There's quite a few owners of bricked Motorola portables who would disagree.
The F8 routine for Win95/98 is a command line mode that is designed to avoid reliance upon Windows drivers and .dlls, in order to get a machine running that has otherwise been corrupted. It looks like DOS, and will run many DOS commands. However, the kernal of this OS will not permit an application to take direct control of the UART.
There is quite a bit of hysteria about windows. It has been my experience that if the RSS program can read a radio, than writing to it will be OK.
Newer radios, such as the MCS and Spectra will not program with the so-called "ribless" cables that you see offered on E-bay. Get a real RIB and cable.
To maximize your success, the following helps:
Use the latest version of software released. Moto upgraded many of their RSS programs to work with faster UPC's. The caveat was that they still needed to run in MS-DOS.
I regularly program MOTO radios with pentium class computers, the trick is that I use MS-dos 6.22.
Forget anything involving windows. Most of the older RSS are dependant on the UART calls, as previously mentioned.
I still maintain a 4.77 MHZ computer for older radius radios. Like I said, it depends on what version of RSS that you own. There is newer stuff out there, bit I don't own it, so I have to get by with what I own.
It doesn't hurt to try to read a radio. I would never try to program a MOTO radio using anything but real DOS. I have been doing this for a long time, as others here have, and I have never corrupted a codeplug.
BUT!, I always use MS-DOS 6.22. Good luck.