On Dec 4, 3:43*pm, Home Guy wrote:
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.

After certification and approval by Microsoft to ensure that they work
with
the OS. Ifa the drivers for the common video chips included in WinXP,
7, etc
doesn't work, won't install, etc, you call Microsoft. With Win98 you
have
old drivers and God knows who you call today. I doubt anyone is
writing
Win98 drivers for new hardware today.




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.

And most people, like me, are using the standard ones. I have a four
monitor Appian graphics card running on XP. Not even your typical
video card. The standared XP install recognized it, installed the
driver
and it works perfectly.



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. *

There isn't anything special about notebook computers. The hardware
components
that drive the I/O, eg video/graphics chips are integrated into chips
on the motherboard. The
exact same thing is done with the computers you buy at any of the
desktop
manufacturers. They usually have basic video/graphics integrated on
the motherboard
because most of the chipsets sold by Intel, AMD have those built-in
and it gives them
a cost effective way of offering video/graphics. If you want to, you
can choose to disable
those and use an add-in card for higher performance. Same thing
with disk. The disk interface has
been part of the desktop motherboard for a decade, because it too is
intergrated into those
chipsets, just like for notebooks.




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.

You're stuck in Win98 world. Today those common, mainstream PCs come
with drivers that are perfectly fine, stable and only a small minority
of people
are seeking out drivers different than what comes with the PC. That
mode
exists primarily with geeks and gamers, who want to screw around with
things
and try to get some better performance. I don;t know who would
consider HP
or Dell a boutique company. I can get a mid-range PC with 6GB RAM,
650MB
disk, Win 7, MSFT Office, Norton Internet Security, etc from HP for
$425 including
shipping. What makes that "boutique". BTW, Compaq hasn't existed
for years.
It was bought by HP.



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. *

Uh huh. And those better drivers are shipped by Microsoft as part of
XP and later
OS's. Consequently, those OS's are more likely to install and work
without blue
screens of death. I think most people would say that makes XP a
better OS.




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.

Win98 was different. You just said:

"Windows 98 was plagued by buggy AGP video card drivers " Today Win7
ship with drivers that are stable and not buggy.



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.

Oh my God. You can't seriously belive this. WinXP and subsequent
OSs
took full advantage of the hardware protection built into the Intel
architecture. There
is physical hardware present specifically to prevent one app from
crashing another
ap or the OS. For example, using that hardware, the OS limits the
memory space
application A can reach. It can try to do a direct memory write to
another memory
region, eg one used by the OS, and the HARDWARE blocks it and triggers
an
exception. It's precisely those kinds of improvements that are in XP
and later
OS's that make them stable. Win98 was a kludge from the days of the
original
8088 based PC, with the OS being a legacy 16 bit implentation with
some 32 bit
capability added on. Consequently it made minimal use of the features
of the hardware
that provided memory management and protection. With XP, the home had
a true 32 bit
OS that fitted perfectly with the memory management and protection
hardware of the
Intel architecture.

With Win98 I regularly had one bad behaving app lock up the whole
system. With
XP and later, that's been reduced dramatically. It still does happen
once in a while.
I think most people share that experience.





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.

And Win98 besides being an unstable piece of crap, had all those
security
vulnerabilities and more. Just because more viruses and malware have
evolved
over time doesn't mean that earlier OS's were better. Following that
logic, we
should all still be using MS-DOS because the original IBM PC had no
viruses,
at least for a while.




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.

Wrong. You can take Win98 and run it on a brand new computer today and
it
would have the same problems because it's a kludge 16bit/32 bit
patched together
OS. But that ain;t very likely to happen, because no one is writing
drivers for it
today. You want to stay stuck in time 5+ years ago forever?



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. *

Been, there, done that. What I've seen is a constant improvement
over time in
both hardware and software. One of those was kissing Win98 goodbye.




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.

Hopefully that's because that system is not connected to the internet.
More likely it's because no security software is available to offer
real-
time protection for Win98.





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.

That must mean that you don;t have it connected to the internet,
otherwise
they would clearly be exposed. But being an antique, there are less
viruses to worry
about because just like with apps, no one is writing new ones. But
I'd bet someone
is occasionally recirculating old ones.





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.

I'm sure trying to use Win98 on the web today you get all sorts of
error messages.





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.

That's a real convenient process and finds them only after they've
infected the
system.




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.

Yeah, like I said, that evil corporation called Microsoft has really
scammed me.
They got maybe $50 from me in 2001 when I bought a PC with XP. And
recently
they got a similar amount or maybe $75when I bought a new PC that has
Win 7
and Microsoft Office on it. During that decade I got free updates.
They really
took advantage of me. All those developers that stopped writing
anything for
Win98 6 or more years ago must be fools too.

Clearly you're one of the Microsoft hating loons, so biased you can't
see the forest
for the trees.