Microsoft is working on a Service Pack for Win98 that will be out in a few months. What would you want put in the Pack? What's on your Win98 wish list?

Here's one item I'd put in: disk compression. I miss having Win95's simple software add-on that doubles my disk capacity. Yes, Win98 ships with Drivespace3, but you can't use it on FAT32 disks. The only thing that will work on FAT32 disks is a folder-by-folder compressor that's part of the Win98 Plus pack. But let me save you the money: it stinks. If Drivespace3 (or 4?) worked on FAT32 disks, we'd have effortless disk-doubling again without the kludginess, awkwardness, and clunkiness of the Plus Pack's compressor.

What would be on your wish list for Win98? Join in this week's online WinMag column, starting around noon on Monday Eastern Time (GMT-5), via the link at http://content.techweb.com/winmag/!

But wait, as they say, there's more to this week's online WinMag column. See the next item!

Win98 is taking a drubbing in some quarters because of the number of problems being reported; last week's WinMag BBS discussion on "Win98 Hits and Misses," for example, generated about 1000 active posts in the discussion area!

And as with any operating system, there are problems in Win98. But it's worth taking a minute to try to see what Win98's problems add up to. For example, if there are 50,000 installation failures in software with an installed base of 100,000 users, that's a horrible 1-in-2 failure rate, and you'd be nuts to run the software. But if there's the same number of failures in an installed base of 5,000,000, that's entirely different animal---a 1-in-100 failure rate, or to put it more positively, a 99% success rate. In this case, you'd be nuts to be scared off by the 50K bad installs.

But either way, there are 50,000 angry customers writing emails and posting in discussion areas and telling their friends and co-workers that the product stinks. If you don't have perspective on the numbers, you can come to the wrong conclusion about a product and either end up installing a bad one, or steering clear of a good one.

(I made the above numbers up, by the way, but you get the idea.)

So are Win98 problems an indication of major trouble? Three years ago, Win95 had a success rate that looked to be in the low to mid 90%'s. That wasn't bad at all, but was enough to get Win95 unfairly branded as a dog in some quarters because even a 5-8% failure rate still ultimately translated into tens of millions of botched installs. The percentage wasn't too bad but the absolute number sure made it look that way.

In this week's WinMag BBS column, I'll compare the current Win98 installation experience to those of Win95, three years ago and try to sort out whether Win98 is experiencing a scary, "stay-away" number of failures, or if the failure rate actually isn't bad.

So to add to the wish list or to comment on the Win95 Vs Win98 failure rates---or to comment on any related issue---join in this week's online WinMag column, starting around noon on Monday Eastern Time (GMT-5), via the link at http://content.techweb.com/winmag/!

Portals, Schmortals.

If you follow the internet industry at all, you've probably seen the incessant announcements about web "portals:" A web company decides to broaden its site's appeal, and either on its own or with content partners, creates a portal site that acts as a front end to a wide variety of attractive content---much of it hosted on other sites---that goes far beyond what the stand-alone site used to offer.

But the theory is sometimes far removed from the practice. Take Netscape's new portal page, as one example. You used to go to www.netscape.com for support and add-ons for Netscape's browser, right?

But go to www.netscape.com today, and the first thing you see is a general web search form followed by links for renting cars, reading movie reviews, finding health information, buying a house, and so on. This kind of muddled offering can't be building Netscape's brand image. It's not highlighting Netscape's own products and technology. And it's not encouraging people to download the latest Netscape offerings.

It's not just bad for Netscape; we end users don't benefit, either. If we go to Netscape's home page looking for Netscape products or information, we now have to bypass all the irrelevant links to find what we want. The portal page is an obstacle, not a help.

There are other kinds of portals, and in some cases, they do make more sense than the Netscape example. For instance, if you're visiting a general search engine site where you can find information on any subject, having miscellaneous offerings on the "portalized" home page isn't so jarring.

But even here, there's a problem. Search engines are supposedly neutral ways of finding information on the web. If that neutrality is compromised by paid-for links to partner sites---if search engines now have vested interests in steering us to its partner's sites---the whole search engine runs the risk of losing credibility.

To me, it seems in many cases that portal-mania has replaced common sense. Some companies just don't belong in the portal business, and expanding to portal status only defocuses what their sites really are about. Sometimes with web sites, more is less.

What's your take on portals? Is a portal page a necessary element of any major site now, or should most companies keep their sites focused on the main line of business? What are some great portals you've found---and which ones are the dogs? Join in starting Wednesday, at http://www.langa.com/badlink.htm .

Some users of BrowserTune98 have found that their Win98 upgrade did NOT properly upgrade all their system's internal identifiers, and that their browser still thinks it's running on Win95!

One of the very first pages of BrowserTune asks your browser to report on itself. For example, when I run BrowserTune, it correctly identifies my browser this way:

But some users who have upgraded to Win98 tell me that the same BrowserTune test reports

In other words, something didn't get upgraded properly, and the installed Win98 version of IE4 still thinks it's running on Win95 instead of Win98!

In literally less than a minute, you can see how your browser identifies itself; and which OS it thinks it's running on: Just click on over to http://www.browsertune.com/bt98/ and work through the first few pages. You may be surprised at what you find!

Note that BrowserTune isn't doing any snooping. It's simply showing you how your browser identifies itself to the world. If what you see on the screen doesn't match the browser and OS you know you're running, then the problems is somewhere inside your system or in your registry.

That's just one of many kinds of problems that BrowserTune can find for you. Check it out at http://www.browsertune.com/bt98/ !

Reader George Gombos wrote to say:

Thanks, George!

I recently got a chance to try "SurfSaver," a neat web app from http://www.surfsaver.com/.

If you've tried using your browser's "save as" feature to copy a page off the web, you know how limited it is: You can save only the HTML of the actual page you're viewing. If that page is Framed or calls other pages or other graphics from other locations, your saved version will be incomplete and will have holes, broken graphic symbols, and so on.

SurfSaver is an intelligent web page-saver. When you see a page you want to keep, SurfSaver lets you place a complete, live copy of the page---everything you see on screen, including graphics and Frames---in a kind of filing cabinet on your hard drive. You can add notes to the saved pages, and best of all, search the intact, all-parts-in-place pages for text later, offline. It's great for doing web research!

I admit I was skeptical at first, but I find myself using SurfSaver more and more as time goes on.

It's a modest download, and offers a free 30-day trial. After the trial, it costs just $30. Highly recommended! 

I hope you saw Saturday's list of some 300 great Reader's Choice Hotspots! Well, the flood of outstanding HotSpots suggestions continues!

I hope you know about the HotSpots page (http://www.browsertune.com/flanga/hotspots.htm)---it's one of the most popular single pages within the WinMagWeb!

Its mission is simple: every day, I personally select and highlight one of the best, most interesting, most useful, and strangest sites the web has to offer. The Hotspots page has been running for three years, and has been viewed by tens of millions of visitors!

Please stop by and check it out. This week, we'll run another Readers Choice Day to so in addition to the daily picks, which continue to run at their normal rate of one great page per day. Visit the HotSpots page at http://www.browsertune.com/flanga/hotspots.htm.

Many other readers sent me numerous other instances of, um, unusual programming in the Microsoft Word thesaurus.

Open a new, empty Word document, and type any of the following sentences in the document. Highlight the sentence, and hit SHIFT-F7 to fire up the thesaurus, and see what it says.

The sentences to try:

• Who Bill Clinton makes love to?
• When will OJ confess?
• Turn off the radio. 
• I'd love to see you in your birthday suit

Of course, what the thesaurus is doing is responding to the general sentence structure, not to the specific content. (You might expect a thesaurus to be very specific, but that's not how it's working here.) That's why you can get such bizarre responses.

For example, any sentence that starts with the words "I can," "I like," or "I love" will generate a thesaurus response of "I'll drink to that."

Bizarre, yes, but once you know what's going on, less mysterious.

But it's not that the Microsoft programmers are above doing silly things inside their applications. See next item.

WinMag has reported on all known "easter eggs" (hidden programmers silliness) inside MS applications, and reader Kent Pilarski wanted to make sure I mentioned this one:

In Excel97:

1. Open a new blank worksheet.
2. Press F5 and type X97:L97 in the "Reference" box, then click OK.
3. Now hit your "Tab" key once ( you should now be in cell M97)
4. Press "CTRL" and "SHIFT" while clicking on the "chart wizard" Icon.
(the one at the top with the blue,yellow,red, bar chart.)

After a few moments, you should be flying. Steer with the Mouse, Accel and Decel with the left and right mouse buttons respectively, and look for the monoliths with the programmer credits. You can exit the screen by pressing CTRL+SHIFT+ESCAPE.

Thanks, Kent!

See you next week!

Best,

A formatted HTML version of this newsletter is available in the "what's new" section of http://www.langa.com .

Why are you getting this newsletter? There are only two ways to get on the list (direct email request or via the WinMag list-serve signup page) so if you're getting this newsletter; your name came to me through one of these channels: