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Did something happene in Autum 2008 to the Win98 community?


winxpi

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This may make Win9x safe for the Internet.

Nope.

The Win98 system which is used by grandparents for internet now also got infected some weaks ago by some kind of trojan/virus.

Windows 2000 was installed later then,but with IE5 which really sucks.

We can only bundle and use the Windows 2000 made IE6 SP1 updates which also run on 98 if we want to have an as save as possible Windows98 (SE).

Or surf the web with non IE.

I also wanted to compile new IE6 SP1 Cummulative updates for japanese version if I had time, because many visitors are also japanes on the website from x-mas. But I've got less time :blink: .

So I've not even got time to check the newest one for my system yet.

Well I can't find a reason for the high shrinking of visits except maybe people which came into the crisis now stopped using 98 or don't have the time anymore to look for updates on 9x systems, maybe thats a reason. :unsure:

Edited by winxpi
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I can't agree with point that we are having compatible hardware problem. Even today is possible to buy in computer shops components for which are supporting Windows 98 SE with official drivers.
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.
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Lexmark also pulled all of their Windows 98 drivers.
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?

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Old worms and viruses still roam the Internet as well.
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.

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I question the accuracy of the percentages for each type of OS. If that info is obtained from checking the user agent, they could be way off. Most 9X users I know aren't browsing with IE6. They're using an alternate such as SeaMonkey, K-Meleon, etc. Several of these enable the user to spoof the user agent, either directly or by using an extension or free-standing app like Proxomitron as an aid for dealing with sites that don't work properly with 9X systems. I would guess that most 9X users have run into such sites and know how to spoof the user agent.

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Ok, 2-cents...

I have Win98SE on my box (dual-boot w/ an NT-type opsys - nunya, guys/gals)...

Works fine. Granted, hardware support is getting slim, but drivers can be found (a pain). The converse is also true for older hardware on a newer opsys. Bottom line, bite the bullet finding drivers (any opsys), attach it, test it, and if it works use it; otherwise, yank it. The main problem seems to be the MoBo's, of which a list is being kept. Software support in many cases is also getting hard to find, but again can be found and is being listed.

MSFN is probably the best resource for support of Win9x/ME, so "Don't worry, be happy". :)

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I question the accuracy of the percentages for each type of OS. If that info is obtained from checking the user agent, they could be way off. Most 9X users I know aren't browsing with IE6. They're using an alternate such as SeaMonkey, K-Meleon, etc. Several of these enable the user to spoof the user agent, either directly or by using an extension or free-standing app like Proxomitron as an aid for dealing with sites that don't work properly with 9X systems. I would guess that most 9X users have run into such sites and know how to spoof the user agent.

This computer has had Proxomitron running every day for 6 years and never once displayed the Windows 98 user agent.

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I question the accuracy of the percentages for each type of OS. If that info is obtained from checking the user agent, they could be way off. Most 9X users I know aren't browsing with IE6. They're using an alternate such as SeaMonkey, K-Meleon, etc. Several of these enable the user to spoof the user agent, either directly or by using an extension or free-standing app like Proxomitron as an aid for dealing with sites that don't work properly with 9X systems. I would guess that most 9X users have run into such sites and know how to spoof the user agent.

This computer has had Proxomitron running every day for 6 years and never once displayed the Windows 98 user agent.

Yeah you two are right, that percenage of TOTAL 98/ME users isn't really so accuracy.

When I used KUP for example to make FireFox 3 run, I wasn't displayed as Win98 , it was displayed as unknown OS, that's because you have to change the OS which the program your using is supposed to think you are using. For Example you set the OS to Windows 2000 in the KUPVER.INI to run FireFox 3 so you won't even be listed in the Web as Win98 althought it's an Win98SE system you are running.

The numbers might be higher than stated, when people use KUP but I think the numbers are still shrinking althought there may be some shown not anymore as 98 but "unknown" instead. That's only a small part of the total 9x users. I think we 9x users are shrinking but there are still more systems using 9x than official are told(even not all use the internet).

Edited by winxpi
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As long as we're talking about user agent statistics, these are the numbers from my website:

Win95: 7.5%

Win98: 0.5%

WinME: 0.3%

WinNT: 0.2%

Win2000: 1.7%

Of course, part of that is no doubt due to the fact that I look at my own site. :whistle:

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I wouldn't be afraid of these cute old-timers, they are just too well known and too easily detected.

Even without an anti-virus program? Because I think we're talking about Windows 98 on its own here.

With Win98 and old applications disappearing rapidly, many of these old worms and viruses should be dying out in the wild.

You'd be surprised how difficult it is to get rid of these.

herbalist, I personally haven't encountered a site that refused me just because I use Windows 95, but I know they exist. I actually have a custom user agent string that is the result of doing away with old cruft:

SeaMonkey/1.1.16 (Win95; en-US) Gecko/1.8.1.21

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Don't be too optimistic: Stats are bad and do look like the Dow Jones circa end of 2008.

It's sad that so few poeple see the advantage of using w9x, and that nobody in the industry ever recognized these advantages.

Morevoer, w98 is perhaps the most hated OS ever by the so called NT-based OSes users.

On every forum where dropping or keeping w98 is discussed there are XP fanboys coming out to destroy w98. Everytime. And I suspect that commercial websites like Lexmart who remove w98 drivers do so because of these XP fanboys.

It's an incomprehensible hatred, like racism or schizophrenia. It's absolutely incredible.

This is even more bizzare since XP is not known for being a success technicaly. It's rather the failed experiment of the new window generation, like w3.1 was to w98. Vista was a slight improvement in some way, wondows 7 should be the real fix.

Nevertheless I'm still very pleased with the activity of this board and all the ongoing projects we can find.

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Even without an anti-virus program? Because I think we're talking about Windows 98 on its own here.
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.

Edited by Multibooter
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Even without an anti-virus program? Because I think we're talking about Windows 98 on its own here.
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.

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.

Just out of curiosity, what is the kind of stuff you download apparently so much from P2P, that is executable code, that has nfos and that DOES NOT SMELL FISHY ? :whistle:

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Just out of curiosity, what is the kind of stuff you download apparently so much from P2P, that is executable code, that has nfos and that DOES NOT SMELL FISHY ? :whistle:
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.

Edited by Multibooter
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