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Key Software Recommendations for Win9x


ryaxnb

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I thought it would be a good idea to have some important software, sorted by Category. I have added some of my own software and have used some from various lists. Each software has a comment on how it works and my like of it, so that's the big difference between this and other lists.

Revisions:

1.0 Original.

1.0.1 Fixed errors, updates in Opera section.

1.1 Added Virus & Spyware section.

Web Browsers:

Firefox is a popular web browser. Upsides of firefox include it is very popular, it is well-supported by websites, it has a good interface, and it is very extensible. Downsides include System Memory/Resource usage, lack of support by v3 for 98se without hacks, and being light on features by default. Overall, it's a good choice for 98SE systems, but older systems might want to consider something else. Kernelex is required to support v3 or v3.1 beta on 9x. http://www.getfirefox.com

Opera is a lightweight web browsers with lots of features. The main downsides are lack of support for some websites, and minimal expandability. Opera runs on all 9x versions, and the latest version works fairly well on 9x. Opera is a good choice if you want a browser with many features, and good support for 9x. http://opera.com

SeaMonkey is an integrated internet suite. It includes a web browser, mail program, irc client, and even a web page editor. The downside is that SeaMonkey can be rather bloated. The latest version supports 9x fully, but the next version is not likely to. The best thing about SeaMonkey is that it can be hard to find good IRC and web page editing software for 9x, so if you need those, SeaMonkey is a good bet. http://mozilla.org

Antivirus & AntiSpyware & Firewall:

Firewall: A good hardware firewall is the best defense! Just use a router. If you must, use the last 98se compatible ZoneAlarm.

Virus: Avast Antivirus will be 9x compatible for the forseeable future. I highly recommend it. NOD32 2.7, available for purchase from eSet is another great AV.

Spyware: I recommend Ad-aware SE.

Chatting & Mail:

Miranda IM is the de facto standard IM client for 9x. The only other real multi-protocol choice is Trillian, which costs money. http://miranda-im.org

mIRC is a popular shareware IRC client for Windows. It is the main choice for IRC in Windows 9x. It is quite good and very scriptable. http://mirc.com

Chatzilla is an extension to Firefox. Although certainly not the best client, it is free. https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/16

Skype is a VoIP program. v3.0 may work on 9x without video. Skype is high-quality free software and is the best you are going to get for VoIP on 9x http://skype.com

Thunderbird is the most common mail client that is fully compatible with 9x. Thunderbird is well-made, but can be a bit clumsy to navigate. It is however easy to setup and generally a great mail client. http://mozilla.com/thunderbird

Pegasus Mail is a complex, powerful, traditional mail program. It is highly recommended for advanced users by many. http://pmail.com

Web Chat and Mail:

http://meebo.com, http://mibbit.com, http://gmail.com Web-based mail and chat programs are very common. Meebo is the leading multi-protocol IM client, Mibbit is the only major Javascript IRC client, and Gmail is the best webmail client. I highly recommend all three.

Office:

Office XP is the obvious choice, but besides being very large, Office XP is far from perfect, and is no longer very well supported. I recommend OpenOffice.org 3, with KernelEx, or OpenOffice 2, without KernelEx. Office suite choices are very limited in 98se, and Office XP and OpenOffice.org are the only two real choices available. Kingsoft Office and SoftMaker Office require 2000. http://openoffice.org

Professional tools:

The GIMP 2.2 is the last version to work in 98SE. I consider it essential to working with graphics if you don't have a 98SE compatible version of Photoshop. The last version of Photoshop to be compatible was 7, with CS possibly working in KernelEx. Photoshop 7 is still a great tool, and is the recommended version due to being faster and lighter, as well as being much more of a sure thing to be supported.

Illustrator 10 was the last supported version of illustrator. Quark 5 was the last version of Quark. Dreamweaver MX 2004 was the last version of Dreamweaver, and Flash 7 was the last version of flash. There have been reports of Flash 8 and possibly Dreamweaver 8 working on KernelEx.

Multimedia:

The Klite Codec pack is an essential. The last working version is 3.45.http://www.oldapps.com/download_old_versio..._codec_pack.php

Windows Media Player 9 is important too. This is part of the updates you get with Auto-Patcher for 98SE, highly recommended. Media Player 10 is a barely-improved version, but if you want it, you can hack it into 98SE. http://www.msfn.org/board/98MP10-WMP10-XP-XP-SP-t89934.html. The last media player for Windows 95 was 6.4.

Quicktime Alternative 1.56 can be nice too http://www.codecpackguide.com/quicktimealt.htm

VLC 0.8.6 is essential for DVD playback and many other things... including Quicktime Content. http://www.videolan.org/vlc/download-windows.html download the 0.86 version.

Textediting:

Notepad++, Emacs.

http://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/emacs/windows/

http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.p...ckage_id=102072 (download the zip)

Overall, I'd recommend Emacs to UNIX users or feature lovers, and Notepad++ to Windows lovers.

Patching:

http://www.msfn.org/board/98-SE-SP-30-BETA-3-t61749.html

98SE SP3 Beta 3 Unofficial! Essential for smooth operation.

http://www.msfn.org/board/Auto-Patcher-Win...98s-t80800.html

Important to have the latest 98SE, but some files are not as new as the SP3. I recommend trying both at the same time.

http://www.msfn.org/board/Unofficial-Windo...SR-t124074.html

For 95OSR2 users

http://www.msfn.org/board/Service-Pack-Windows-t61407.html

For ME users.

Edited by ryaxnb
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You call Firefox light on features, Opera having a lot of them, and SeaMonkey bloated? Urgh, bad comparison.

SeaMonkey is rather complete, not bloated. If something is to be called bloated with features, it's Opera. But it runs great, so no one is complaining.

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Office software: Microsoft Office 2000. Reason: Does not require authentication upon installation. I have Office 2K Full Premium SR1 installed on all my win-98 systems. Once installed, go to officeupdate.microsoft.com and apply several patches and add-ons (like the ability to open the newest format of office files).

Internet e-mail and usenet news client: Netscape Communicator 4.7. Reason: It just works, and works well.

Drawing, image manipulation and page layout: Coreldraw 9.0. Not sure if this is the last version that's compatible with win-98 or not.

Anti-virus software: Norton Antivirus 2002. Reason: It's lightweight and easy on resource usage, can be easily reinstalled when it's 1-year license expires, can be updated via Symantec Intelligent Updater (updates include new versions of scan engine DLL). Alternative is Symantec corporate anti-virus (version 9 or 10) which never expires.

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Office software: Microsoft Office 2000. Reason: Does not require authentication upon installation. I have Office 2K Full Premium SR1 installed on all my win-98 systems. Once installed, go to officeupdate.microsoft.com and apply several patches and add-ons (like the ability to open the newest format of office files).

:blink: Isn't that implying violation of EULAs? Office XP's activation is no problem if you use the software within the EULA, and if you want to all-out pirate, there's ways around it.

Internet e-mail and usenet news client: Netscape Communicator 4.7. Reason: It just works, and works well.

Reasonable. I would recommend Netscape 4.8 instead however.

Drawing, image manipulation and page layout: Coreldraw 9.0. Not sure if this is the last version that's compatible with win-98 or not.
Cool. :thumbup
Anti-virus software: Norton Antivirus 2002. Reason: It's lightweight and easy on resource usage, can be easily reinstalled when it's 1-year license expires, can be updated via Symantec Intelligent Updater (updates include new versions of scan engine DLL). Alternative is Symantec corporate anti-virus (version 9 or 10) which never expires.

I'm partial to Avast! Antivirus myself.

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I'm partial to Avast! Antivirus myself.
I've been using Kaspersky for the past 12 years. Even in 1996 Avast was a close 2nd choice. Too bad that one can't have 2 virus scannning software packages installed under the same operating system selection. One reason for multibooting into a 2nd opsys selection with another virus scanner.
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For email I use Foxmail 5 since long ago, very good and simple even for gmail http mail

You may download it from here:

http://www.brothersoft.com/e-mail/e-mail_c...load_27488.html

As browser, apart from Opera and Firefox 2, I use Maxthon Classic, which keeps using IE6 resources but without most of its inconveniences and insecurity:

http://www.maxthon.com/download.htm

Edited by cannie
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There is a version of SoftMaker Office, Softmaker Office 2006 which is available as freeware. It only includes a word processor (TextMaker 2006) and a spreadsheet (PlanMaker 2006). It is only 40Mb total and blindingly fast to load. I also have OpenOffice 2.4, in case I need to use other office applications, but it is huge, 270Mb and the only thing I need it for generally is to run PowerPoint files.

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Office software: Microsoft Office 2000. Reason: Does not require authentication upon installation. I have Office 2K Full Premium SR1 installed on all my win-98 systems.

:blink: Isn't that implying violation of EULAs? Office XP's activation is no problem if you use the software within the EULA, and if you want to all-out pirate, there's ways around it.

I have serious problems with product activation! In fact when Microsoft originally started talking about tying the OS to the HDD I remember thinking "What id*** would tie software to the most often replaced piece of hardware in a computer?"

I swap HDDs in and out like most people use flash drives. All our (myself and my sister's) desktop machines have at least one removable HDD which can mechanically be turned on or off, one has two although in that machine the second one is a 2.5" IDE drive so I can copy partitions between the desktop and the notebooks. With the SCSI drives, I can change the boot drive from one the main one in the computer to the one in the removable cartridge merely by switching the SCSI ID number using a switch on the front of the cartridge. This is the only method I know of which allows you to make sure your the backup of your OS will work. Every other method requires some sort of restore function, which wipes out the original installation to use the backup, so you cannot have both a working installation and a backup which has been run to ensure it is working. I have also found that a HDD sitting on the shelf will not become infested with viruses or spyware, as it seems that most cannot traverse a 6 foot or better air gap.

I back up my system by coping the drives onto another drive and putting it on the shelf. I have had CR-Rs which were unreadable in 3 months, or unreadable on a different CD-R drive and tape is a joke. All this Microsoft ET Phone home technology which tries to tie itself to a specific HDD doesn't like HDDs being used like that. In fact, if you have a machine with two HDDs and you swap them making the original drive 0 drive 1 and vice versa, XP considers it as having installed two new hDDs!

For our two desktop machines, I have a spare CPU, MB, memory, video card, sound card, modem, and power supply. If you do not do this and need a new motherboard or etc., you will have to reinstall windows, as you will never be able to find two or three year old hardware without a lot of effort. Then a major hardware failure becomes a several day problem instead of a couple hour problem.

Windows Product activation doesn't like this.

In fact, if your MB dies and you don't have a backup, you will have to buy a new MB, which will mean a new CPU and new memory, which will probably make Microsoft consider it a new machine and require a new copy of Windows! I do not know, as I have taken careful pains to avoid being in a situation where I would find out, if XP considered a card moved from one PCI slot to a different one to be a "new" device.

I upgraded to XP when Windows Vista came out, for I never upgrade to a version of a Microsoft OS until the last version of it is available - Who can forget Windows Me or DOS 4.0, which was so bad that what should have been DOS 4.1 was released as DOS 5.0? I needed 4 copies. I purchased the enterprise edition which did not have Product Activation. The minimum purchase was five seats, so I bought one more copy of XP than I needed. It is still unused, but I effectively paid an extra $200 for a copy I did not need to AVOID product activation. I will not buy anything which ties itself to a specific piece of hardware, user name, e-mail address, real address, or anything else which might change unexpectedly.

I do not trust Microsoft enough to believe that if they can cause users OSs to become disfunctional, they will not choose to arbitrarily do this. What happens when the support cycle for windows XP ends, will they disable the product activation or disable the OS so you have to by a more recent version? More than half of the computers I have are running no longer supported OSs, and my PIM has not been supported for over a decade.

If you look at how product activation is supposed to work, you will realize that Microsoft cannot tell if a copy of Windows is legitimate, as they claim that the product key is not transmitted to them, but hashed with other numbers from the hardware. The numbers pertaining to hardware, with the exception of OEM versions preinstalled on a machine, have nothing to do with the validity of a copy of Windows.

Since you can easily find a pirated version of almost any software merely by Googling the name of the software and adding a couple keywords, sometimes even being able to get a pirated version before the legitimate version is released, it does not eliminate piracy or even slow it down real much.

Piracy is defined as using software without paying for it. Is it not just as much piracy to pay for something and then be unable to use it? If software was sold, rather than licensed so that you do not have the legal protections you have regarding things you own, Microsoft would have been out of business long ago, found guilty of multiple counts of fraud! Microsoft's earlier policy of licensing their OS by the number of computers delivered rather than the number of computers delivered with a Microsoft OS on them effectively forced people who wanted a different OS to pay for a copy of the Microsoft OS without ever receiving it - reverse piracy anyone?

What does product activation actually do? Well in 2000 or 2001, Microsoft prohibited OEMs from including a copy of Windows with new PCs, so if you had a HDD failure you had to buy a new copy of Windows. Product activation is merely a more elegant method of accomplishing the same thing.

You can buy an new low end computer with Windows Vista installed for $199.95. If your hard drive then crashes you will have to buy a copy of Windows Vista retail for $199.95 plus a new hard drive. This is more than the original computer costs, so an intelligent person will just buy a new computer and trash the old one. As only folks living in major metropolitan areas have access to means of recycling electronics devices, and there is little market for a used computer with no hard drive and no OS, it will probably become landfill.

So the Microsoft ET phone home technology does little to prevent piracy but is good at increasing landfill.

Friends don't let friends use computers which automatically talk to Microsoft!

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Sygate Personal Firewall Pro version 5.5 build 2525 works very well in Windows 9x.

I prefer Avast for antivirus, but the recent version was said to cause Windows 98SE to

hang on shutdown. I also experienced that personally. Supposedly they fixed that with the latest release. It is very light on resources (system requirements are a 486 with 32MB of RAM if you are running Win9x).

Winamp 5.09 worked fine with Win95 OSR2 and Win98SE (but newer versions of Winamp have been said by others to be unstable).

Yahoo Messenger 7.0 worked fine for me and it allows for use of avatars and a personal

photo, just like version 8. Versions 6 and 8 are unstable for whatever reason and version 5.6 build

1358 is unable to connect because Yahoo disabled it (they said it is "expired", so they are

forcing people to upgrade).

Nero version 5.5.10.42 is stable.

Office XP worked well too.

Norton Partition Magic 8.0

Mozilla Firefox 1.5

Free Download Manager

CCleaner 1.41

AIDA 32

IrfanView

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> Sygate Personal Firewall Pro works very well in Windows 9x.

Firewall = useless waste of CPU cycles

> Office XP worked well too.

What are the benefits or extra capabilities of Office XP vs Office 2K ?

> Norton Partition Magic 8.0

I wouldn't think that a rarely-used drive configuration / volume preparation tool like PM was part of what the OP of this thread had in mind when it was started. My impression is that the "key software recommendations" were along the lines of software that's used every day (ie the reason you have a computer in the first place).

> IrfanView

An alternate image-viewing program is Microsoft Photo Editor 3.01:

Based upon HALO Desktop Imager

Copyright 1991-1998 Media Cybernetics LP

File name: photoed.exe

File date: July 10, 2001

File version: 20010710

File size: 760 kb

Microsoft Photo Editor ships with Microsoft Office 97 and the stand-alone versions of Microsoft Word 97 and Microsoft PowerPoint 97. Microsoft Photo Editor is installed when you perform a custom or complete installation from the CD. It does not ship with the stand-alone versions of Microsoft Excel 97, Microsoft Access 97, or as part of the Microsoft Office 97 ValuPack.

Microsoft has replaced Photo Editor with Microsoft Office Picture Manager, a new photo editing and cataloging program in Office 2007 and in Office 2003.

I believe the one I have was installed as part of Office 2K. But it can also be downloaded from here:

http://www.brothersoft.com/microsoft-photo...tor-128651.html

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I wouldn't call a drive partitioning program "rarely used"!

Although I use Partition Commander instead of Partition Magic, I would be totally lost with neither of them, for I back up my "C;/" drive by merely copying the "C:" partition to another drive. As I only back up the C drive when I have changed something significant, this is something which is not necessary to do very often.

I DO use Partition Commander much more frequently to do major backups of my data drives. All my and my sister's computers are essentially duplicates of each other except for the "C:" drives, and even those are close to duplicates in regards to types, IE the desktops are identical machines, the notebooks are identical machines, the sub-notebooks are identical machines, and there are back-up machines of each type as well. How frequently I copy the data partitions depends on how much data I have added to the drives in a given period of time.

All my data is also on USB HDD drives, some of them have copies of the computer partitions, and some are merely one big single partition. While I do the major backups of the data partitions by using Partition Commander, more frequent backups are made on the USB HDDs by syncing the already copied partition with the main drive using a program called freeCommander which is a portable windows Explorer alternative. http://www.freecommander.com/ It runs on both 98SE and XP.

FreeCommander is a member of a new class of software which I discovered a couple years ago called Portable Applications. These are applications do not need to be installed and can be run from a thumb drive or even a CD. I use the type of thumb drives which are merely a holder for SD Flash cards, since if I am traveling and run out of space on the camera, I can merely remove the SD card from the thumb drive and use it in the camera. As all these programs are backed up elsewhere, the only disadvantage to wiping the card is that I will be unable to get my e-mail or use any of the other software in a foreign computer for the remainder of the trip.

The programs are placed on the SD card in the thumb drive so that I have all my essential software on a drive where I can use it in any computer I come across, for instance, I can browse the web or get my e-mail on any computer I have access to without leaving any traces of this activity on the computer I am using.

Links to Portable Applications:

PortableApps - http://portableapps.com/apps

The Portable Freeware Collection - http://www.portablefreeware.com/

and the article

100 Portable Apps for your USB stick at http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/portable-software-usb/

If it is the software I bought the PC for it would be AutoCAD, the existence of which caused me to buy my first IBM PC XT Clone in 1986. Blindingly fast it ran at all of 4.77MHz! :rolleyes:

This is software I use so frequently and consider so essential it is on the flash drives as well. All this software runs on both Windows 98SE and Windows XP, as I try to avoid software which does not run on both OS. These are also the main programs I use on the desktop and notebook computers for these purposes.

PlanMaker Office 2006 (before I found this I was using the Portable version of OpenOffice)

Portable Firefox

Portable Thunderbird

EditPad Lite - A NotePad alternative which allows multiple files to be opened in tabs. http://www.editpadpro.com/editpadlite.html

progeCAD LT 2006 - an AutoCAD clone which can read and write AutoCAD files up through AutoCAD 2004. I believe this is the last version of progeCAD which runs on Windows 98SE.

Personal Ancestral File (paf) allows me to read all the genealogical data my sister has collected over the past 40 years

FastStone Image Viewer at http://www.faststone.org It has enough photo editing features to make most people happy, although I am a published photographer and use more extensive stand alone photo editors for photo editing. They also have a screen capture program which I have on my computers but which I do not consider essential enough to put on the Flash drives.

PhotoBrush from MediaChance at http://www.mediachance.com/ is my main Photo Editor. IMHO it is the best stand alone (no Photo Album features) Photo Editor I have come across. It is relatively small at 30Mb but will still do things like compensate for the curvature (pincusion and barrel distortion) innate to the more extreme wide angle and telephoto lenses as well as MUCH other esoteric stuff. It has more common features as well, like red-eye removal, color correction and exposure adjustment. Runs on both 98SE and XP. It is also fairly easy to use.

In regard to Photo Album or photo organizing software - I do NOT use it!

Reason - if you use image organizing software you are then tied to a organizing file format specific to that program. What happens if ten years from now that software is discontinued? You will probably not be able to convert the format to the format used by a different Photo Album program, and will have to convert it manually, if you can do it at all.

Photographers and software people are entirely opposite in viewpoint. Software folks tend to think of something being 'obsolete' in a half decade or so, photographers tend to think in terms of images which will last 100 years or better.

I had a partial database of my library which contained several hundred books, which I could not convert from the database format used by the Commodore 64 to the database formats used in the PC. Having to manually re-enter the information for several hundred books, from the title pages, make a lasting impression sufficient to guarantee that one will never use computers in a manner where this will happen again!

Instead of using Photo Album software, I use the normal Windows folders and file system.

I create a folder with the year preceded by either my or my sisters first initial (example X2008)

under that folder I make additional folders as necessary with the folder starting with the date in YYYYMMDD format, padding the month and days with preceding zeros to make two character fields. This is followed by a underline and a keyword denoting the event, for instance a SiFi Convention which took place on the day after Thanksgiving might have it's base folder 20081128_SiFi

Under that folder is another folder for the original files from the camera. These files are NEVER modified in any manner, not even by renaming. Any editing is done on files copied into the next higher level folder, ie a photo in \20081128_SiFi\Neg would be copied to \20081128_SiFi\ before doing any editing

I can find any of the approximately 25,000 photos we have taken in the past five years or so using this method, and I could still do so if I was running a similar program under Linux or even some operating system which does not exist now but is being used in 2030 or such. I wish I could find older photos taken on film cameras so easily!

The remainder of the 2 or 4 Gb SD card is filled with all my data - except for the photos as they take up about 40Gb. I have a USB Portable Media player with a large HDD for these. This can be plugged into a foreign computer along with the USB Flash drive, and is small enough to carry in a large pocket.

As I do not do video and have an MP3 player, I do consider it necessary to put those types of applications on the Flash drive, but I am told a good Portable video player is VLC Media Player, I have it on all the computers, but rarely use it.

Audacity is a good portable audio editor. It will probably end up on the flash drive eventually when I get through this cycle of more important things and have time to go back to doing music things.

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