Win98 Spt Extended Thru 30 June 2006

[David]

I am still to find a Linux distro that I like and that has support for all
my hardwares...
(winmodem, Serial ATA RAID controller, scanner, printer)

The rest should not be too much of a problem but that winmodem is
nasty. Once again M$ is trying to dictate to the user so that it can
maintain its monopoly.

 

[Terry Russell]

I recently purchased a couple of new low end machines built by a local
guy for $200 each. He sells them with either Win 98 SE or Win 2K Pro
installed and updated ... with a three month hardware gaurantee. These
are 1.6 ghz AMD cpu machines with 256 meg RAM and 60 gig drives.

I bought them because my wife's 900 mhz Hp Pavilion with Win ME had
started horizontal line streaking. I had eliminated the monitor and
Windows drivers, and discovered to my dismay that there is no video
board. The video hardware is on the motherboard. It didn't occur to
me to plug in a video board to see if the machine would accept it,
until this same fellow I bought the new machines from suggested I
try that. Sure enough, a spare video board I had worked fine.

Most of the cheaper motherboards , those department store things,
have onboard video chips and use system RAM as video memory,
you can usually substitute an AGP or PCI card as primary video.
Add more PCI cards with monitor on each and the desktop
spans them all ( w98 and later)

So now our super Hp Pavilion is back up in service for her. I had only
payed $150 for it two or three years ago from a person having
trouble with it who just wanted to get rid of it. The problems were
just software, and it's been solid as a rock since I fixed it up.

It's fun for me in retirement to do things on a shoestring and pay
very little for my machines. A neighbor is moving, for example, and
sets out her kid's computer for trash pickup. I find that the ink jet
printer works fine and just needs a black cartridge And I get
other spare parts besides.

Undifferentiated computer components go for 80c a kilo at salvage
or try computer auctions.
recently got a colour laser, postscript, network printer at auction
cyan almost empty < 500 pages $350 for a cyan cartridge :-(
but 5000+ pages left on the black
$5. nice for the shed
[ okay there are some jewels and a lot of fools gold ]

P300s $20 each.
And a box of w95 licenses for $10.
A dozen 17 inch monitors, hey 6 actually work okay and 4
are okay as status indicators .. if you don't plan to actually focus on them
for more than a few minutes at a time
$40

Cheap multinode system if you want to do tests or for practise,
or just as gifts to the local aged home/orphanage /other good cause.

$=$AUS

Cheap entertainment and cheap learning, if you have time,
and transport to shift the junk.
Suitable for ages 8 to 80

 

[ms]

Windows 98 and Windows 98 Second Edition support was scheduled to end on
January 16, 2004. The continual evaluation of the Support Lifecycle policy
revealed, however, that customers in the smaller and the emerging markets
needed additional time to upgrade their product. Therefore, Microsoft will
continue to support Windows 98, Windows 98 Second Edition, and Windows Me
through June 30, 2006. http://support.microsoft.com/gp/lifean1

W98SE is for me very stable and reliable. Maybe 1-3 BSOD screens a year,
and since CCleaner does a good job of cleaning caches, maybe even less. And
this is with very few "critical MS security" patches since 1997. Fred Langa
says XP is a big advantage over W98 for stability, but not what I see when
I look on MS newsgroups.

Mike Sa

 

[REM]

ms <[email protected]> wrote:

W98SE is for me very stable and reliable. Maybe 1-3 BSOD screens a year,
and since CCleaner does a good job of cleaning caches, maybe even less. And
this is with very few "critical MS security" patches since 1997. Fred Langa
says XP is a big advantage over W98 for stability, but not what I see when
I look on MS newsgroups.

This is a pretty interesting case where the horse CAN lead the war
wagon. I enjoyed 98SE and did my share of bad mouthing XP before I got
it. With serious hardware XP rocks... but so did 98SE when I had my
old system.

As long as large numbers of people and businesses, both large and
small, cling to 98 Microsoft had best keep it patched and secured!
Otherwise it is shooting itself in the foot.

The war wagon has gotten its way pretty much until now and was able to
lead the horse wherever it wanted. Most people were willing to give up
on 95 and migrate on to 98, ME, or XP. Then MS was able to declare 95
dead in the "product cycle," and fully abandon support. I don't think
that's going to ring true with 98 though.

It will be curious to watch. Who really calls the shots? The company
that writes Windows? Or the multitude of people who pay for, install,
and use it?

 

[mike ring]

The rest should not be too much of a problem but that winmodem is
nasty. Once again M$ is trying to dictate to the user so that it can
maintain its monopoly.

I got a proper modem for linux - it does work, though often takes a great
deal of kicking into life......

But it hasn't really helped; I've never solved how to download and install
anything, and usually the d/ls are huge.

mike

 

[Andy Axnot]

Yhat's one major problem - I'm on dialup and can't download hundreds of
megs.

You may want to try www.linuxcd.org which sells burned CDRs of Linux
distros and other non-copyrighted things. Cost is low, less than $2 US
per disk, less than $2 shipping (by mail). I have never used them, but I
understand they're OK. There are other companies as well.

And I'd have no chance on a text based jobby - I've tried.

Mepis is KDE based and looks and works a lot like Windows, kinda. Well,
sorta

In fact, a lot of old time Linux nerds are very upset with distros like
Mepis and windows managers like KDE because they are making Linux
accessible to us non-Klingons

And the ones that have installed are so grindingly slow to try to tweak;
alright that's prolly my problem as I don't know how to slim them.

But each call of the control panel and attempt to tweak takes forever,
life's too short.

And I must have good midi - noteworthy, a very old Cakewalk express and
timidity++ to make waves (hem).

Rosegarden won't work for me, and I can only find the player version of
Timidity.

Sorry, this is all Greek to me. I just run a desktop-centric Linux
distro and click on pretty icons to surf the internet or listen to music
or burn CDs or whatever. Let me admit here that these distros are not
exactly lean and mean, they have as much, or more, eye candy as Windows
and will not run well on older or resource-poor computers.

I can't tell you anything about midi on Linux (or on Windows, for that
matter

No point in whining, linux buffs only listen in Klingon ;-)

I've come across some of those guys.

 

[Howard Schwartz]

W98SE is for me very stable and reliable. Maybe 1-3 BSOD screens a
year, and since CCleaner does a good job of cleaning caches, maybe
even less. And this is with very few "critical MS security" patches
since 1997. Fred Langa says XP is a big advantage over W98 for
stability, but not what I see when I look on MS newsgroups.

And let us not forget the much maligned, DOS, that is present in
win 9x as a decent, single user, task sharing, 32-bit, console or
command line OS. Starting with win 2K no decent console available.
With dos and fat-32 and grinding one's teeth as one partitions
the disk a bit -- one has a large and good set of recovery tools
available, free, should all or part of windows fail. After 9x,
not so.

Most of the useful, from a user's view, aspects of the unix
command line have been ported to dos by GNU along with a host
of other free dos utilities, and versions of dos.

It will be hard for linus programs to keep pace with the
variety of userful freeware programs for windows, due to
the mass of the latter.

The cycle of changing formats and versions for windows will
be endless, for profit reasons. Perhaps - ah but a dream,
the set of useful functions home users want for a computer
will stabalize (e.g., a word processor, a spreadsheet, etc.),
and they will stop caring about the infinite supply of eye
candy being manufactured each years.

At that point. linus could reliably supply such a set, although
unix was originally build for larger computers, and multi-users,
and programmers -- and will carry a lots of unnecessary extra
weight in that regard for a long time to come.

 

[Wishmaster]

"mike ring" <[email protected]> escreveu na mensagem

I got a proper modem for linux - it does work, though often takes a great
deal of kicking into life......

I have an external modem here, but no serial port, and the only real modem I
have here is ISA (ancient 33.6k modem).

 

[David]

I got a proper modem for linux - it does work, though often takes a great
deal of kicking into life......

But it hasn't really helped; I've never solved how to download and install
anything, and usually the d/ls are huge.

mike

I must admit that most of my Linux stuff comes from magazine CD/DVDs.
Saves spending hours online and reduces the cost considerably. In
Britain you have a magazine called Linux Format which is excellent in
terms of cover CDs, at least it used to be, I haven't seen a copy for
about eighteen months here in Australia. We have a magazine called APC
(Australian Personal Computer) which normally has an ISO or three on
the cover DVD each month. Last one was Solaris but I haven't installed
that yet.

 

[mike ring]

I must admit that most of my Linux stuff comes from magazine CD/DVDs.
Saves spending hours online and reduces the cost considerably. In
Britain you have a magazine called Linux Format which is excellent in
terms of cover CDs, at least it used to be,

I've had stuff off that, Mandrake 10.1, Mandriva, Fedora core 1; and
Mandrake 10, Mandrake Core 2 off linux Magazine.

Those are the ones I haven't chucked because they sort of worked.... badly,
(there's been many others, ubuntu, slackware, debian, Xanth something), and
I've got this sort of fantrasy that a white knight may one day show me how
to work them.

But all I get is bad-tempered klingon speaking anoraks projecting their
insecurities on me. (psychobabble, yet!).

It's all cost a fortune in money and is hellish depressing in time.

But I hate to be beaten, but there comes a time to admit defeat.

mike

 

[Wishmaster]

Sorry, this is all Greek to me. I just run a desktop-centric Linux
distro and click on pretty icons to surf the internet or listen to music
or burn CDs or whatever. Let me admit here that these distros are not
exactly lean and mean, they have as much, or more, eye candy as Windows
and will not run well on older or resource-poor computers.

My problem is that I use highly specific applications, like CAD tools, that
don't work with WINE. Most applications I use everyday are made by software
developers that don't exist anymore

And I'm also using a SLOW dial-up connection, it would take weeks - if not
months - to download a full Linux distro.

[]s
--
[]s Renan (aka Wishmaster) - Canoas, RS, Brazil
"Q: What is the best music for playing while using Linux?
A: dd if=/dev/urandom of=/dev/dsp "

np: After Forever - Inimical Chimera

 

[Richard Steven Hack]

At that point. linus could reliably supply such a set, although
unix was originally build for larger computers, and multi-users,
and programmers -- and will carry a lots of unnecessary extra
weight in that regard for a long time to come.

Nonsense. Linux can be stripped down to run on a 486. Try that with any
version of Windows since 3.1.

Linux runs on PDAs, for Christ's sakes.

It pains me to hear people talk about Linux who have no clue how many
different variations there are of it.

Anybody who wants to run DOS in the 21st Century has no clue how to use a
computer in the first place.

DOS was a joke OS. Any version of Windows up to the current Windows 2003
Server is a joke due to complexity. Longhorn will be an utter disaster for
Microsoft as its reliability and security will be a joke due to even more
complexity. Linux is getting more complex, but that depends entirely on
your distro and kernel.

 

[Richard Steven Hack]

I've had stuff off that, Mandrake 10.1, Mandriva, Fedora core 1; and
Mandrake 10, Mandrake Core 2 off linux Magazine.

Those are the ones I haven't chucked because they sort of worked....
badly, (there's been many others, ubuntu, slackware, debian, Xanth
something), and I've got this sort of fantrasy that a white knight may
one day show me how to work them.

I wouldn't count it. White knights tend to be picky who they save.

But all I get is bad-tempered klingon speaking anoraks projecting
their insecurities on me. (psychobabble, yet!).

Attitude counts when asking questions.

It's all cost a fortune in money and is hellish depressing in time.
But I hate to be beaten, but there comes a time to admit defeat.

There are some people who simply aren't meant to use computers. You may
be one of them.

I installed Mandrake 10.1 recently to replace my aging Red Hat 7.3 and
guess what - it just works. Anybody who can't get a modern Linux distro
to work is doing something seriously wrong.

 

[mike ring]

I wouldn't count it. White knights tend to be picky who they save.

You don't know much about white knights, do you, or basic generosity of
spirit? Wotcha doing here?

Attitude counts when asking questions.

Not so much as in refusing to give answers, or understanding - like the
IT personnel when I worked,

There are some people who simply aren't meant to use computers. You may
be one of them.

Didn't you read this bit in my post......??

"But all I get is bad-tempered klingon speaking anoraks projecting their
insecurities on me."

Anybody who can't get a modern Linux distro to work is doing something
seriously wrong.

There seem to be quite a lot of us

mike

 

[Robin T Cox]

Or maybe a linux that works/Ican work.

(I musta tried about 10 and spent a hundred quid. Latest failure ubuntu; 2
count them two versions)

But 98SE soldiers on brilliantly )

mike

A good choice would be MEPISLite, for which a free pre-release version
is available. See:

http://www.mepis.org/node/7583

MEPISLite is an entry level version of desktop MEPIS designed for home
users. It has been used successfully with as little as a 2 GB hard drive
and a Pentium 2 processor with 128MB of RAM. MEPISLite preinstalls a
full complement of software including KOffice, Kontact, and Firefox.