by Lonnie Falk
Publisher
   Maybe it isn't really "here," but it is coming. Whether you call it Windows Memphis or Win98 (as the name was officially announced recently), this latest and greatest version of the Windows operating system by Microsoft is a good one.
   First of all, if you've read our technical editor's review of Microsoft's OEM Service Release 2, everything that's there is here. Chief among those is the FAT32 file system, which means large hard disks can be formatted as such with small cluster sizes. How much can you save with this little gem? I had two disks (2.5 and 2.1 gigs) and still came up with 80 meg of additional space even though no partition on my old system was more than 512k. In the couple of weeks I have had this beta, I have probably saved 3-4 hours of looking for programs and data files on what was once 10 virtual drives.

one application, not several.
   And while Internet Explorer (a part of Win98) can be used to do this, you can also use Netscape's Communicator and its push technology to integrate these two operations to the desktop.
   You have a choice of a web-like desktop (one click to launch programs, for instance, or a "traditional" interface.
   Too, most of the enhancements of Microsoft's original "Plus" package are incorporated in Win98. This gives you animated icons, for instance, themes, the ability to make several changes in your desktop and better screen-savers, among other things. The Plus pack has been out so long that it seems silly to go into detail here.
   This is, to paraphrase Mark Antony, "the most stable beta of them all." I have beta tested every release of Windows since 1.0 and this is by far the most ready-for-prime-time I have seen. Every Win95 application I have runs on Win98, DOS apps work and games do, too. All those little shareware goodies that make life easier integrate over just fine, even at this early stage in the process.
  A lot of things are behind the scenes. For instance, with Win98, Microsoft will be using its Win32 Driver Model, which allows new devices to have a single griver for Win9x and NT. Because you will be migrating to NT some day, this is both important and significant.
   There are new wizards and applets, but we are loath to do much more than mention them, because there is question as to whether they will make it into the final shipping product. One of the nicest, however, is a system file checker utility, which verifies that system files are the latest ones. As you probablu know (unfortunately) many applications do you the "favor" of installing system files when they install: sometimes these are newer versions, sometimes they are not.
   The bottom line, however, is that Win98 is getting elegant. It is snappier than Win95, guides you through problems and seems more together than any version of Windows to date.
   When can you get it? We don't know. Obviously, as its new name implies, before the end of '98. But, given the state of this Beta, we suspect it will be sooner than that unless unforeseen bugs crop up in the Beta cycle. And, despite what you might read from some of the know-it-all pundits, it will be worth the upgrade.