This release of Office will require that the OS be Windows 2000 (SP3 or higher) or Windows XP.
There were a number of reasons for removing support for Windows 9x. As a number of you have noted, Windows 98 and 98 SE are getting a bit old now. It also relates heavily to the push to improve security in our products. Windows 9x is inherently insecure. It also takes quite a bit of dev time to make our products work well on Windows 9x. We determined that it would be more effective to spend that time making our products work better on the more advanced platforms.
We chose SP3 on Windows 2000 because that service pack includes Windows Installer 2.0 (which shipped in the RTM release of Windows XP). Installer 2.0 is much better about limiting reboots at install time and when applying patches. It also has features that allow us to minimize the need for the user to insert the CD. Lastly, Installer 2.0 allows us to optimize the patches so that the size of the patch is much smaller. We did that with Office XP SP2 when downloaded from the Products Update page (SP2 is only 6
mb when Installer 2.0 is installed vs 15 mb for Installer 1.x).
h34r:" class="inlineimg" />
Linear Mode
