrade to Windows 98 is a new file system called FAT32. Some of you may have discovered that recent purchases of machines with Windows 95 have come with the Windows 95 FAT32 as well. Users of Windows 98 will have an option of installing the operation system with the old FAT file system or with FAT32, but like more recent Windows 95 machines, if a computer comes pre-installed from the manufacturer (as most do these days), you will get whatever was installed or mirrored at the factory. FAT32 saves a tremendous amount of disk space by reducing the cluster size (file allocation blocks), thus reducing slack space of underutilized clusters. On a 1.6 Gigabyte hard drive formatted under DOS, the conversion to FAT32 gained nearly 160 Megabytes of free space when the cluster size was decreased from 32 kilobytes to 4 kilobytes.

Windows 98 has plenty of additional features such as dial up networking improvements, a defragmenter that optimizes performance of applications you use most, and the ability to be a remote access server, something that previously was limited to Windows NT. With the continued support for 16 bit applications, Windows 98 gets a leg up as a corporate desktop standard over the future Windows NT 5.0 which will not support 16 bit programs. With all that in mind, Windows 98 looks quite promising as a corporate desktop standard.

Dean S. Tripodes teaches the Webmaster class at the University of California at Irvine. He also teaches Computer Science at Marymount College in Palos Verdes and Pasadena City College in Pasadena, California. He can be reached at webmaster@baywalk.com.