"Vivien M." wrote:
if haveto(M$) use(W98SE);
Have either of you actually followed this advice?
Yes.
(30%ish free). That machine got totally unstable needing a reboot after about 3 days. On the same hardware (with additional RAM), Win2K could easily run 3-4 weeks and run any app I wanted just fine.
ROFL. :-) My relatives run their machine(s) for a couple of hours and turn them off. My 3000+ customers are primarily dialup, and presumably turn them off, too. If they didn't, the Nachi infections would be much, much worse.
No wonder people think Windows is unreliable. 98SE may be preferable from a security-from-external-threats POV, yes, but
This thread primarily concerns security.
... I'll take rebooting every week or two for the latest XP security patch any day over rebooting every day or two because Win98SE is an unreliable piece of poorly designed legacy junk.
All M$ software is "an unreliable piece of poorly designed legacy junk." This is about which piece of junk to recommend to customers, that keeps support costs down, and Nachi et alia from showing up.
The way I see it, there are two uses for 98SE (or 95, 98, Me, etc) in the modern world: 1) People who use their computers as game-only machines (or who dual boot a real OS for non-game purposes)
That's me, personally, for games that are not available for Macs -- after all, GreenDragon is a Mac game company!
2) Advertising for $OTHER_OS, where $OTHER_OS can be Win2K, XP, or your favourite Linux distro with KDE, GNOME, etc. Anything that actually WORKS reliably.
Although we do run YellowDog Linux on old Mac hardware for much of our server needs, the security monitors and such run NetBSD or OpenBSD. Just had a Linux nameserver hacked the other day.... I have horrible, horrible, support experiences with 2K and XP. Every customer that I know runs XP has been infected with one thing or another. In the case of 2 DSL customers in particular, they seem to be infected again a week or two later, even tho' they swear that they applied all the patches. This has been a major pain in support costs. My brothers both run XP for Civ3 PTW, and both crash within a half hour or so, while the W98 machines just keep running that program all day, leading me to host on much slower W98 machines -- contrary to the usual instructions. So, I can personally attest to "actually WORKS reliably." -- William Allen Simpson Key fingerprint = 17 40 5E 67 15 6F 31 26 DD 0D B9 9B 6A 15 2C 32