Written before seeing advice from SD posted above.
No, you won't find any current AV products for 9x. I still have AVG 7.5.557 running (537 days out of date) and it has detected Word macro viruses (confirmed by Kaspersky) in documents sent from China but I am not sure that it is worth the candle. PC Tools dropped 9x support for Spyware Doctor a few months ago.
The machine I am typing this on:
Windows 98 SE 4.10.2222 A
Space used by 98SE on drive C = 2.7GB (a fully loaded install which has been running for over 6 years ... which seems to confirm P. Pilcher's experiences with Windows 95 and supports his comments re current 9x threat levels).
Internet Explorer 6 SP1 6.0.2800.1106IS
IE6 security roll-up: Q916281
Firefox 2.0.0.20 (last available release for 9x)
Opera 10.62 (I have not tried the latest versions but would expect them to work OK)
Java jre-1_5_0_14-windows-i586-p-s.exe
Adobe Reader 6.0.5
Adobe Flash: 9.0.246.0 (Adobe KB406791), digital signatures 19th July 2009
ZoneAlarm (free firewall only) 6.1.744.001, 16th March 2006, set to the maximum levels available in the free edition.
I had to export some security certificates (VeriSign Class3) from Firefox 3 and import into Firefox 2 to resolve an error, the nature of which I have now helpfully forgotten.
ZoneAlarm stopped working at one point (an expired certificate problem???) and it was necessary to reinstall it but there was a catch ... the uninstaller wouldn't work either. The solution was to move the system clock back a few months in the BIOS, then uninstall ZA (the uninstaller now worked ... ZA clean uninstall instructions are available elsewhere on this forum), reboot and reset the clock and then finally reinstall ZoneAlarm again. I only saw this problem on some machines and think it was linked to the level of IE6 security updates.
Last recommended NVIDIA driver = 77.72 (later versions had a broken uninstaller); my version is modded (a couple of entries in the Nvagp.inf file) to support 6200A-LE.
My Acronis True Image backup files (on this particular machine) at default compression:
Windows 98SE: 1.6GB
Windows XPSP3: 4.5GB
Mandriva Powerpack 2008: 1.4GB
Mandrake 9: 0.5GB
My 98SE home theatre machines use less than 500MB of space on drive C
Money spent buying Windows 98SE: 50 GBP
Money spent buying Windows XP (various flavours): 1000 GBP
Two words send my quackometer off the scale: *proven* and *pro[fessional]*.
E&OE
IRN
Last edited by In rerum natura; 19th October 2010 at 22:32.