MS Windows 98 Broken? But, Usable!
While reading through Slashdot (with the new look), I bumped into this nicely written little article on Microsoft pulling the plug on MS Windows 98, SE and ME. This is earlier than its July 2006 support end of life date. This quotation was taken from the Microsoft Technet Blog describing the reason why the current MS06-015 security fix does not cover MS Windows 98 and ME:
… after extensive investigation, we’ve found that it’s not feasible to make the extensive changes necessary to Windows Explorer on these older versions of Windows to eliminate the vulnerability.
This is because during the development of Windows 2000, we made significant enhancements to the underlying architecture of Windows Explorer. The Windows Explorer architecture on these older versions of Windows is much less robust than the more recent Windows architectures.
Finally, after years of denial, Microsoft admits the architecture for the older generation of MS Windows is broken. Years from now, they will probably say the same thing about the current generation of MS Windows. This is what they call evolution: “Works Better. Plays Better.”
But, seriously, MS Windows 98 is a pretty stable operating system. Since, it has been out of the limelight for quite sometime, it has been spared the current onslaught of worms and others forms of malware on the Internet. It is also a nice operating system for running on old computers. Just don’t expect to run any publishable services on the Internet. It is also still pretty useful as a general purpose desktop computer.
Here are some tips for getting a still useful MS Windows 98, SE or ME box:
- Install on Ancient Hardware. Do a base installation of MS Windows 98 on your machine. Try to get as many driver disks from the hardware vendor as possible. It is difficult to install MS Windows 98 on newer machines due to driver problems. This is especially true when the drivers cause chicken and egg problems. “You can’t load MS Windows because it lacks a driver but since it can’t load you can’t install the driver” type of problems. Try to use MS Windows ME if possible. This might save you some of the driver installation headaches.
- Put the MS Windows boxen behind a firewall. It might not be sufficient to trust host-based firewalls on these operating systems. So, I suggest you put a hardware firewall in front of them. It should be configured only to allow outbound and related connections. Even outbound connections must be limited to necessary services only.
- Avoid P2P Software. Like the plague, stay away from this. P2P software can be used as vectors for exploits. Just say no.
- Disable Internet Explorer. MS IE has a number of vulnerabilities that can still be exploited. This is especially true for mid-generation MS IE versions that still run on MS Windows 98 and ME. You might want to try using Mozilla Firefox instead and just hope that the Mozilla foundation continues to support MS Windows 98, SE and ME. Also educate users not to visit sites of dubious nature. These are the sites that carry web-based trojans.
- Do the same thing for MS Outlook and Outlook Express. Use Mozilla thunderbird. However, as a word of warning, try to keep your mailboxes small as Mozilla Thunderbird is known for being a CPU and memory hog when your mailboxes get larger. Do offline archiving once in a while to avoid this. Try to educate users on openning emails of dubious nature. These carry trojans too.
- Use MS Office 97. I have determined that this is the version of MS Office that fullfills 99% percent of my office productivity needs (and I am considered a power user). All the later versions of MS Office has nicer features, but, this version would suffice for more than most. I would have liked to recommend OpenOffice.org but that is also another CPU and memory hog.
- Install Lean Anti-Virus Software. I would consider this on a case to case basis. Anti-virus software tend to be resources hogs. This especially for newer versions of commercial anti-virus software. You also might want to consider using the open source ClamWin Anti-virus. However, it is not as featureful as most commercial versions. It does not come with an on-access scanner. So, users are required to schedule or manually scan systems. However, it does come with an MS Outlook and Mozilla Firefox plugin for access scanning. But, at least, it still has MS Windows 98 support. You can use a separate ClamAV product called ClamMail to scan email in Mozilla Thunderbird.
With these little tips, you can extend the life of your MS Windows 98, SE or ME computers for a few more years. Maybe until hardware and software vendors decide to totally drop support for it. If these computers really loose the ability to run software directly on them then you can convert them to LTSP terminals.
