I’ve been asked many, many times over the last month about upgrading, and sometimes I’ve said yes, go for it, and other times, I’ve said "forget it".

So in keeping with the "Beginner’s Column" title, I’ll first explain a bit about FAT and hard drives, and how Windows 98 affects this, and then we’ll get on with a couple of examples of why you should — or shouldn’t — install Windows 98.

First, some terminology. 1K is a thousand bytes (actually 1024 bytes, but this is usually ignored, and we will, too). 1M or 1 Megabyte is a thousand K, or one million bytes. And 1G or 1 Gigabyte is a thousand Megabytes. That’s 1,000,000,000 bytes.

FAT – stands for File Allocation Table. FAT was a design especially created for the IBM PC. You know – back in 1982. I’m not sure of the year, but it was back when it was thought that no one would ever need more than 640K of memory (that’s 64% of one meg of memory), and a floppy drive of 360K was plenty. FAT is simply a way to lay the files down on disks, organize them. It’s a table of numbers and also file names. It starts with a table at the beginning of the disk that keeps track of where all the files go. It has a lot of limitations, one being that it limits the total number of files and folders at the root (say c:\) to 256. Another limitation is that as the size of the disk increases (remember 360K is BIG and for years a 40 MB hard drive was enough to last a lifetime), since FAT keeps track of a limited number of files, then the cluster size must increase. And finally a limit of 2.1 Gigabytes is necessary simply because of the limit of the largest number that FAT will store.

The cluster size is important. A given cluster is the minimum number of sections of disk that can be allocated to a file. At 2.1 GB – the upper limit, the cluster size is 32K bytes. This means that if a file is one byte over 32K, it must take up 64K of space. Up to about 40% of a 2.1 Gig hard drive’s space can be wasted in this manner.

FAT32 is simply an update of FAT. The FAT32 table is designed to hold larger numbers. As a result, it’s much more efficient, and it can handle huge disk sizes. The cluster size is affected also. The space allocated to a single unit is only 4K up to a drive size of 8 GB. This makes the wasted space go way down, and just converting to FAT32 can recover a significant amount of wasted space, as Larry mentions in his article.

FAT32 was introduced with the second revision of Windows 95, designated Windows 95b. It was not sold in stores, only to dealers and manufacturers because it had no conversion utility from FAT – as Win 98 does.

Win 98 has the conversion utility, and you have to install that utility from the CD. It will not convert a drive 528 MB or smaller.

There is some risk in converting. Let’s say you have a power blip during the conversion. Or your system just "burps" (a scientific term) or you inadvertently did not turn off anti-virus during the conversion and it interferes. So anyone would recommend backing up the hard drive before attempting conversion. Will most people do that? No, because very few people have the ability to do full backups. The best you can do is to identify all your "data files" and copy them to floppy. Did you know that your e-mail programs address book is "data" and probably very important (mine is certainly important to me!)? Can you identify what file that is?

So let’s leave the technical fiddly-bits and go on with a couple of cases of why – or – why not Windows 98.

My brother-in-law (whom I like and wouldn’t steer wrong) asked about Windows 98 just two nights ago. He’s a doctor in Indianapolis and uses his new Toshiba notebook steadily, carrying it from home to office every day. He has Windows 95b, with FAT32 installed and he’s not a power user. He has a very limited list of software programs that work very well for him. I had to ask – have you been having problems? And do you like it the way it is? He loves his new notebook – just the way it is. Don’t do it, I said, it isn’t worth it. And very likely he will never install another operating system (unless his hard drive crashes) and because it’s unlikely he’ll upgrade any hardware.

I have a client, an attorney with three networked computers and a dial-in from home. She had asked about the need to upgrade, and, the situation being the same as my brother-in-law’s, I said "don’t bother". She really has no interest in computers as such, just as being a platform to using a very limited number of good, quality applications.

But then … she called me and was very concerned about the noise her computer was making. So I looked at it, and the hard drive was making a very alarming noise. But fortunately it was still working, so I replaced it by making a Drive Image to a new 4.3 GB hard drive. And here was a very good reason to upgrade to Windows 98. It originally had Windows 95a, with a 2.1 GB drive, and I certainly did not want to partition a new 4.3 drive into two 2.1’s (the limit for Win95a and FAT) . Additionally it is only a Pentium 100, with 16M of memory. So I sold her on the idea of Windows 98 and 32M of memory, reassuring her that it would not affect the network and there was no need to upgrade her other computers, just because this one was upgraded. She was absolutely delighted with the results. The machine was very noticeably faster, especially when loading programs. The improvement was mainly due to adding memory, but Windows 98 certainly contributed a lot, and of course it wasn’t possible to install a 4.3 Gig drive as one drive without FAT32.

I’ve met many people who have a partitioned drive – a C: and a D: and don’t use the D: at all because they are really just not aware of its being there, even though they’re forced to do some file management to keep C: from getting too full. It amazes me, but my own observations say it’s quite common. So I try to stick with one drive for my clients, and Windows 98 certainly makes that easy.

So to summarize, don’t just jump into it. Give it some thought and ask someone knowledgeable who knows you and how you use your computer.

Here’s are some useful hints if you’re preparing to go ahead:

• Do your homework. Identify all your hardware components if you can before you start. Look the manufacturers up on the internet and get Windows 98 drivers if you can.
• Disable all the programs that run automatically on your system. Anti-virus in Windows and DOS, System Agents, Schedulers, Office taskbar; move all shortcuts in your startup folder to another folder for later retrieval. Re-boot and double-check. Do an Alt-Ctrl-Del and look at the task list. It can't be empty, but no programs except what it takes to run Windows should be there.
• Do any hardware upgrades now, like memory or new hard drives.
• Back your system up if you can. At least copy important documents and databases like Quicken to diskettes.
• Disable your screen saver. u