[NEWS] - Farewell Win98

[CougTek]

Via_Patrino writes "According to Microsoft on January 16, MS Windows 98 and 98se will end Extended Support Phase, that means they'll became obsolete and assisted support will no longer be available from Microsoft, affecting about 27% of the Internet users. That means even if 98 is working well for your needs (and especially computer specifications) and you want to pay for support (because that might cost less than switching hardware) you can't, because who will be able to patch eventual new bugs (security related or not) besides Microsoft?

I don't think many among our membership still use this old operating system, but many of our customers surely do. Warning the concerned folks that it's their last chance to update their system might be a good idea.

News source

 

[blakerwry]

I run win98(se) on my laptop. win2k is slow and sucks the battery life even worse than win98. I'm sure DOS would be great....

That reminds me... since winME came with a new version of DOS, is DOS still supported?

 

[Mercutio]

Probably not. Remember that Microsoft took almost all access to DOS out of ME (e.g. fdisk doesn't work, even though there's an fdisk binary as part of the OS).

command.com will probably never die, though.

 

[Fushigi]

My wife's PC is 98. I dread re-installing everything to move her to 2K or XP so I'll probably just stick with it and make sure her AV & firewalls stay current.

Since she has no outstanding problems, I think the real 'forced upgrade' will occur when she wants an app that doesn't support 98.

Of course, in a business climate, this is not the case. We've been migrating to XP at work. Upgrading/replacing hardware as needed.

 

[Mercutio]

What about the next show-stopping IE bug? What to do about that?

 

[Tannin]

Still using 98 in the face of the expense, complexity and bloat of XP is a cost-effective, practical way to operate a computer.

Still using IE in the face of the clear-cut and decisive superiority of other browsers is a confession of technical incompetence.

 

[ddrueding]

Still using 98 in the face of the expense, complexity and bloat of XP is a cost-effective, practical way to operate a computer.

Still using IE in the face of the clear-cut and decisive superiority of other browsers is a confession of technical incompetence.

I would have taken offense to that, until I switched to Firebird about 3 weeks ago

 

[CityK]

Firebird 0.8 should be out any day now.

 

[Will Rickards WT]

Firebird 0.8 should be out any day now.

It has been delayed by a couple weeks.
See ben's post here.

 

[CityK]

Darn.

Oh well, but thanks for the info update/link Will.

 

[SteveC]

Hopefully, now they'll fix that nasty installer bug before 0.8 is released.

 

[CityK]

Lives to see another day