Yes, I still primarily use win-98 on two systems, one of which (the one >>I'm posting this from) has 2 gb of ram and several 1TB sata hard drives.
I seem to remember that win 98 could only address up to 64MB
of RAM. That was one of the reasons I switched to XP in 2006 or so.
But in terms of internet security and exposing a system to remote
exploit code, the NT line fell far short of being as invulnerable to
such exploit paths as 9x/me was, and the Secunia numbers posted above
are perfect examples of that.
Nevertheless, I'm still going to use XP. Have not used a
resident AV for more or less 5 years now.
A very large number of softwares no longer work on 98.
Windows 98 se, out of the box, can handle 512 mb of ram. In fact,
when installing 98se unless you modify some of the installation
files the system must not have more than 512 mb of ram. Once
installed, and some vcache settings are changed, the hard upper
limit in terms of installed ram is something like 1.195 mb of ram
(something that can be achieved with creative use of a ram drive
that consumes some system ram to limit what is "visible" to
win-98). Most situations involving a Pentium-4 based motherboard
(socket 478 or 775) should have no problems running win-98 with 1
gb of installed ram and that is indeed very useful compared to the
more anemic 64 - 256 mb amounts of ram that most people think is
suitable for win-98.
Quite a while ago a trivial hack was discovered to VMM32.VXD and
VMM.VXD files that allows win-98 to see and use up to at least 3
and maybe all 4 gb of installed ram. Above 2 gb you might have
problems with some motherboards and VGA display ram (something
about the amount of ram on the video card and/or the bios video
apperture size setting).
It would have been very common back in 2005 - 2007 time-frame to
see win-98 installed on a (at the time) new or current motherboard
with at least 512 mb of ram.
And likewise I have not used an AV program on my win-98 systems
since probably 2008.
A surprisingly large assortment of older versions of current
software runs just fine on win-98, aided by a kernel compatibility
layer known as "KernelEx" that was developed maybe 10 years ago
and contines to be enhanced today. And there is a similar project
for XP I believe.
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