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Win95 Lifecycle Draws to a Close
Mr_Perl writes "As many Everquest players discovered recently directx 8.1 is not being made for Windows 95, sending stores everywhere into a frenzy to slap little stickers over the words "Windows 95" on game box system requirements sections. Microsoft has picked November 30th, 2001 as the date that Win95 moves into the unsupported phase of it's career, making it even more useless to those who still keep it around for playing the latest games. Looks like Win98 is slated for execution June 30, 2003."
Are they going to make a scaled down, slightly less bloated version of their kernel that they sell for less and that we can use for all the latest stuff?
That's exactly what I use Windows 95 for.
I put a copy on my Dad's old P-133 laptop so that he could do word processing for his job (he's not quite Linux ready, and neither is the laptop). It runs. And so do the programs I installed on it.
I know what you might be thinking: "that's old stuff, and old stuff is as supported as it gets on 95." Well...
there are still a lot of products out there that use simple Pentium chips and small memories that keep coming out that could use a good Windows API every now and then.
So what is our recourse for "Lite" systems, if not older versions of the software if Windows is required?
I suppose if we wait a few more years, the Windows clone will be ready, and that could replace it...
Mod me down and I will become more powerful than you can possibly imagine!
If you look at the notes at the bottom of the Windows Lifecycle page, Microsoft blames the January 2001 Java settlement with Sun for not being able to produce more Windows 95 CDs.
Well DirectX is a high-level interface to low-level drivers, so it's quite possible that the kernel interface for such things is different. Afterall, win98 has to be different somehow, right? Like, besides USB.
MS OSes will be unsupported:
:-)
MS DOS x.xx (December 31, 2001)
Windows 3.xx (December 31, 2001)
Windows 95 (November 30, 2001)
Windows NT 3.5x (December 31, 2001)
Windows 98/98 SE (June 30, 2003)
Windows NT 4.xx (June 30, 2003)
Anyone else find it odd that MS will be supporting DOS, Win 3.x and NT 3.5 a month longer than 95? I mean, seriously. I can count the number of people I know that have win 3.x system on one hand.
I only wish I could do that for people who use 95.
Which is precisely why I question the quality of the upgrade. Why would it hurt MicroSoft to release Win95 for free if 98, ME and XP are so wonderful? 98 was 95 with USB, ME was 98 with new icons, which leaves XP as the first major upgrade to the home user's version of Windows since 1995.
You can download PC DOS 7 (and DR DOS and MS DOS) here.
If they no longer sell it, and no longer support it, technically it's abandonware, right?
There is no legal definition of abandonware (nor any legal concept of it).
Have there been any court decisions on abandonware and whether it's legally okay to trade it/hack it/despoil it in general?
Copyright does not require support of the copyrighted work.
Has MS been enforcing MS-DOS licenses?
Yes. SPA and other copyright enforcement goons still catalog and penalize illegal copies of MS-DOS.
If not, will that make Win95 sort of a free-for-all too?
No.
rage, rage against the dying of the light
Until I upgraded my computer, I still had Windows 95 on it. When I replaced the 300 MHz K6-2 processor with a 450 MHz one, I was surprised to see that Windows did no longer run.
The problem was well-known; K6-2 processors of above 350 MHz were incompatible with Windows (or surely, it's the other way around?). A patch was available, but guess what? It only applied to Windows 95 release 2 or later. We poor souls still running the very first Windows 95 release were left in the dark.
After throwing out Windows, the following years were a happy multiboot-story of Linux, BeOS, FreeBSD and DR-DOS. Windows is not missed, other than the occasional urge to play Need for Speed again;-)
Depite what the Korean-hosted old-warez sites tell you, there is no such thing as "abandonware" and the copyrights will still stand, even if the product is essentially obliterated off the face of the planet. No, there is no "24 hours to delete your downloads" law, either.
You won't find Internet Explorer 6 or Windows Media Player 7 for Win95 either, on that vein. Go to MS's site and it'll say "Windows 95 users, experience the wonderous yada yada of IE5.5 / WMP 6.4 in all its glory, because it's all you're getting".
;). It's not that flash, just more integrated junk and a bit more advanced DOM support like Mozilla.
.NET shenanigans, and doesn't have enough disk space for more than one OS. So it's Win98 for me, at least until 2003 when I have to start reg hacking my way into installations ;).
;).
I also found that IE5.01 is out of support as well, and installed IE6 (which I need to test pages, as a web developer, don't worry I have a couple of Mozilla versions to make up for it
My old PII 333 can't keep up with the latest XP
Seriously, most Windows INF (installation script) files have $CHICAGO$ at the top as their version signature, the codename of Windows 95. I've yet to meet one that says '$MEMPHIS$' or similar. Surely it's just an exercise of finding the right installation/'advpack' DLL versions to get these programs going, as the core system API can't be that different once installed? Perhaps just install DX8, and manually copy over the DLLs and any relevant registry settings for DX8.1?
At the moment I'm running IE4, 5 and 6 concurrently. Come 2003, I'll relish the challange of adding 7 and 8 to the mix
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You can generally download and run more things from Microsoft than they advertize. Almost nobody knows about IE 5 for Windows 3.1, but it exists. Similarly, you can get updates for Windows 95, but you'll have to stray from "Windows Update."
It makes sense for Microsoft to do this. Other companies do similar things. It isn't free for Microsoft to keep supporting old software.
Microsoft has big labs full of computers, and testers who work in these labs. If they support DirectX on Win95, that means they need to run tests on Win95, which means they need computers set up and running Win95, and they need to pay the testers who will run all the tests on Win95. When the testers find bugs, the DirectX developers need to fix the bugs, too. None of this is free.
It's not that Microsoft will be going out of their way to make sure things break on Win95; they just won't pay any attention to Win95 anymore. Stuff might even work, especially since MS will still be testing against Win98, which is similar to Win95.
One of the things I like about HP: they have an official policy that they support their products for five years after they stop selling them. Microsoft seems to have chosen a similar guideline of about five years after they stopped selling stuff. That's not bad.
It's true that when everything older than WinXP is dropped, that you won't be able to buy any non-activated MS software new. By then I expect to be running 100% Linux, including games, so I'm not worried about it, but even if I were there is a huge pool of Windows software out there at swap meets, on eBay, etc. It will still work as well as it ever did.
MS isn't doing anything evil or unexpected here. Support can't last forever.
steveha
lf(1): it's like ls(1) but sorts filenames by extension, tersely
I'm not being sarcastic here (although I do shake my head), but they are a company that makes money. The way they used to make money was by releasing their OS in increments (... 3.*, 95, 98, 2K, ME) every few years. But it's getting ridiculas as people own one of their OSes for a year before the new one comes out. Their customers sit on their old versions for years before upgrading ...
...
... for now ..
So how do MS make sure that they have a sustainable income? They create an OS that is ever changing, "Rent your software!".
Ok, if they had come up with that idea in 1995, then they would have achieved their sustainable income (with minimal effort) and be on easy (easier) street. But they have to get rid of these older OSes that people won't upgrade. How do they make people go to XP? Start cutting out support of course!
So in a few years, XP will be it, MS can maintain their income with minimal effort and the hardware industry will we happy supplying new PCs for an ever growing OS that will make older PCs whine and cripple under its fluffiness
I guess the point is that it's business. That is the whole deal with capitalism. I'm not a communist, I'm just baffled at everyone's amazment at this issue. It's a dog eat dog world and MS the fattest dog
"Yeah Tommy, before Zee Germans get here
Many OS's boot loaders had this problem of not supporting Hard disks > 8.4G. this has to do with the way CHS (Cylinder, head, sector ) data in Hard drives is numbered using 24-bit addresses = this gives a max of 16M physical sectors - which meant 8.4G.
Linux also had this problem (with LILO atleast, don't know about the other bootloaders) and you had to place the kernel in a partition that fell within the 8.4G limit
As far as ME goes there were significant changes to it. MS tried to add some of the stability features of winXP (system restore, health monitor) to the win9x code line and also completely get rid of true real mode in the system. Both of these things caused more trouble than good except when running perfect programs on perfect hardware.
Win 2k of course was the first time the NT code base had anything resembling home user type features though it was definitely oriented at the business consumer based on its price and its features. Win xp is very good but no you aren't going to be able to run all your very old win95 based apps in it.
I think the issue you are getting at isn't a MS based problem but a computer industry problem in general though. Win 95 was good enough, what more do people really want? If you just add stability people say "whoa that isn't any different than what I have" and if you and tons of fancy features people either go "I don't like those features I don't want to pay for them (even though the os price is the same as win95 as best I can tell) or those features add a crapload of bugs (or both).
"You can now flame me, I am full of love,"
And you believe Gates's statement because...?
Sometimes it didn't even load Windows. Sometimes it froze on bootup because of registry errors. Around August/September I called a friend over to help me find the problem, and it turns out it was an improper setting I had selected in the BIOS which was causing 98 to corrupt not only the registry files but the autoexec.bat file as well.
But, during those months when I was having the registry issues, I learned a few things about how to backup and restore those troublesome files. Win98SE, by the way, is far better equipped to handle these things than any previous version of 9x. You're able to make backups of the registry into CAB files with the program scanregw.exe. Just open the Run prompt and type that. It'll do a quick scan, then offer you the chance to back up the current files. I usually did this always after installing something so if I had a serious reg error I wouldn't be forced to reinstall it. (I lost a Black & White game that way) It's a good idea to do this regularly.
Now, when it comes to restoring the registry, 98SE should be able to handle it itself if the error isn't too serious. If the files are totally corrupt 98 may not even load. In that case you can boot to DOS by pressing F8 right before Windows starts loading or with a boot disk, and type SCANREG /RESTORE to restore the files. Failing that, there's one more route you can take. Boot to DOS, and go to the Windows directory. There is a hidden directory called SYSBCKUP which contains the CAB files for the last five registry backups. Check the dates on them to see which one is the best to restore from, and just use EXTRACT to place them back into the Windows directory (or is it Windows\System... don't recall. Easy to find out).
So basically it's not that big of a deal. I'm not familiar enough with NT/2000/XP to know how it works yet, but it's fairly easy to do in 98. Just some ways I described above are more time-consuming than others.
Of course, the other option is to use a disk imaging program like Norton Ghost, but that depends on how large your Windows partition is, if you have sufficient storage space for the image, etc.
There is no escape from The Muffin.
Even with corporate edition there is no guarantee there is no spyware stuff going on. I for fun did a corp ed. install somewhere behind a NATed private network. I logged all attempts by the installing computer to contact any machine on MSes subnet, and guess what, there were about 12 connection attempts throughout the install process, about 8 of which had no warning nor rationale, the others were along the lines of "testing your network connectivity".
I really ought to more officially document it, including tcpdumps of whatever the system is sending to MS and what is in the response, if any, from MS. Just because you aren't sending in for Product Activation doesn't mean it's not spyware. Also, I re-installed the OS later after formatting and both logged and blocked to see if it changed the install at all, and the install performed almost exactly as it had before, except a bit slower in places where it would timeout on a connection and try another IP until the list of IPs was exhausted. So the net connects don't seem to positively affect the install whatsoever.
Don't believe me? Try the experiment for yourself. Being a sys-admin I can toy around with the company firewall and license, but at home you can set up something similar.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
Y'know, I've had a similar experience installing Office XP (which afaik has a similar scheme in place). Deployed the activation-free CDs on ~30 systems, firewall logs all over the place.
This would really be worth following up on with something like ethereal running on the firewall.
Then again, sometimes Windows (I deal with NT4 & 2000) just won't listen to you no matter how many commands you give it. You might also search the net for a program called OLEView (comes in Visual Studio and the NT Reskit). OLEView will show you what file the system actually uses when it needs a particular object (from a dll). Then you can be sure about which file you need to unregister and replace.
Regards,
Stephen
It really made concentration difficult with that guy swearing all the time, and the machine crashing every now and then. One reason was Windows's instability, the other was Word's inept features at page layout.
After a month or so my friend got this guy to install CygWin and run LaTeX from a unix server through X. After that: peace and quite all the way. Since Windows did nothing but run the XServer, it stayed up, and LaTeX made document editing ridiculously easy.
Try 2000 and you won't have to worry about all those problems.
No, you'll just have problems with Win2k not flushing the write cache on IDE drives before powering off. The "bugfix" from Microsoft didn't fix it.
What did it cause us? Registry problems, incidentally. Win2k refuses to boot because the registry is corrupt. Not even safe mode. And having an ERD or using the backup registry doesn't help; every time you log in the registry changes and trying to roll it back to a recent (2 days ago) backup confuses the shit out of AutoDesk Inventor since they're paranoid about pirated software. Using an old registry also confuses Office 2000. So I ask again, what use is this proprietary, very undocumented, unreadable and practically unfixable single point of failure? Hell due to its very nature backups don't even work!
Give me separate ini files or give me a human-readable, fully documented registry. Ideally, give me all of that and a bugfix that actually works!
Win2k is a lot better than anything that came before. It is not, however, infallable. These problems are experienced on high-end (dual proc, 1G RAM) CAD workstations with mid-end (AutoDesk, Inc.) software. Who do you blame now? Microsoft, for creating a horrendous single point of failure, Microsoft, for not actually testing their bugfix, or AutoDesk for following Microsoft's reccomended programming practises and using the registry for everything and anything?
Could you remotely log into your DOS/Windows 3.* machine while someone else uses the console? No? Cause you can do that in Windows XP. Out of the box. Can you run your system on a very fast, robust, journaling filesystem? Cause NTFS is pretty damn good. Does DOS/16-bit Windows have an SMP kernel? Does it support proper memory protection? Threads? No? Thought not.
/like/ Windows, less so Microsoft and their business practices, but to claim it's the same as DOS is straight up trollish pig-ignorance. It's like claiming that all the advances in Unix since AT&T are meaningless fluff.
I don't particularly
Peace,
(jfb)
To spur "enterprise Linux," Big Bang, the distributed two-phase commit.