98 Guy, 2016-03-06 15:17 »
It's funny reading the OP and his history of using win-98. I too had started a tech partnership back in the early 90's (when win 3.11 for workgroups was current) and our first servers were nt 4. By the early 2000's everyone had win-98se except for the software developers (who had win-2k). As of today, my office computer, the office admin's computer, and our production computers are still running win-98 on desktop PC's that were built and cloned back in 2004 (Intel 865-based Soyo boards - and yes we've replaced the capacitors on them!). Our sales people run win-7, 2/3 of our developers have win-7 as their main OS, the other 1/3 use XP (with POS-2009 hack). Our contact managment software is Janna Contact '99 (JC) , and our accounting software is AccPac - a really old (and expensive) version which last had updates in 2000 or 2001 (so we're getting our money's worth out of it!). Accpac uses sql database, and JC has some sort of MS access data base format. And yes, we're still running our two NT-4 servers today! One for our website (IIS4) and the other for our mail server (Post.Office, circa 1999) and JC and Accpac. Our continued use of Win-98 on half our computers, our continued use of NT4 and our accounting and CRM software is no secret around here.
Back during the years 2000 through 2005 we had a dedicated block of 64 IP addresses, and NO nat-routing or firewall. So each PC had direct access to the internet. None of our win-98 machines were ever infected with anything during that time, but a few of our win-2k machines got some worms and one of our NT4 servers somehow had a private FTP server running on it. By 2006 our internet connection was behind a nat-router so intrusion or access to internal machines was blocked. I don't think anyone was running XP in our office until some point in 2006.
So the OP can feel good about still running win-98. I am. Just a few months ago I was able to purchase some tickets for air travel using my win-98 machine - and I do some web-banking on it. So there are still some pretty sophisticated or mission-critical web-transactions that you can still do with win-98. Naturally I have KernelEx API helper installed on my win-98 systems.
It's funny reading the OP and his history of using win-98. I too had started a tech partnership back in the early 90's (when win 3.11 for workgroups was current) and our first servers were nt 4. By the early 2000's everyone had win-98se except for the software developers (who had win-2k). As of today, my office computer, the office admin's computer, and our production computers are still running win-98 on desktop PC's that were built and cloned back in 2004 (Intel 865-based Soyo boards - and yes we've replaced the capacitors on them!). Our sales people run win-7, 2/3 of our developers have win-7 as their main OS, the other 1/3 use XP (with POS-2009 hack). Our contact managment software is Janna Contact '99 (JC) , and our accounting software is AccPac - a really old (and expensive) version which last had updates in 2000 or 2001 (so we're getting our money's worth out of it!). Accpac uses sql database, and JC has some sort of MS access data base format. And yes, we're still running our two NT-4 servers today! One for our website (IIS4) and the other for our mail server (Post.Office, circa 1999) and JC and Accpac. Our continued use of Win-98 on half our computers, our continued use of NT4 and our accounting and CRM software is no secret around here.
Back during the years 2000 through 2005 we had a dedicated block of 64 IP addresses, and NO nat-routing or firewall. So each PC had direct access to the internet. None of our win-98 machines were ever infected with anything during that time, but a few of our win-2k machines got some worms and one of our NT4 servers somehow had a private FTP server running on it. By 2006 our internet connection was behind a nat-router so intrusion or access to internal machines was blocked. I don't think anyone was running XP in our office until some point in 2006.
So the OP can feel good about still running win-98. I am. Just a few months ago I was able to purchase some tickets for air travel using my win-98 machine - and I do some web-banking on it. So there are still some pretty sophisticated or mission-critical web-transactions that you can still do with win-98. Naturally I have KernelEx API helper installed on my win-98 systems.