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Microsoft Extends Win98/SE Support
An anonymous reader writes "ZDNet reports that Microsoft is extending technical support for Windows 98 till 30 June 2006, despite being days away from switching support to a CD. It seems Windows 98 will also have all necessary security updates till the new expiry date." The article states that Microsoft will have "...During that time paid over-the-phone support will be available, and "critical" security issues will be reviewed and "appropriate steps" taken."
Even if support had been switched to a CD, MS had still pledged to provide security related fixes, AFAIK.
RedHat Updates are still available, and will be available in the future. The up2date service for free is what being discontinued. To me, it seems better than a CD based support, anyway.
FYI, as of Office 2003, you have to have either W2K sp3 or WinXP. Office XP looks like the last one to support Win98. The ongoing saga of 98 support being cancelled is why I bought the Microsoft Action Pack (were they not going to cancel support back last summer? The dates have changed so many times I can't remember). I mainly run MS stuff at home due being able to support work (and I don't think Reader Rabbit runs under Linux very well). To upgrade to WinXP Pro at home was going to cost me on the order of $500 at oem pricing, plus the cost of other app upgrades. For $300 US I got a 10 user license of XP Pro, all the server products and a 10 user license of Office XP and now Office 2003. I don't like supporting the evil empire, but with this I am supporting them a lot less than I used to.
"It's a dog eat dog world out there, and I'm wearing Milk-Bone underwear."- Norm (from Cheers)
It only makes sense that 98 is still widely used, as upgrading to 2K/XP costs more than my mother-in-law is willing to spend on the stuff that lets her read her email...
I ran 98SE for *years* before switching to Linux, and for John Q. Homeuser who has AOL and doesn't use the internet for anything more than checking local movie start times and ordering flowers for his wife's birthday, it's enough.
well, it's nothing one behind the ear wouldn't cure
You'd be wrong there, from support costs alone. Since we implemented XP at the site where I work (we are currently at ~95% implementation), the number of calls to the helpdesk is down to about half what it was when we were running primarily 9x. Patches also install much more reliably using automated mechanisms. Just figuring increased productivity due to less time on the phone with tech support and spontaneous reboots is probably reason enough to migrate.
XP is also an OS which is securable. 9x is not. Where I work this is a big issue, since we get audited twice a year.
The license for XP may be more, but with upward of 10k users we have a volume license which gets renewed every couple of years anyway, and the CALs for desktop machines all cost the same for us.
I was installing their new OS's from burned CD's, legal licenses, but using a burned copy of Windows 2000. No installer pops up unless you boot from CD.
Windows XP runs rine on a 450 MHz CPU. I'm running it on a 350 MHz machine, though I do have 128 MB RAM.
Now, maybe you have some funky hardware, but in terms of CPU and RAM, you can run XP on what you've got.