Multibooter

Tihiy has written a very interesting Network activity indicator, described in http://www.msfn.org/board/index.php?showto...mp;#entry854139 and downloadable from http://tihiy.ahanix.org/IpTest.zip I like it, its system tray icon looks really great, it can shut off the connection to the internet. But what is really interesting is that it doesn't show up in Task Manager (alt-ctl-del), or in the process viewer PrcView v3.7.3.1, or in Startup Organizer by Metaproducts. If there weren't an icon in the system tray, I wouldn't know it was running. Is there some software which readily indicates under Win98 that programs like Tihiy's were added/installed/are running? (Well, STOBJECT.DLL is indicated in MS System Information -> Software Environment -> 32-bit Modules Loaded, but who's looking there regularly?)

Yes, a 2nd opsys puts you in control of your software environment. The next higher level of control is if you have 2 nearly-identical computers, with nearly identical HDD content. Then you know whether a problem is caused by bad hardware.Old computers eventually wear out physically, one should be ready for it. I have 8 working Dell Inspiron 7500 laptops, about 10 years old. Some of the laptops are used heavily, the dedicated eMule/print server computer, for example, is running under Win98SE 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. To reduce physical wear on the HDDs I have built myself an external USB drive with SDHC cards. A USB 2.0 CardBus card of mine (the old Inspiron 7500 only comes with a built-in USB 1.1) sometimes smells a little burnt, but hasn't broken down yet. I even had a new Netgear router and 2 new cable modems die within a year, maybe because of a heavy load or just bad quality. My experience has been that about 1 old laptop dies per year, but that's no problem, I then just take the HDD out and put it into a spare laptop.

Never said that I download executable code. eMule has usually rars, zips, mp3s, avis etc. There might be even some nice old Win95 stuff

Yes. Yes. Kaspersky Internet Security v6.0.2.621 still updates nicely under Win98SE, my last update was today 1-May-2009. I have purchased a supply of 3 keys, on ebay as old unopened retail boxes of KIS 6, which should keep me going for another 3 years or until Kaspersky Lab stops providing new signature updates under Win98. I have de-selected, after installation and before the first signature update of KIS 6, the selection "Update application modules", to make sure Kasperky Lab doesn't kill my installation by updating parts of their program with stuff which is incompatible with Win98, as happened in Dec.2008, when they killed v4.5 on my computer in this way.

Sorry, a little off-topic. But one of the reasons I am still using Win98 is the mule. Somehow things look safer using the mule under Win98 than under WinXP.I am also migrating away from Win98, application-by-application, but it's a very slow process and will probably take years. My game plan are dedicated computers, i.e. computers whose main function is to run a single application. Currently I have an eMule computer, next month I'll add a bittorrent computer. On some dedicated computers I'll expect to keep Win98 running for years to come.

Printing coupons could be compared to printing money. There must be some built-in protection for the companies honoring them in the U.S. Maybe dencorso could give it a quick look, with his WinME system, if his Brazilian IP goes thru.Correction: On second thoughts, maybe it's not that good an idea. Foreign IPs at a U.S. coupon printing website may raise alarm bells in the U.S.

Some people might download stuff which belongs to the cultural heritage of humanity, and which is not available commercially, maybe because it smells fishy to some.The best music clip EVER made is in Estrellita Castro's 1938 movie Suspiros de España, made in Goebbel's UFA Studios in Berlin; or Estrellita Castros' movie Hijos de la Noche, made 1939 in Mussolini's Cinecittá in Roma; or the music clips in Imperio Argentina's movie Carmen (de la Triana), made in 1938 by Goebbel's UFA/Hispano-Film Produktion in Berlin. These internationalist Nazi movies have gypsy heroines who don't speak Deutsch, this doesn't conform to the truths we all must know. Their copyright status is probably unresolvablable or expired, two of the above examples were produced by a German-Spanish joint venture 70 years ago, dissolved before the end of WWII, produced in a Berlin which was split between 4 victorious powers. I doubt that the U.S. Office of Alien Property Custodian, or its British etc counterparts, or the German government, could prove their ownership in court, and all the artists are long dead. The objective of the time was not to make money with the movies of the defeated powers, but to destroy the Nazi movie industry, which was the only competitor to Hollywood, Marlene Dietrich had gone to Hollywood, Estrellita Castro to Berlin. The beginnings of the movies start with "Filmoteca Nacional de España", http://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Filmoteca_Española without a copyright notice, in Spain it's considered part of their national heritage. There are some Estrellita Castro clips from these emule downloads on YouTube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ep9dKLlJezw with some people wanting to make Suspiros de España Spain's national anthym, but that won't happen with a song of such an origin. About 20+ other performers have made recordings of it, my favorites among them are Pasión Vega and Rocío Jurado; Plácido Domingo wasn't that good at it, he tried, but maybe women are better at singing this Nazi poetry. http://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suspiros_de_España and http://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Estrellita_Castro The lyrics of the song can be found at http://www.lyricsondemand.com/o/orquestami...spaalyrics.html So the mule not only disseminates malware.

Several times it seems to have blocked Win98 shutdown. I just flattened it with a clean opsys restore (in my setup this takes less than 10 minutes).

Alcohol 120% v1.9.5.3105, of 5-Jul-2005, is the last and best build for Win98. The Win98/ME version is offered for sale as a separate download at http://www.free-downloads.net/programs/Alc...ws_98___ME_only Their homepage is http://www.alcohol-soft.com Alcohol is a must-have software, the best of its kind. Its main use is for handling a library of .iso etc image files. I have images of all my CDs and DVDs on two 1TB HDDs (one is as an identical backup), it's much easier to make a backup copy of a HDD than of 500 physical CDs/DVDs, and CDs/DVDs are just pieces of plastic which disintegrate after a couple of years. Alcohol can handle regular and copy-protected CDs/DVDs and their images. I have set up 2 virtual drives V: and W: so that I can make a binary compare of the content of 2 mounted image files with Beyond Compare (e.g. are 2 eMule downloads, one a .iso file, the other a .nrg file, identical?) With Alcohol one can install software from mounted CD/DVD images (careful, 4GB filesize limit under FAT32), both copy-protected and normal. Again: highly recommended.

Thanks Jake, rubberducky didn't convince me, on my old laptop I hardly can see the 2 plants (=disk activity indicators) move and the whole thing is not really intuitive. But maybe we will still find something. A disk activity indicator is quite useful, to see whether a program is still doing something or whether it's frozen, or whether an installation is is doing something or hung, etc. 5 months ago I have built myself a little external USB solid-state HDD, consisting of a USB hub with a built-in SDHC card reader plus 2 more SDHC card reader sticks attached to it, altogether 3x16=48GB storage. I have been using it nearly uninterruptedly for 5 months as an eMule download station, without any problems. Every SDHC card reader has a little physical disk activity light built in, this makes for very easy checking of the upload and download activity of the mule, or whether the mule hangs, even when the laptop screen has shut itself off. I have CPUIdle as the CPU activity indicator, it works also with a dual-core CPU under Win98, maybe we eventually can find a good disk activity indicator for Win98.

How about -> right-clicking on any printer icon in the Printers folder, then -> select Properties? Yes, I definitely agree. I didn't want to delve into it because a clean restore afterwards, of 2 opsys (Win98+WinXP) does take a little while. But my gut feeling is that in the worst case you're getting a dose of advertising into your system.

I am using Kaspersky as an on-demand scanner, I wouldn't recommend to anybody to be without a good and updated virus scanner. I have not had an infection from browsing the internet during the last 5 years, using Win98 + Opera. My eMule downloads with Win98 contain about 5-10 trojans etc per day, but I have not had a worrying virus infection in the last 5 years.Maybe it's a couple of safe practices, besides using Win98 + Opera/Firefox, which have kept harm away: 1) After fiddling around for a week with new stuff, I restore the clean previous opsys backup, then make a clean re-install of the new worthy stuff, then the next clean opsys backup. So if I had an infection unknown to me for a week, it would be wiped out by restoring the previous clean opsys backup. 2) I let eMule download many differences instances. When they are processed they goes first thru Kaspersky, which doesn't like 10-15% of them. WinRAR then has problems with another 10-15%, that goes. After extracting, Beyond Compare can help identify suspicious stuff (lone instances, large nfos). Whatever has many instances when extracted is usually clean, and whatever looks unusual or smells fishy, goes. 3) New stuff doesn't get installed immediately, it stays in the backlog for 3 months or more, then gets checked again for malware. Kaspersky then still finds a lot of previously undetected malware. 4) I am using a boot manager (System Commander), which prevents an infection with boot sector viruses. The final line of defense is Win98. When I returned to the US last December, for example, after 6 months in Europe, Kaspersky actually did find a trojan on a desktop, which it hadn't detected 6 months earlier. But no damage, Win98 apparently could not understand what it was supposed to do. It was an ActiveX/Flash Player related trojan, and on my desktops I only have IE 5.5. I left the little critter for several days on the desktop, to see what I does, before deleting it. If I remember right, the only effect was that Opera had a few unexplained crashes while watching a flash movie.

Should be Ok, I had checked old couponprinter.exe, digitally signed June 2008, with Kaspersky. Kaspersky should catch old malware.Did you check in Printer Properties -> Details tab -> Ports drop down list whether a new printer port was added? Unless you made an opsys restore, if a port was added it might be still there.

Another possible way to get the coupon printer to work under Win98 might be to install it first under WinME/XP to extract the driver (if it's just a printer driver or a virtual printer port). After that, if this coupon printer installs a printer driver, the driver might be installed under Win98 via Printers folder -> Add Printer Wizard. Or, if this coupon printer installs a virtual printer port, the driver may possibly be saved with Driver Magician under WinME/XP and then re-installed with Driver Magician under Win98, circumventing the installation from a .exe which checks for the opsys. Driver Magician for example can back up under Win98 a "USB Printing Support" driver for a USB001 virtual printer port, created by installing an HP USB printer (Win98SE does not come with USB printing support). But I'm not into coupons, and don't want to restore my opsys after testing. There might be something appealing to others, coupon printers apparently have a mechanism to prevent printing a coupon more than once or twice. Good Luck.

I had tried Total Commander v7.04 + the plug-in InstallExplorer v0.9.1, but they couldn't look into CouponPrinter.exe . Kaspersky Anti-Virus however could, so there should be some tool.Without having installed it under WinXP (again, I'm not into coupons), I would speculate that CouponPrinter.exe prints only to a USB printer port (i.e. not to LPT or to an IP/Ethernet port). Win98SE does not have a built-in driver to print to the USB port, that started with WinME. This might possibly be the reason why CouponPrinter.exe requires WinME or later. If one could get CouponPrinter to install under Win98, there might be a chance to get it run under Win98. Maybe it's just a virtual printer driver, like Acrobat Distiller or FinePrint, with some added security features to prevent printing 100's of coupons. BTW, in the link http://couponsinc.com/corp/source/u_uninstall.asp older versions (plural, before April 2008) are mentioned - maybe an older version works under Win98?

I wouldn't be afraid of these cute old-timers, they are just too well known and too easily detected.With Win98 and old applications disappearing rapidly, many of these old worms and viruses should be dying out in the wild.

So has Netgear. This basically makes older hardware by HP, Lexmark and Netgear worthless, unless one is prepared to spend long hours searching for the right driver. Any other manufacturers to add to the list?

Not in California. 2 weeks ago I checked at Office Depot, Staples and the big computer chain store Fry's - they had not a single Win98-compatible printer left anymore, not even old returns or reburbished printers in their back rooms. Zilch. Nothing. Nada.

The last infection I had on my Win98 system was a trojan 5 years ago, but instead of spying on me, it blocked the LPT printer port and was quickly discovered.

Yes, it's the last call to buy Win98 hardware. Win98-compatible hardware is getting harder to find at ebay, ebay has changed, fewer individuals are selling their old stuff there now, it's mainly ebay shops offering new stuff.Time permitting, my current best source of Win98-compatible hardware is -- garage sales/neighborhood sales, but only when I specifically ask: "Do you have any old Win98 stuff?". People usually ask me then "What are you using that for?" After I explain, they look in the house for old goodies. Last week, for example, I got for $40 a hardly-ever used Epson ink jet Stylus Photo 1280 printer, for very large paper size (up to 13"x19", larger than tabloid), works nicely under Win98 (Epson in contrast to HP still has their Win98 drivers on their website ); the successor model 1400 does not work under Win98 anymore. Also a bunch of original Win98 software CDs for 25 cents each: Adobe Photoshop Elements v2.0.2 CD+reg code (probably the last build for Win98), WinME Upgrade CD+reg code, Win98SE OEM CDs+reg code, Win95 CD with USB Support+reg code (25 cents, that's what people apparently think Win9x is worth ). Only about one in every twenty places still has any Win98 stuff left, pretty soon some Win98 items may become rare collectibles. Another source of Win98-compatible hardware may be craigslist.org I went twice to a large swap meet recently, but didn't find there any Win98-compatible hardware of interest.

This may make Win9x safe for the Internet. Which hacker or governmental spy agency would want to develop new malware to attack a tiny disappearing minority of 0.32% ? Furthermore, the knowhow about Win9x seems to be disappearing rapidly.<snip />

I'm not into coupons, when I went to http://print.coupons.com/CouponWeb/NoSuppo...iq37&nid=10 with Opera v9.64 and Firefox v2.0.0.20 under Win98SE, I got the msg: "Unsupported Browser We're sorry, your browser is not supported for coupon printing. Coupon printing is currently supported on the following systems: Windows Vista, Windows XP, and Windows 2000: Internet Explorer 6+ Firefox 1.5+ Netscape 9 Most MSN and AOL browsers" After installing the User Agent Switcher 0.6.11 for Firefox (Tools -> Add-ons -> Get extensions -> in field search for add-ons enter "User Agent Switcher") and then faking to have IE7 & Vista, the following page was displayed instead: "Coupon Printer Installer You’re just a minute away from printing your free coupons!" Opera apparently can only masquerade as a different browser (Tools -> Quick Preferences -> Edit Site Preferences -> Network tab -> Browser identification), not as running under a different opsys. When I tried to install the downloaded Coupon Printer (CouponPrinter.exe v7.0.6.1 of 18-Jun-2008), I got the following err msg: "The following minimum system requirements for this setup were not met: Operating System: Windows ME/NT 3.0/NT 4.0/2000/XP/Server 2003/Vista. The setup will now abort." The download location of the coupon printer program is: http://download1.coupons.com/7/19/7125/145...uponPrinter.exe

Java Runtime Environment Version 5.0 Update 18 of 25-Feb-2009 can be downloaded from: http://java.com/en/download/windows98me_ma...ost=java.com:80 Maybe it should be re-classified as ONGOING, since Sun has released several Updates since it was classified here as LAST.

ABBYY FineReader Professional v7.0.0.543 Multilanguage has worked for me under Win98SE, but I am not sure whether this is the last build for Win98. v8 does not work under Win98 anymore

Security concerns are probably not called for, they were open about it and it sounds like a lot of intellectual effort went into this program:"Our sponsor, the National Security Agency, has ended their support of our program... " http://cmrr.ucsd.edu/people/Hughes/HDDEraseReadMe.txt