Another systems integrator said he had noticed problems with existing VXD video drivers. Windows 98 checks the registry for existing applications and drivers. It s supposed to upgrade old drivers automatically if there s a newer version. Microsoft officials said that they had not heard about any upgrade problems. If we did, we d defintiely alert people to compatibility issues beyond what s in the Readme files, said product manager Rob Bennett.
Hardware incompatibilities aren t the only potential problem.
There are lots of conflicts with applications, especially Lotus Notes, acknowledged Marie Presti, director of product market with SystemSoft. The Evil Empire SystemSoft today announced SystemWizard, a troubleshooting tool that a number of top PC makers are bundling with their Windows 98 machines. SystemSoft has been working with a number of hardware and software vendors over the past months to build a knowledge base of known problems and incompatibilities between existing products and Windows 98. SystemSoft is expecting the bulk of early upgrade problems to be attributable to Notes-Windows 98 incompatibilities. But disk compression, DOS applications and changes made to the location and workings of Microsoft Fax are all likely to stump Windows 98 customers, too, she said.