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please close this thread(Stupid arguements abloobloo)
Erich Zahn
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2) If you really want to try.. can you post the network card brand and if it's integrated or seperate?
Just make sure you've at least got a firewall running. I'd also recommend ditching Internet Explorer for Opera, which scales to older hardware really well.
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Just for kicks see if you can run windows update.
Networking on 98 is a pain in the ass, so you want him to try Ubuntu?
As long as it has a network card, it should work fine. The internet was well on it's way when 98 came out.
The OS that requires no configuration on any computer to make it start using my network?
Yep.
linux evangelists are at least as bad as their apple counterparts
i'm posting from windows 7 right now, so no.. not a linux evangelist
just nobody should be using 98 at this point. notice how i suggested WinXP, but even that is pushing it
bwa hahaha
Neither me nor a linux guru friend, meanwhile, can get my computer online at all under Ubuntu.
That's good for you, but the exception not the norm.
Anyway. Waiting for RAM/network card brand.
http://www.dfsdirectsales.com/
Let me guess, you've got a broadcom chipset. Even so, wired networking has worked flawlessly and instantly on every system I've tried it on.
Anyway, Ubuntu is fine. I assume one reason they haven't upgraded is money, and it's hard to be less expensive than free. I'd even venture that Ubuntu is easier to use than Win 98, unless you're just enough of a power user to not be happy with the programs in the add/remove dialogue, but not enough of a power user to compile source code or look for things to download on the internet. Then I guess you're fucked.
All that being said, I'm going to chip in and agree with the "new computer" folks. You can get a shitty Compaq (that's still a lot better than what he's got) at Walmart for like $150. For another $30, you can buy a gig stick of ram and magically turn it into an okay computer.
Though if the computer is running Windows 98, I can't really can't recommend slapping Ubuntu on it. The livedisk won't even boot if you've got less than 128 mb ram, and most computers those days didn't have that much.
If time is worth money, save both yourself and your father some and do what Seeks said.
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I still use 98SE on a machine here that sees a nice amount of use (Athlon XP2000 machine w 512MB RAM, U160 SCSI on the motherboard, 2x80GB ATA100 drives, 2x37GB U160 drives). It's my current video capture/editing machine and I use 98SE 'cause there are no other drivers for my capture board except 95 and NT4 (Matrox Mystique220 w/Rainbow Runner). It works well, so why change it?
If it ain't broke, etc.
Exactly, I capture video with it, nothing more. I like the card 'cause it ignores the old Macrovision protection for VHS tapes, compression is done in hardware, and oddly the video quality it produces is much better then the Matrox Marvel series of capture cards. This is a card that would capture full frame NTSC video with no frame loss on a Pentium 2 as long as your hard drives were up to snuff. The stuff you buy today can barely be installed on a P4 for christ sakes! Since I only capture at NTSC resolution, it's perfect (my camcorder is an old JVC VHS-C joint). I CAN, however, edit video on this machine and it's pretty swift at it. I do have Adobe Premier 6 installed and it works like a charm.
Bleeding-edge cats kill me with this "YUO NEEDS TEH CORE DUO AND NVIDIA GEFORCE 49432700XXL BATTLE OF THE PLANETS EDITION AND 128GB OF RAM TO DO ANYTHING!!!" rhetoric. There's shit out there that doesn't need any of that and I have such a machine. It's like these guys that swear you can't create music on anything less that a dual quad-core machine, yet I just finished a track on my lowly P2-300 laptop over the weekend.
... and yes, the P2-300 with only 192MB of RAM and a 10GB drive runs XP.
DietarySupplement - Microsoft stopped support for Win98 three yearsago in July of '06, far short of the decade you claim. I rarely ever go on the net with this machine, and even if it DID get a virus somehow I know how to get rid of 'em. Also, you do know that IE6 is STILL one of the most widely used browsers (#3 as of March), right? Not that it matters, I run Opera 9.63 on this machine for the rare moment I need to pull up a web page and Flash 9 still works as does Java (JRE 1.5.0).
As for updating the hardware, let's just say that thanks to my affinity for AMD processors, I can concievably update this machine to a Socket939 single core Athlon 64 since VIA's LATEST Hyperion drivers still support 98SE (though they're not "optimized" for 98, but who gives a shit, they work).
On this machine, there are some things I could care less about. USB2.0 on 98SE is shit, but I really don't care 'cause, wonder of wonders, I fly files back and forth across 1Gb ethernet . Sure I could have fast SATA drives, but since my motherboard has built-in U160, I use that with a pair of 10K RPM u160 drives for my video work and just a pair of ATA100 joints for the OS'es (Win98SE installed on the primary, FreeBSD on the other, though it's very rarely used)
Actually, 98 was supported until 2006, and you can run the current version of Opera on it. There is actually a ton of software the still supports 98. it is being reduced every day, but 98 still sees a good amount of support. Sure 98 is not flashy, sure it's not modern, but if it does the job adequately for what he uses it for, then that's good and there is no issue continuing to use it until the hardware dies.
Working on getting a new one.
Yes, I can easily Google "Win98 stop support date" and yes I know IE6 is still one of the most used browsers. I just feel bad if you still feel the need/desire to use either.
Why?
I'm being serious too. Why would you feel bad if someone had a valid reason to use 98?
Is it 'cause you can't run "Crysis - We Kill Aliens For Sport and Meat"? Other than Active Directory, what is it that a "modern" Windows OS does that 98SE doesn't?
And I'm talking about REAL stuff too, not something that doesn't have to be, like no Flash 10 or Java 1.6.x support, 'cuase quite frankly that's a manufactured issue.
Gaming? Yeah, if that was a person's primary focus, then no modern games would be an issue. But if it wasn't how is that bad?
No new hardware support? Again, that's forced on the public 'cause companies like Intel and whatnot simply don't feel like doing it, OR are dropping it to force you to spend money on their newer products.
Being real here, the whole reason that M$ doesn't retrofit a lot of "modern" features onto an OS like 98SE is because they profit from making you buy a new OS, and their partnerships with Intel and AMD mean that a new OS will run like shit on older hardware forcing you to buy new hardware just to run that shiny new OS. It's not that they CAN'T do it, they just won't 'cause they can't make money on a person that has no incentive to update to a new OS. You can bet that there's pressure from M$ on 3rd party vendors to drop 98SE support as well for the very same reason. If I could go out and buy new software for 98SE today, and have new hardware support for 98SE, what reason would I have to upgrade to Vista or Windows 7? Security??? M$ COULD patch 98, but again we come back to money: If they patched 98, making it very secure, what reason would anyone have to buy into Windows Vista or 7, with their "enhanced" security features?
And there are lots of reasons to move to Vista or 7, just as many to stay on 98. A lot of the technology in Vista and 7 cannot be reverse engineered. Look at how far technology has come in the past 11 years. 98 would not have scaled up to that. And a lot of what I do today on my computer, could not be done on hardware that 98 can run on. hell, besides being called windows, Vista/7 and 98 have almost nothing at all in common, just for the fact that Vista is NT based. They are completely different platforms, with Vista/7 being leaps and bounds above what 98 has to offer.
Saying that running 98 on older hardware if it still works is one thing. To say that 98 is still a viable OS and relevant today is another, and is wrong.
No, it's because we've moved on from 1994 technology, which Windows98 is running on. They don't make new OSes to fuck you over, they make new OSes to stay relevant in the market and adapt to new hardware. Nobody willingly uses Mac OS 7 anymore. Nobody willingly uses the Linux kernel from that era, either.
Windows 98 is old, obsolete, can't address more than 512MB of RAM without problems. Windows 98 is dead. You will never be able to buy new hardware or software for it because people like their sanity and the improved driver models of XP and the even better driver model for Vista/7, much like how everyone moved onto OSX from MacOS9.
Also typing M$ makes you look silly and 10 years old. And no, MS (look how I spelled that) can't just patch 98. It is inherently insecure. Not only would patching it now cost thousands of dollars, the userbase is extremely small, and it cannot be patched with modern UNIX-style security (which Windows is just getting) at all because it has zero concept of user permissions. Everything runs as root.
I'm just really suprised that there is still 98 diehards out there 11 years after it's released.
I mean, come on.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cl7xQ8i3fc0
Kind of what I was trying to say except you were much more mature about it. Thanks.
Also, that's the first time I actually say someone bust out an "M$" reference in almost forever. Well worth it.
I'd personally say it's only about half wrong. Viability is dependant on what you're trying to do... for example, a calculator doesn't need Windows 7 slapped on there. But yeah, it's basically an undead OS that's only good for niche shit. Which is what he's doing, so meh.
It's windows 98. Slap Avira or another anti-virus on there, make sure the system is behind a firewall, install Opera (at absolute worst, install an older version of Opera), and just use the fucking thing.
If I were insanely worried that the system couldn't cut it, I'd just use puppy linux instead or hunt up a bit of old memory online.
I routinely recycle old windows licenses myself. When my primary computer gets off of an OS, I use the old OS on another machine. Until having 4GB+ files from DVD rips was common for me, I used a 98 machine as a storage server at home. It wasn't flashy, but it got the job done. The main reason I had to stop using it was because fat32 can't do a filesise more than 4GB, neccessitating me to upgrade.
I'm not a 98 diehard, but unlike a lot of people I see that 98 has it's place. I'm not saying it's relevant, but it still works, and oddly it works with tech that's really not that old too.
Yes, a lot of the tech that goes into newer OS'es CAN be retrofitted to 98. The multi-user environment is one major one that can't due to the DOS underpinning, same for Active Directory integration, but above that not much else. It's all a matter of writing the driver for it.
Multi-threaded processing simply can't be done on 98, that's always been the case.
The 512MB limitation (notice that my 98 machine only has 512MB) could be fixed (it's a bug that was never fixed, not a real limitation), but according to MS, 98SE and ME weren't designed to handle more than 1GB of RAM anyways (they're supposedly unstable above 1GB).
FyreWulff - The people that rely on apps that would only work on MacOS 7 still use it. I'm quite sure there's a grip of guys out there still using ProTools 3 or 4 with a NuBus TDM card or something like that.
The biggest difference between Apple and the PC/Win32 world is that Apple purposely locked out hardware they felt wouldn't run OSX well. Since Apple controlled the hardware and the OS, they could get away with dictating that "Either you upgrade, or you don't get access to OSX". Granted, a PowerMac 9600 with a Sonnet G3 or G4 card would have been perfectly capable or running OSX, but Apple didn't want that, so they didn't allow it. It could only be done with unsupported software, which if you ever called Apple on it, they would pretty much laugh at you, tell you to buy a B&W G3, and then call back. Few moved on from OS9 because they wanted to, they were forced to do it.
The other big difference is that a large number of 32bit apps written for even Win95, will run on XP and quite possibly Vista. Some of the DAW software I use were made in the 95/98 era, but will fire up just fine on XP without any tweaking (Cubase VST, FL Studio, SoundForge, etc). An app written for OS7 will fail to run on OSX, bottom line.
Systems pretty much always remain capable of doing the things they used to do. That's why I've never gotten rid of my old Apples or Ataris (the computers, not the consoles) or Amigas or the PRO-350 or even my XTs.
I imagine one day I'll retire and actually hook up all my old hardware in some sort of computing museum (lots of people have similar things already.) For now, though, I hold onto it because the things that those machines were awesome at doing in the past, they're still awesome at doing today.
Edit: slashdot is pretty fucking immature given that it's populated by a lot of people who know better. I agree with rejecting the use of M$, just as I agree with stabbing people in the eye when they crack wise about macs having one mouse button. Those are like the lowest common denominator of computing-related jokes.
Edit2: And you mean System 7. From back when Apple had genunely awesome names for their software
Point 1 - Thats why I don't understand the lashing that the OP got. It's not like the machine doesn't work anymore, or that 98 stopped working 'cause it's too old.
Point 2 - It's not that bad over at /.
Point 3 - Yes, System 7, you're absolutely correct.
Point 2 - Yes, yes it is, and your M$ comment further proves the point.
I know people who still have 98 SE & even 95 PCs at their jobs. These are small companies that just use them for spread sheets. I wouldn't be able to stand using those PCs. I switched to Vista at launch and loved it. I'm running the Win7 RC as my full time OS and will be switching my family over at launch as well. XP is just painful for me to use at this point. My sister has an old 900mhz Dell that runs XP. I hate dealing with it.
Calm down, Jesus. Why does it personally offend you that this dude's using Windows 98 to capture video? Did a video capturing Windows 98 machine murder your parents? I know this is the internet and everything (hyperbole, exaggeration, etc.), but christ man.
It's not a damn world view, it's functional hardware running functional software. He uses it for a very specific job, which it reportedly does well.
He hasn't said that it's the only computer he uses (or if he did, I missed it), but even if it was, so what? If he's happy with a computer that's lesser than what could be had, why do you care? Do you get pissed right the fuck off every time you see someone driving an Astrovan?
Again man. You're taking this Windows 98 thing way too seriously, and he's not objectively wrong in using his machine regardless.
Both of your points - I forgot this is PA, home of the many GOD'S of Reality, your opinion means everything... and yet... absofuckinglutely nothing.
To clarify, the 98 machine I have is not my only machine nor is it the most heavily used, that's reserved for this machine I'm posting from right now (Athlon XP 2500+). Of course, you're likely the Eternal GOD Interetitus and thus, my lowly machine shouldn't even be running, let along able to run XP and Vista (it does both, though Vista was too much of a headache... Aero looks nice tho). Oh ye of the GODS, please show thine mercy on such a wretched machine, even though it does absolutely everything I throw at it.
pfft... you internet GODS are a funny bunch.