Order of the Bath

Well, it has finally gone after all these years, and it is the full flush this time after an earlier attempt failed to see it off. The one we all loved to hate has gone forever. I am certainly not sad to see it go. I can now say with a clear conscience, “sorry I can’t help you; you could install Linux on the old box.” Much has been said to deride XP but it is an order of magnitude better than 98 (we won’t mention ME which has been in a coma for years).

Of course some people loved it; that is fine, I never had to support them anyway as they were enthusiasts and they could get it to work. Joe User, however had nothing but heartache and blue screens.

Now what?

Using it to let the grandchildren surf the net is not a good move. Just because MS have laid it to rest, doesn’t mean the virus writers will. A botnet of W98 zombies will suit them fine. According to W3Schools, 1.6% of systems connecting to them are still running it. Make yours stand-alone and let them run all those great games you had forgotten about.

If you have an application that absolutely must use 98 then isolate it, use the box for nothing else. If the machine is running reliably then leave it alone. If it is a bit dodgy then consider reinstalling from scratch with all known patches. There is a list at Techspot but I don’t know how long they will remain available at MS so cut them to a CD now. Surely someone will create an online archive, but there may be copyright problems. Install just that one application. You probably won’t be able to get AntiVirus updates for much longer so you need to disconnect from any critical network, especially the open internet. If it has to connect to something then put in a firewall, the current ZoneAlarm should work just fine; close it right down to the bare minimum.

This entry was posted on 11 Jul 2006 at 06:41 by Rick and is filed under Technical, Windows. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.