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Home Guy

wrote:

Last time I checked, video drivers are considered part of and ship
with the OS, at least today.

Hardware drivers (video, chipset, etc) are written by the manufacturers
of those components. They are made available to Microsoft for
incorporation into the distribution CD's that Windows comes on.

Drivers are updated all the time, especially for video cards, and the
best drivers for most things are almost always obtained from the
manufacturer's website, not from the Windows installation CD.

Now if you're talking laptops or netbooks, that's a slightly different
story, as those hardware components are custom-integrated into the final
product and there may never be driver updates created for those hardware
components. When it comes to desktop PC's, unless you have a "boutique"
computer (HP, Compaq, Dell) then most likely there are better versions
of various hardware drivers available on the net vs the ones that
shipped with the computer originally or that come on the Windows CD.

Windows 98 was plagued by buggy AGP video card drivers and even the AGP
bus itself was still being improved (from an electrical / signalling
POV) back during the time when win-98 was introduced and used (1998 -
2002). Video cards and drivers were significantly better and more
reliable in 2002 than they were in 1998.

The video drivers I'm using on the PC I'm writing this on were
shipped as part of Windows XP. Upon installation, the OS
installer detects the hardware and installs the appropriate
driver. That's one of the benefits of XP and more modern OS's.

Windows 98 was no different. The win-98 CD comes with hundreds of
drivers for all sorts of hardware devices from dozens of manufacturers,
and hundreds if not thousands more win-98 drivers are available on the
web for new devices that didn't exist back in 1998/1999.

It was only during 2006 that drivers for new hardware products stopped
being written for windows 98.

As for the quality of computers in 2000, it's rather strange that
if hardware were the problem, those same computers did not crash
when running NT.

NT did crash. But more to the point - NT systems were usually given the
luxury of more installed RAM. Any OS becomes unstable when given a
small amount of memory, and Win-98 systems at the time were severely
handicapped because they usually had a pathetic 8 to 32 mb of installed
RAM.

Another thing is that when a program crashes under NT, it doesn't take
the OS with it. But Win-9x doesn't have the same separation of OS and
App memory space, so a badly behaving program can crash a win-9x
computer. You might think this is a good thing, but it's largely
irrelavent, because you probably won't be running a badly-behaved App
for very long regardless what OS you use.

XP was the emperor with no clothes. It was a disaster for
the first 4 years of it's life.

Strange because I used it on several PCs from the time of
it's first release and I experienced no such disasters.

XP was extremely well known as being easily exploitable back during 2002
through 2004, and slightly less exploitable in 2005 - 2006. Ask anyone
who was in IT during those years.

It was an immediate improvement.

You noticed an improvement because XP most likely came installed on a
new computer, and the specs of that new computer were likely much better
than the specs of of the win-98 computer that it replaced.

The years 1998 through 2003 saw a drastic improvement in the capability,
performance, stability and reliability of computer hardware
(motherboard, hard drives, video cards, RAM). You can't compare win-98
with XP without taking that into account.

We live with spam today because of all the home systems that
used XP from 2002 through 2006 that got infected with backdoor
trojans that turned them into botnets.
But everyone conveinently forgets XP's history in that
regard.

Nonsense. The only reason more spam originates from XP, Vista,
or Win 7 systems is because there are so many more of them out
there

There were major flaws in XP back in 2002 through 2006 that made them
easy targets for remote access and control by hackers. Those flaws
relate to Microsoft's design goals that XP was first and formost a
business-level operating system and had lots of extra "stuff" (services)
turned on that were completely unnecessary for home users. Windows 98
either did not have those services or they were not turned on by default
as they were with XP, and because of code differences the win-98
versions either did not have any vulnerabilities or if they did, they
were not exploitable in a reliable and consistent way as they were with
XP.

There were plenty of Win-98 computers on the internet during 1998
through 2002, but hardly any of them were exploited because they simply
weren't vulnerable, and many win-98 computers continued to be used into
2003 and 2004. When you read detailed reports and white-papers
regarding trojans and botnets, you find that they were overwhelmingly
composed of XP machines back in 2003 through 2005, even though there
were still a significant number of win-98 machines in use at the time.

Why would any hacker or virus developer waste their time
screwing around writing for Win98 in 2006, when it was
basicly extinct?

Hackers were always looking for vulnerabilities in all OS's in use at
any given time. The truth is that there were hardly any vulnerabilities
in win-98. Ever.

Tell us what marvel of security software you're using that offers
realtime protection from viruses and malware on Win98.

Usually - nothing.

The main AV product that I used on my home and company PC's is/was
Norton AntiVirus 2002 (and note: NAV did not become bloatware until
version 2003 and later). NAV 2002 can still be updated with current
virus scan engine and definition files using Symantec's "intellgent
updater" package - but Symantec doesn't want you to know that.

But I mostly don't bother to update the definitions on the 15 or so
win-98 computers that I own or manage because they quite simply have
never gotten exposed to any malware in the past 7 or so years.

And it's funny when I'm surfing a website and I get the fake-AV popup
that wants me to download some software (which I do just to sample it
and send it to virustotal.com) or maybe some rogue web-page will trigger
my browser to download a malicious pdf file which will cause Acrobat
Reader 6 to start up - and display a harmless error message - because
acrobat reader 6 is not vulnerable to any of the various pdf exploits
that have been discovered in the past few years.

Every once in a while I'll take the hard drive from my win-98 systems
and slave them to an isolated XP system running several different AV
software and scan the drives for malware. NONE is ever found.

From an IT management point of view, it has been an absolute pleasure to
own and operate about a dozen windows-98 systems in a corporate / small
business environment for the past 10 years. From payroll to accounting
to production to manufacturing to networking, win-98 works well in those
rolls with the software we have, and I spend zero time having to worry
or deal with security or malware from the internet. It's also been a
very cost-effective solution not "upgrading" to what-ever Microsoft says
is the required OS to use. Anyone dancing to Microsoft's tune is indeed
a fool.