Sure, Win98 has lots of neat new features, but is it faster? With one important exception, the short answer is no. Win98 won't turn your 486 into a Pentium, or make your hard disk twice as fast. But when it comes to launching apps, it rocks.

We ran our current reference PC, a Quantex 333MHz Pentium II, through our standard set of benchmarks, including WinTune 98 and our Word and Excel macros, using both Win95 OEM Service Release 2 and Win98. In some cases Win95 was a tad faster, in others Win98 nosed ahead. In no case was the margin between the two greater than 10 percent, so you wouldn't notice a difference without a stopwatch.

Here's the one exception where Win98 beats Win95 by a wide margin: application launch times. In most benchmarks, including the ones we run, application launch times don't factor highly into performance scores; the time it takes to start an application is short compared to the time spent running a benchmark inside the application. Yet when you're sitting in front of your PC, the delays from slow application start-up times are noticeable-and annoying. In Win95, for instance, Netscape's Navigator 4.05 takes nearly 5 seconds to launch on a 333MHz Pentium II system. An optimized Win98 system can cut that time in half.

Much of the credit for faster launch times goes to a Disk Defragmenter enhancement codeveloped by Intel and Microsoft. Disk Defragmenter now organizes the files on your hard disk based on the order in which an application needs them when it launches. To figure out which files are used when an application launches, Win98 relies on a utility called TaskMon, which constantly monitors the system. When it detects an application launch, TaskMon records information about accesses to the disk. This data is recorded in files in the hidden \WINDOWS\APPLOG directory. Disk Defragmenter uses this information to decide where to place the files for best performance. It also records information from its last run in the file OPTLOG.TXT.

If you have two or more hard disks, Disk Defragmenter can optimize a single application to make the best use of all the disks. These must be physically separate disks, not just partitions on the same disk. One strategy is to install Windows on the first disk (C:), and apps on the second disk (D:). When an application starts, TaskMon records separate launch data for each drive. Then, when you run Disk Defragmenter for both the C: and D: drives (through Maintenance Wizard or by running it manually), it ensures the files for frequently launched apps are close together on each drive. Because many-if not most-apps require files from the Windows System directory, both drives will be used in most application launches.

At first, you may find apps load a bit slower in Win98 than in Win95. That's because there's some overhead in having TaskMon record the app's launch information. Once you've accumulated a few days' worth of such data, Disk Defragmenter should reduce launch times.

Also remember Disk Defragmenter can optimize only a few apps for best performance. There's no user interface to let you indicate which programs you'd prefer to optimize. Optimization priority seems to be sorted by the number of times you've run the program. We're still digging into the launch optimization feature and will tell you how to make the most of it in a future issue.