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If you're using a 3rd party firewall for Windows, I would suggest Sygate's old personal firewall (before Symantec bought it.) Get it here. It's reasonably up to date, and works fine with the latest Windows OSes, and it should give you the same amount of control that Kerio does.

i.e. why the hell is someone still using W98? Sorry -- I'm 100% in favor of penguin domination -- but the reason people are still using 98 is -- almost always -- because they're deathly afraid to touch their computers. Linux's (not-very-accurate) reputation as an OS that you have to touch all the time is not gonna cut it here.

You must've not heard of http://www.oldversion.com./ I use version 5.1.3036 myself.

However, what to do with all those businesses (especially low-profit government entities such as schools) with older machines, win98 licenses, and not a lot of money to spend on either hardware or operating systems? To me, it looks this is just another push for those entities towards a linux desktop, not based on any technical details, but due to just plain ol' dollars and cents.

You neglected to mention that it will cost these entities money to learn Linux, as well as teach their clients, et al., to learn it. As someone who supports the above entities pro bono, I can tell you that many of them have zero money to do anything. Their mantra: "if it works, why fix it?" Many Slashdotters forget that not everyone has the technical grasp to use Linux, even if there is a nice GUI helping out. If it's all DOS stuff they're using, I am not going to spend my time trying to slap up DOSbox or DOSemu when what they have is working just fine.

Also, schools may not be allowed to use Linux. I know of several school districts where it's mandated that all computers will run Windows (any version), but nothing else. If it does, it has to be approved through the school district. That can be hellish on anyone, especially when the school board knows little or nothing about Linux save for "it's a hacker's operating system". I've been through that before and quite frankly, they don't care. They want dollars and cents proof that moving to Linux, from what they already have, would be worth it. Sadly enough, most times, the answer is "no" to Linux. I haven't seen any school districts where I've lived adopt Linux. I've seen 'em adopt Macs and XP, but not Linux.

If it ain't broke, don't fix it. Let whatever solution they've been using for years work. I know plenty of people who are still under DOS, multitasking, surfing the Web, doing email, everything they want with nary a problem.

It's the industry to blame for this constant upgrading for people who don't need it. It's the push to sell, sell, sell, money, money, money. Knowledge is true power and when you reveal to people that they don't need to use the latest thing to do what they need to do, it really can open eyes and make minds easier. Yes, I agree, running any operating system on today's Internet without a firewall is crazy.

I'm assuming that most of you out there haven't heard of a website called Old Version (http://www.oldversion.com/). They have a lot of great free software, normally older versions of Windows stuff. They have some good firewalls on there, such as Tiny Personal Firewall, ZoneAlarm and Sygate Personal Firewall. If the person can't afford a hardware firewall, a software firewall is still a good option. I use Tiny Personal Firewall on my laptop and Winamp 2.95 for myself.

Again, the latest ain't the greatest.

People just need to get that through their heads.

I am supporting Win98SE and Mac OS9 for family and friends right now. Win98 kicks the pants of OS9, particularly in application support. I'm not having any driver issues regardless of which hardware base I'm on (since I hand out salvaged hardware, the platform changes every six to eight months. I'm currently on 2 powerMacs and 10 1.8 GHz Celerons - no driver problems).

Myself, I prefer Ubuntu or Slackware. But for end users Win98se is a fine platform that runs Firefox, IE, and hundreds (if not thousands) of games just fine. Wireless works easily on it too.

OS9, though, is a pig (and has severely limited hardware compatibility). I prefer OS7 or OSX personally; they don't crash as often.

You need old Adobe reader, old ZoneAlarm, and a good antivirus for Win98se, but even with an antivirus running full-time Win98se outperforms XP on the same hardware.

And what's really impressive is MS-DOS dentist office management software on a 2 GHz P4. Effectively instantaneous response yields fantastic productivity for the end-user. Backup and database management is lighting-fast, too - reindexing and archiving ten years worth of data (which was a tedious weekly chore on a 16 MHz 386) can be handled nightly in under ten minutes.

They also bought out Sygate Personal Firewall. Fortunately you can still get the old version here.

http://www.oldversion.com/ I'm pretty sure you can snag Winamp 2.x there.

I mostly only use Adobe Acrobat Reader and I've noticed a trend in it to get more and more bloated, and less and less user friendly as the version numbers get higher. It now takes longer to load, annoys me more by asking me to "upgrade" constantly, it wants to install yahoo toolbar with itself, it adds a freaking add banner to itself mostly directing you to yahoo crap.

Acrobat reader really is tending more toward malware program that just happens to be able to read pdf files. I wish the people who decide to make their products step way outside the sane scope of the product would knock it off. Every time they do it I jump ship or "upgrade" to an older version.

The good thing is it's really easy to put a stop to it: http://www.oldversion.com/

I am now happily using 5.0. I think it's the last streamlined non-annoying version. You can actually turn off update checking. (Amazing!) I consider any program that prohibits me from turning off its automatic updates to have a terminal illness. Meaning I will replace it soon with a program that behaves itself.

To get back off the tangent, I could rant about virus scanners all day. About how futile they are and how little they benefit you and - I guess in this case - how much they can actually hurt you, but I've done it before, however, McAfee has a bigger PR department than I do so it's pretty futile.

Speak with your money. Quit buying virus scanners.

I recently installed the only downloadable version of WinAMP on it...

...and it uses almost 80-100MB of RAM while it's running.

Not exactly. Archive.org doesn't store large binary files. I found this out when downloading tools for an obscure processor - they had the smaller tools, but not the larger ones.

Try to download it from archive.org -- http://www.oldversion.com/downloadx/itunes41.exe"> http://web.archive.org/web/20060307125009/http://w ww.oldversion.com/downloadx/itunes41.exe -- it won't work. But, if you strip off the beginning of the URL, you can find out where oldversion.com used to store it -- in /dowloadx/itunes41.exe. It turns out oldversion.com still has it at this location and you can still download it from them.

It's funny this article should come up today. I just built a new computer this week & was looking to keep the same version iTunes I had on my old one. OldVersion.com immediately came to mind - however when I went to their site I found it awfully strange that there isn't ONE, not a single ONE version of iTunes there. Only thing on the itunes page is, "iTunes is currently unavailable." Pretty fishy if you ask me. See for yourself: http://oldversion.com/program.php?n=itunes iTunes-Page

http://download.oldversion.com/itunes42.exe

and if that goes down

http://s65.yousendit.com/d.aspx?id=3SD5GM2DZTLOU0G 897A0LFAY8X

Start the conspiracy theories!

http://www.oldversion.com/program.php?n=itunes
iTunes is currently unavailable.

I think I'm still running 6.0.1 at home on my iBook...

iTunes is highly problematic. Aside from my (now old) Powerbook G4, my family's computers are all older Macs, and they can't all run the latest and greatest version. For instance, my wife uses a 400 MHz iMac, running OS X 10.3.9., and my stepdaughter's 233 MHz iMac is running OS 9.2. We got her an iPod Shuffle for her birthday, and she still can only use it on her Mom's computer. We're going to boost the RAM on the old bondi iMac and upgrade to OS X 10.3.9, but the oldest version of iTunes that her machine will run is 4.7.1, which can't be downloaded from the internet anywhere as far as I can tell. Heck, it's not even available from OldVersion.com :-(

Although I dislike Winamp for it's complexity

v1.82 man, v1.82.

"gimp" is also slang for someone who is crippled or handicapped.

http://www.answers.com/gimp&r=67
The noun gimp has one meaning:
Meaning #1: disability of walking due to crippling of the legs or feet
      Synonyms: lameness, limping, gimpiness, gameness, claudication

Could it be??

Personally, I've found gimp to be pretty limited. Sure, it can do a few neat things but for the largest part, it's pretty darn limited.
Way back when when I was using M$ winders I had taken a liking to Paintshop Pro.
As they upgraded through numerous revisions I found that out of all of them, I liked the 6.x version the best. I don't know what version they are up to now but sometime back I tried to get 8.x (I think) working under WINE and had no luck.
I then played with it on a winders box and decided that I didn't like the newer version.

I tried to find the 6.x on http://www.oldversion.com but no luck.

As for photoshop, I never cared too much for it, the price is insanely high and it's massive overkill and overly complicated for the basic stuff I play with on occassion.

Nice. I noticed that Symantec acquired Sygate and are (surprise!) not giving away their excellent firewall anymore. Sygate Personal Firewall is IMO the best free Windows firewall available. Don't use Zone Alarm. It's extremely icky. Download SPF from here. It should last you for a while.

PS!: Get! Yours! Here! http://www.oldversion.com/program.php?n=yahoo

There's a newer version of Winamp (2.95) available at http://www.oldversion.com/program.php?n=winamp

BTW. From personal experience Media Player Classic is the best video player for Windows. You can get it here http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group _id=82303&package_id=84358

No, Kazaa was always adware and spyware. The current practices of any company today DOES NOT MATTER as average computer user now knows what spyware is and software giants like Microsoft offer anti spyware for free.

Nowadays companies feeding the worst spyware to people _had to_ remove spyware from their bundles as it became a security concern even NSA cares about. Of course, their PR department works very fine, now they brag about being "spyware free!".

I am always concerned about the practices of companies _before_ users (and some developers!) became aware of what those "extra apps" do! I know a few developers who did not have a clue what "gator" etc did, they tricked them it provides "advertising banner only".

Kazaa was never a "clean" and trust-able application.

If you dare http://www.oldversion.com/program.php?n=kazaa (note for people can't stand without clicking a link, I AM LINKING HIGHLY POSSIBLE SPYWARE!)

goto http://www.oldversion.com/ and get adobe reader 4 (i use 5) it is a lot lighter and it never asks for downloads or searches for newer versions etc etc

... they could incorporate a minimalist, fast pdf viewer into Windows itself, I would happy. Ever since zip support was incorporated into XP, I've been so pleased that I've had no reason to download winzip. And the Windows "Picture and Fax" image viewer is exactly what I had wanted for a while- a fast, simple way to view images, zoom in, etc. That's what I would want for .pdf's in Windows, a simple way to quickly open, view, and print. And with Adobe's latest offerings getting bigger, more bloated, and more irritating with each new release, believe me, it can't come fast enough. Thank God for www.oldversion.com.

Interesting, I understand and somehow agree with you. As have been a programmer since the days where you *needed* to count your bytes of code (because as everyone knows, someone thought 640 should be enough for everybody).

Moreover, I agree with you in that I also hate the trend of the bloated software. But, it is not only a MS Windows problem, you see it also in Linux (KDE for example), as a simple example, go to this page and see the difference between the 7 previous versions of Acrobat reader or in the same page look at the nero file history, I can not understand how [with acrobat reader] reading a PDF could need from 1.4MB to 16MB! that tells you how bloated the software must be no?

Interesting, I understand and somehow agree with you. As have been a programmer since the days where you *needed* to count your bytes of code (because as everyone knows, someone thought 640 should be enough for everybody).

Moreover, I agree with you in that I also hate the trend of the bloated software. But, it is not only a MS Windows problem, you see it also in Linux (KDE for example), as a simple example, go to this page and see the difference between the 7 previous versions of Acrobat reader or in the same page look at the nero file history, I can not understand how [with acrobat reader] reading a PDF could need from 1.4MB to 16MB! that tells you how bloated the software must be no?

Or you can downgrade to version 4! http://www.oldversion.com/program.php?n=acrobat
Seriously, that's what I use and I've never noticed any missing functionality -- just quick loading times.

Yes, uninstall 7 and install Acrobat 4. The old version is faster and I haven't found a PDF it can't read.

Seriously, 4 is the best if you're just looking to open up .pdf files and print them.

Get it at oldversion.com

Not open source, but you can get old Adobe Acrobats here.

Kazaa and Old Version
Legal Intimidation

See Kazaa?
You wanted to be selfish now take that idiots!
I just hope you decay down further and further - you bunch of bullying spyware-endorsing thugs.

There is some justice in this world - your actions will come back to haunt you.

Can't wait when Valve gets their own comeuppance for the way they've been treating their own customers.

Dont you guys get it?
Dont the companies get it?
Call this supersition - but the collective disapproval of thousands does bring about bad-luck and misfortune.
It's been scientifically proven.
But noone wants to know.

If you piss off your customer base - you will pay .. somehow, somewhat .. eventually. See it in anyway you want - even sociologically - it's damn obvious.

If you please people - you will benefit from good auspices.
It's all but a statistical phenomena; whatever way you choose ... it's all about shifting the odds for-or-against you.

Why doesn't Microsoft collapse?
Because they balance their nasty acts with very good deeds : charity,employee satisfaction,good customer service,acts of sporadic apparent "generosity" .. with that they keep buying themselves more and more time.

Kazaa and Old Version
Legal Intimidation

See Kazaa?
You wanted to be selfish now take that idiots!
I just hope you decay down further and further - you bunch of bullying spyware-endorsing thugs.

There is some justice in this world - your actions will come back to haunt you.

Can't wait when Valve gets their own comeuppance for the way they've been treating their own customers.

Dont you guys get it?
Dont the companies get it?
Call this supersition - but the collective disapproval of thousands does bring about bad-luck and misfortune.
It's been scientifically proven.
But noone wants to know.

If you piss off your customer base - you will pay .. somehow, somewhat .. eventually. See it in anyway you want - even sociologically - it's damn obvious.

If you please people - you will benefit from good auspices.
It's all but a statistical phenomena; whatever way you choose ... it's all about shifting the odds for-or-against you.

Why doesn't Microsoft collapse?
Because they balance their nasty acts with very good deeds : charity,employee satisfaction,good customer service,acts of sporadic apparent "generosity" .. with that they keep buying themselves more and more time.

winamp now has...AOL On Desktop

If winamp is mentioned, this should be the link:
http://www.oldversion.com/program.php?n=winamp

gewg_

Go to OldVersion and get vers. 5.0 or 5.05.

You might have better luck.

Acrobat 6 would lock up Firefox hard every time I tried to close or exit the page with it embedded (closing the tab, going back to another page, and closing the window all had the same effect.. 100% cpu use until I killed the acrobat thread).

Next time I re-installed the system, I installed Acrobat Reader 5 (and FreePDF to make up for the lack of publishing ability) and all has been well since.

http://www.oldversion.com/

is that it is inbound-only.

The folks that are having problems with SP2 are the same ones for whom the Windows "firewall" is inadequate.
Their boxes are already infected with spyware.
That causes problems with SP2 (and they are already phoning home from malware that is already in place).

As always, get a firewall that has egress blocking.
On Joe Average's one-boxen system that means Sygate Personal Firewall (now the prefered app)
or an old version of ZoneAlarm (the new ones add bloat without adding significant functionality).
http://www.oldversion.com--Caution:The scroll bars at this site lock up my Gecko browser.


Re: SP2
The best results are obtained by a clean install of XP, install SP2, and follow Thomas C. Greene's configuration advice.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/09/02/winxpsp2_s ecurity_review
[Our previous column] "was NOT a practical guide to hardening a Windows system".
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/09/14/reg_reader s_windows
XP Home this time:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/09/17/xphome_sp2
Programs that have problems with SP2:
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?kbid=884 130&product=windowsxpsp2

For reference: Black Viper's SP1 page
http://www.blackviper.com/WinXP/servicecfg.htm%20
(Dontcha just love the way MICROS~1 allows spaces in file names?)


The 2nd-best results can be had by running multiple malware killers, installing SP2, and following Greene.

gewg_

I'm still using the latest 2.x version, stable as hell, lightweight, does exactly what it's supposed to.

As do I

http://www.oldversion.com/program.php?n=winamp

Besides, until there's a version of Ryan Geiss' kick ass winamp plugins, for another player (let's not pretend that iTunes visualizations are even in the same league) I'll stay with the old stuff, thank you. How up to date do you have to be with MP3 software anyway?

It deeply saddens me to learn of WinAmp's demise, having been an avid fan of the software for several years, I've used it since I was first introduced to Mp3's and digital audio (and filesharing). When version three first came out I was turned off by its annoying tendency to crash and thus have stayed behind at version 2.80 (oddly the most stable for my computer.) which conveniently interfaces with StarBar, Another piece of free software I have grown fondly attached to when in a windows envitonment. I hope somebody has the sense to open the source so winamp may continue to thrive in a bazzaar instead of dying in the dungeons of the dark cathedral known as AOL.

oldversion.com
because newer isn't always better :D

I recommend Winamp 2.95 (for all the flavor of Internet TV and Radio without all the bloat).

OldVersion.com (wonderful for pre-bloat Acrobat Reader >=v5.0 et al.) has a great selection of Winamp flavors for all those who want a faster (and more secure) version.

Enjoy.

Next time you look at the aol messenger, just check out all the stupid ads that that thing has! And those annoying sounds!

have you tried oldversion.com ?

There are still ways around that problem.

It's really not too hard at all. All you need to do is look.

winzip
realvnc
ad-aware
html-kit
irfanview
zonealarm
kazaalite
subspace/continuum
prime95
weatherbug
google toolbar

These are not in the right order, just threw em up there as i thought of them.

There is also a mostly complete list of old Winamp versions at www.oldversion.com for anyone who is interested.

Link.

http://www.oldversion.com/

lookie here