I used ToChris for my mods circa 2004 or so when I was using a laptop with no hardware capabilities. It was good but there were crashes where WinQuake didn't crash (although using WinQuake on Windows 98 was a death wish also...). I don't remember the circumstances of the crashes though.
As for news... I haven't worked on GoldQuake in a while. A long time ago I started an edit to allow scaled console graphics (vid_conwidth/vid_conheight), which works, but I still haven't gotten around to all the vrect stuff, sbar updating and whatnot. Some other stuff got in the way and I haven't gotten back into Quake things yet. But you should still expect a GoldQuake release sometime in 2010...
