Microsoft Stops Supporting Win98 Early

Christopher_G_Lewis writes "Today Microsoft announced that it is 'not feasible to make the extensive changes necessary to Windows Explorer on Microsoft Windows 98, Microsoft Windows 98 Second Edition (SE), and Microsoft Windows Millennium Edition (ME) to eliminate the vulnerability' to fix Security Bulletin MS06-15. Granted, the vulnerability is easily prevented by basic firewalling, but this basically is the first time Microsoft has admitted that Windows 98 is so broken that it's crazy to be running it on today's Internet."

not considerably early

[Coneasfast]

paid incident support ends on July 11, 2006. only a month away. mainstream support ended in 2002. this isn't a big deal.

no computer with any OS should be on the wire

[KalvinB]

You can pick up a nice cheap perfectly sufficient router with NAT for around $30. I wouldn't trust any computer directly on the wire without a router. I don't care what OS it's running.

I'd like to be able to run internal services on my systems without having to mess around with restricting IPs at the app level. It's a lot easier to just open ports at the router level if I want outside people to connect to my service.

Re:Quick Question

[Just Some Guy]

I do. I never could get Reader Rabbit or Jumpstart Preschool running under Win2K, and I didn't want to buy (or pirate) XP when 98 runs my kids' games without problems.

Re:R.I.P. Windows 98

[alohatiger]

You might try Edubuntu. The default installation includes LTSP and is designed for small computer labs. You only have to admin one machine and the clients will run on old boxes. You can also reduce noise/power consumption removing the drives from the clients.

Re:R.I.P. Windows 98

[mick129]

> Firefox also drops Win98 support in the next release.

Win98 support will be in Firefox's next release. It's the 3.0 release due in late 2007 that won't have support.

Applies to Windows ME also

[iggymanz]

well, Windows ME came out in Sept 2000, less than six years old right now. Security updates for five years for an OS that costs money is probably OK for home use, but I could see some small businesses wanted a somewhat longer cycle.

Better license agreement

[Anonymous Coward]

Win 98 and ME have better license agreements too.

Those license agreements don't have the weird clauses about M$ being able to remotely disable your access to internet services at any time for any reason, or about your consent to have third-party DRM pushed to you over the internet automatically without your consent or knowledge (both of which are in the XP license agreement).

Industry support

[phorm]

While MS may have stopped supporting win98 in terms of patches etc, the industry stopped supporting it a long time ago. MS also stopped supporting it for much of their office products quite a while back. Even hardware such as printers have been not supporting the old OS in the last few years.

Basically win98 was good if you still need to run some legacy 9x apps, maybe some DOS stuff, and get on the internet for email or browsing. It seems now that it's day has passed even for browsing, as the forthcoming versions of both IE and firefox have stopped support, and now patch support has stopped as well.

However, what to do with all those businesses (especially low-profit government entities such as schools) with older machines, win98 licenses, and not a lot of money to spend on either hardware or operating systems? To me, it looks this is just another push for those entities towards a linux desktop, not based on any technical details, but due to just plain ol' dollars and cents.

No users left? Hardly that.

[Anonymous Coward]

According to the following page (look Slashdot - I'm citing my sources) 3.15% of users online are running Windows 98. That's hardly infinitesimial, certainly not ignorable. For comparison, this same page states Mac OS * at 4.19% and Linux at 0.40%. Dispute the accuracy - I certainly shall - it comes from statistic botherers on commercial websites. The 'mainstream web' we could call it.

http://marketshare.hitslink.com/report.aspx?qprid= 2 [hitslink.com]

So Microsoft, running windows 98 connected to the net certainly isn't impossible in 2006, even if it *is* ridiculous. Maybe we should just block them from browsing, demanding the upgrade.

In other stories.. Debian server running continuously since 1998 succombs to infestation of termites.

Get Internet explorer!

Re:Windows 98 is still usable

[MacDaffy]

Part of the secret to your success that you use your machine wirelessly. Most wireless routers protect you from exploits like the one mentioned in the article.

"Integrated" web browser

[1ucius]

Wasn't windows 98 the first edition bundled the browser with the OS - for the benefit of the consumer of course? Bit ironic that it's now cited at the reason to drop support.

Re:R.I.P. Windows 98

[Salsaman]

Take a look at Skolelinux as well:

http://www.skolelinux.org/portal/ [skolelinux.org]

More Proof

[TheNetAvenger]

The resposes to this article are more proof that a majority of people on SlashDot don't realize that Win9x and Win2k/XP are ENTIRELY different OSes. Different code bases, actually different code all around.

Windows 101 for Slashdot People

Win3.x was 16bit OS for the x86 only platform and was programmed primarily in C and Assembly
Win9x was a 32bit OS built on top of Win3.x technology and again was programmed using C and Assembly in a lot of areas.
WinNT was a New OS technology with a 'real' kernel and subsystem technology that was built entirely in portable C for Cross Platform Support
WinXP is the modern version of WindowsNT, still built completely in portable C and C++ with no assembly optimization allowed outside of the HAL.

The ONLY reason that Win9X and WinXP 'look' a bit alike is purely cosmetic for end user ease.

So people that are still running Win9x, they deserve the blue screens, you won't have them with XP unless you have hardware failure - you know, like a *nix...

Also as for Win98 being lighter for test environments, you are doing a disservice, especially if you are using it for development testing. Applications run differently on WinXP. Also as for Win9x being lighter, the only truth in this is that Win9x will run well on 32mb of RAM, where WindowsXP requires 64mb of RAM for the 'same level' of performance, and with 128MB of RAM WinXP will run 'faster' than Win98.

I run into people all the time that still associate Windows 'instablity' with Win9x and a 8 year old OS that was mothballed with WinXP was released.

I understand that a lot of peeps and friends in the *nix world run Dual boots or VM versions of Win98, but you need to really move on even if you have to run a hacked version of XP. There are things that will still make you mad at MS but your computer crashing under Windows won't be one of them.

Re:no computer with any OS should be on the wire

[misleb]

The nature of PAT (port/address translation) is that it is stateful. Thus, PAT (the most common form of NAT) DOES provide security and it is NOT trivailly easy to work around. If there is no existing outbound connection from a machine behind a PAT gateway, there is no way to communicate with it from the internet because the router doesn't know who to send your uberhacker packets to. And even when there is an existing outbound connection for a machine, it is only for a partocular address and port combination. It wouldnt' do a hacker any good.

-matthew