Inside the box was a 56-kilobyte-per-second Universal Serial Bus modem. New hardware - I had to test it. I perused the manual, which flatly stated that it required Windows 98, Microsoft Corp.'s latest and greatest operating system for home users. I had Windows 95, and it was running smoothly without any hiccups. So I took the modem home, and try as I might, I couldn't get the darn thing to do anything under Windows 95 - not even with the supposed USB support.

The theory behind USB is that it should allow you to connect all kinds of devices - from keyboards, mice and joysticks to image scanners, speakers and modems - to your computer with few of the problems involved in getting a new peripheral to cooperate. We all know the blood, sweat and tears (and all-nighters) that we've spent trying to get that one newtoy to work.But in order to test that theory, I needed Windows 98. That meant a trip to the local store to buy the Windows 98 Upgrade at its inflated price.

The last time I tried installing an upgrade of Windows atop an existing version (Windows 95 atop Windows 3.1), it proved to be disastrous. The upgrade appeared to complete successfully, but within days I was getting "general protection faults," the dreaded BSOD (Blue Screen of Death) and other mysterious errors. At one point, every time I booted the computer, an entire program directory on one of my drives would disappear, until by week's end, the drive was empty.

Regardless of what Microsoft says, the best way to upgrade to a new version of Windows is to do a clean install. That is, install Windows into a new directory. It may take you up to a week to reinstall all of your programs -- depending on what programs you had installed - but this is the best route. You inherit none of the baggage from previous versions.

Afterward, delete your old Windowsdirectory. It also gives you the chance to clean your hard drive of programs you rarely use.

Some people will disagree, but I'm sticking to my guns on this: Do a clean install. I gathered up all of my program disks and my many patches, including a total of 34 megabytes in two patch files (Microsoft likes to call them "Service Releases") for Office 97 and set aside another Saturday afternoon. The installation took about 45 minutes and went smoothly.

There were several reboots - and then Windows 98 was finally up and running.On the surface, Windows 98 doesn't seem that much different from Windows 95, except for its intrusive browser-like behavior that took my snappy 333-megahertz computer and made it feel like an old 486. It took me about an hour to locate the controls and deactivate the animated windows and menus, smooth scrolling and Web behavior from Windows 98. As far as I'm concerned, Web-browser functions belong in a Web browser -- not on the computer desktop. One feature I do like in Windows 98 isbeing able to easily move items around in the Start menu.

Still, an Active-less Windows desktop is my preference.

Some of the settings were buried in a Control Panel "Tweak UI" applet, while others were part of Internet Explorer's properties. Still more were found under the Options menu in drive windows. Microsoft certainly didn't make it easy. But persistence paid off, and I was able to disable nearly all of these features.

With Windows 98 installed and two hours down the drain, I remembered about the USB modem. I plugged it in, and sure enough, Windows 98 recognized it immediately and prompted me to insert a CD. I was shocked that it actually worked. I never did get to test the USB modm that day, because our home phone line was being used, but at least I was able to move up to a "better" version of consumer Windows.

Windows 98 cooperates much better with my new motherboard and processor. It shuts down and turns itself off, as it should. Using new features in the motherboard BIOS, I can turn thecomputer on by pressing the keyboard's space bar. I can also hide the Documents folder, which I never used, on the Start menu.

Windows 98 seems to be very RAM-hungry, much more so than Windows 95. It seems that each new version of Windows ratchets up the memory requirements for reasonable performance. Even with 64 megabytes of memory, I notice the hard-drive light flickering much more than it did under Windows 95.

Windows 98 isn't a vast improvement over Windows 95 -- at least not on the surface. If I were running a Pentium classic processor, I would stick with Windows 95 and its snappy performance.

--The Wall Street Journal