Windows 98/ME support ends July 11 2006

**Luxman** · June 18th, 2006, 12:41 PM

Here is the link to the official page.

What this means of course is that you have until that date to run Windows Update on your box and get yourself fully patched with all of the necessary security updates.

Make sure you do this if you haven't already. Remember, It's free.

**street1** · June 18th, 2006, 03:19 PM

Effective July 11 2006 Microsoft will no longer give a rats "dung extruder" what anybody does with Win98 and Me.

It will make you feel like you finally own the OS they once sold you.

They worry even less about DOS,Win3.1 and Win95.

Mayhap,they will loosen the rope a little,They need length in their rope
for the Vista noose.

**Ferrit** · June 18th, 2006, 04:14 PM

Time to let that unsecure os die a quiet death

**RawHide67** · June 18th, 2006, 11:28 PM

......"unsecure os die a quiet death".....

so the "windows" were not broken after all?? could have fooled me! and here comes the saviour os 'Vista' to the rescue !
instead of spending all that money on Vista, why could they not have invested less and given us a version of XP that wasn't broken...lets see how long before Vista shows its cracks!

It's ALL bull actually.....the PC industry needed a boost in sales and now Uncle Billy will force people into buying new PCs...of course...all in the interest of security !

**Ferrit** · June 19th, 2006, 08:50 AM

Yes unsecure, flaky, crashing, POS.
Dunno about your XP but all the systems I build are relatively maintenance free using XP.
Which is a huge improvement over 98

**Luxman** · June 19th, 2006, 12:25 PM

Originally Posted by Ferrit

Yes unsecure, flaky, crashing, POS.
Dunno about your XP but all the systems I build are relatively maintenance free using XP.
Which is a huge improvement over 98

Wow. I guess I've been in the dark the past 6 years. I never realized my Win98 pc was an unsecure, flaky, crashing POS. Thanks for the warning.

I'm going out the door in about 10 minutes to purchase a brand new copy of Windows XP Pro. Now I won't have any of those problems you've listed anymore.

Whew. Thanks.

**Ferrit** · June 19th, 2006, 12:33 PM

Originally Posted by Luxman

Wow. I guess I've been in the dark the past 6 years. I never realized my Win98 pc was an unsecure, flaky, crashing POS. Thanks for the warning.

I'm going out the door in about 10 minutes to purchase a brand new copy of Windows XP Pro. Now I won't have any of those problems you've listed anymore.

Whew. Thanks.

I guess if you want to call "unsecure, flaky, crashing"
some kind of list, i guess ya can.
Facts are facts. The OS is old and out of date. It was never as secure system.
Granted it was all we had. But thats been a dead issue for 2 years
XP isnt perfect and neither will Vista be perfect
BUT
XP is one hell of an improvement over 98/me

Also you need to understand that while 98 might be just ok for a private citezen desktop at home, its frankly nothing more then problematic in a buisness desktop enviroment

**Kedrin Milborn** · June 19th, 2006, 12:50 PM

Originally Posted by Luxman

Here is the link to the official page.

What this means of course is that you have until that date to run Windows Update on your box and get yourself fully patched with all of the necessary security updates.

Make sure you do this if you haven't already. Remember, It's free.

Actualy it means you can still get the current updates. That only no new updates will be provided. Newly found security holes and code errors will not be fixed. You can still go to windows update and get all the old patches for windows 95 and windows nt. the same will be true for windows 98 and ME.
Oddly enough i just updated a 95 and NT machine on windows upate yesterday of cource the fixes are several years old but still slight improvements on the base load.

I currently agree with Ferrit on this. Windows xp is much more secure than 98. You also cant expect a company to support a product forever.

Windows 98 has always been known as a flakey operating system expecaly if you like running cheaper hardware. Microsoft is trying to move away saying this will run on your 233 mhz system. Windows xp was officaly realsed in 2001 and is already 6 years old windows 98 is nearly 10 years old now i really think its time to upgrade

**Ferrit** · June 19th, 2006, 12:58 PM

Kedrin is right in fact
You can still download windows 3.11 patches through technet if
you care to search
3.11's tcpip stack is there and so is the y2k update.

**3fingersalute** · June 19th, 2006, 01:25 PM

One of my personal customers is a small car lot/service center that still runs the win98 boxes they bought with their software package over 8 years ago.

The owner is one helluva tightwad who won't spend money on anything. About a year ago, they ran a promo where the first 50 customers to buy a car received a free Dell computer system with the purchase (they bought 50 of those $399 systems from Dell). Anyhow, they talked him into letting them keep 1 to replace the office manager's machine, and then they snuck 2 more without him knowing about it, and that's the only reason they have any machines running XP at all.

Anyhow, I'm going to type up a nice little letter linking to this article, and informing them that they will now be even more so at a security risk, don't know if it will help or not?

**Ferrit** · June 19th, 2006, 02:20 PM

Granted 3finger that there are plenty of these situations around.
I recently updated a house moving company because of Win98 locking up all the time and contstantly having to reboot the machines. Now the hardware wasnt bad BX motherboards and P-2 450's with 256 ram. They run no unusual software cept internet,email and office programs but it was still causeing about 5 to 7 reboots a day.
I upgraded all of the systems and put in windows XP and since then they have basically no reboots per day and that means productivity is way up

**musicman7722** · June 19th, 2006, 02:42 PM

Its about time .. Chris P.

**slgrieb** · June 19th, 2006, 05:23 PM

Businesses in particular need to understand that it is much cheaper to keep your hardware and software realtively current than to get in situations where they are forced to update because they have to replace a dead PC only to find that their old software won't run, or print, or whatever under their new OS. So they update their software, ONLY to find the new version can't read the old files! So they are in line for some expensive and time-consuming conversions.

Of course, if this is your typical cheapskate, most of his software is bootlegged, he doesn't have the distribution disks, can't qualify for upgrade pricing, etc. All this can get amazingly expensive very fast.

And, yes, Luxman, W98 sucks in many critical areas; not just security. It has an unreliable file system, rotten memory management, etc. Of course, I know people still running DOS.