Not bad in the long run
My first experience with 98 was the CD-ROM catalog computer at my uncle's hardware store, and I thought it was shit, to put it bluntly. (Although having the catalog on CD-ROM instead of a dozen volumes of paper was nice. I remember having to update the paper ones...)
It was over a year (2, 3, 5?) later that the CD-ROMs were deprecated and all catalog work was to be done through the corporate web-based extranet. (He also moved from dial-up to DSL.) At that time, he finally let me clean up the machine because the web browsing was so much slower than the CD. Turns out that Windows was okay, and the specs were fine (nothing else on the machine, really) -- it was MacAfee being a total pain since day one. Once I figured out how to remove it without nuking the whole thing, things got a whole lot better. (Yes, riskier, but not my problem.)
Around that time, corporate was also starting to force the franchises to change their POS (point of sale, you gits!) from older systems to a Windows-based full-internet one, making a separate extranet terminal redundant. Not sure if he changed before selling the whole store outright to a rival chain.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
