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Unofficial Windows98SE Patch
usrid0 writes "A service pack for Windows 98 Second Edition has been released. Big deal, right? It is if it doesn't come from Microsoft. "
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There's no source code of course, but this stuff isn't exactly opaque. Get yourself a copy of IDA Pro or SoftIce and dig in. You might learn a thing or two!
while the FA implies that Microsoft is somewhat neutral to this fellow's freelance updating, the software is still in "extended" support from MS.
It'll be interesting to see what happens the if they issue a 'critical' security update, and there is a conflict with Mr. Coskun's patch. The cynic in me says they'd almost *deliberately* make it incompatible... oops!
No man is an island, but Gary is a city in Indiana.
I use Windows 98se paired with 98lite on older machines that I still want to keep running and get decent performance out of. With manual tweaking, I've been able to get a working 98se system in under 12meg.
I'm interested to try these together, and see if 98se can be made reliable with the patches, AND un-bloated with 98lite.
someone actually modded you up? sheesh. the point is, your mom didn't, he did.
i've personally had to deal with manually installing the individual patches MS has released for NT4 machines one by one (by one... somewhere in the region of 25-35 patches per machine; MS' advisory on chaining patches without having to reboot after each one is useful but still doesn't help all that much) because MS won't release a proper service pack 7 with all the security updates rolled into it, and if i had to maintain win98se machines, i'd be very happy to run into this.
and as for all the other posters - offhand i'd say i trust him.
You're right. Cause this IS all their own shite, just crapped out of a different orifice.
Heh.. Hope he's got an advanced plan... 20 GB Bandwidth is $99/year for the most expensive advanced plan, and if the slashdot effect holds true, he's gonna use his bandwidth up umm.. today? 12000 bytes to load the page... 1.67 million hits...
I'm really on the fence on this one.... Windows 98 users should know that their products are EOL'd, but then again this guy is giving back freely (albeit in an un-authorized and non-authoritaive manner).
Nah, Alper.. thanks but no thanks.. Your effort is admirable. If my laptop crashes and burns it'll be my last Windows system to go and it won't be a day too soon.
Since I am a mac user, I need to rely on virtual PC in order to accomplish those little tasks that I need windows for (Specifically Minitab/Maple - dont have OSX Copies of either). Well, 2k/Xp/2k3 are very slow in Virtual PC, but Win98SE seems to run well, however there was no support for my 2gigs of Ram and I could only give it 512. Well, now it looks like I can give it a full gig like i do 2000/Xp with this patch!
I am definitely going to check this out,
artlu
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artlu.net
No, it really IS timely. I just happened to have installed Win98SE last night. I have an old Presario that was tri-booting between Linux, Win98 and Windows 2000 for several years, but actually only ever running Windows 2000. I finally decided the registry just couldn't hack it anymore and it needed a clean swipe. If it was my work machine it would have been reinstalled a long time ago, but it's the family computer and it hasn't been a big priority.
...or not :)
Anyway, as if this story had any chance of getting interesting, I'll continue. Something happened to my Windows 2000 disk and it won't install. Call it karma, since my Windows 98 disk is one I actually bought off the shelf, believe it or not. So here I am actually bringing Windows 98 as up-to-date as is possible. Scary. I'm thinking of going out to buy XP later in the week to upgrade it, but it's only a K6 266 (with 384 MB of RAM... maxed-out, baby). I might actually need to buy the family a new computer.
Interestingly (yes, I'm actually continuing this drivel), I remembered last night what a hassle Windows can be, now that I've been a Mac OS X user for a couple of years. Motherboard video driver, monitor driver, oh yeah -- ethernet driver before anything else. This and that and the other. Hundreds of MB of downloads and a couple of dozen reboots so far, I guess. Yee-hah. Yes, it's my fault for still running an old computer with Windows 98. Anyway, worth a mention.
RP
It's good to see someone is still working on 98. I still have one machine left running Win98, but as it's hardly ever used I've never seen the point in shelling out for a more recent version.
Depending on what I hear from others who've tried the patch I might install it.
Microsoft will eventually abandon the Windows 9X platform, so they might as well release the source code or the full API list so some other company or organization can take it over. It is W2K/XP/2003 and above now. Soon to be only Longhorn.
:)
Someone else making security patches for the almost abandoned OS is a start.
Remember, Slashdot does not have a -1 disagree moderation, and no, troll, flamebait, and overrated are not substitutes.
If he was trying to get you to download and install a Trojan horse, why would he tell you to backup your system? Why would he have a disclaimer with dire warnings about 'no warranty' and "damages" rather than a statement that the software is "r33ly L33t" and that you need it now?
In order to attempt to appear legitimate. I've seen simlar "no warranty" warnings in no-cd cracks and the like.
Why would Information Week provide a link to it if it was a Trojan horse?
Because they don't realise that it is, and believe that it's legitimate.
There's 96 hits on Google when you look up "Alper Coskun" (with quotes) and "98SE" -- none of which mentions his sinister plot to get your oh-so-valuable data that you keep on an ancient Windows 98 PC.
Now you're just being silly - he's hardly likely to put up a webpage about it, and a lack of others doing so just means that no-one has figured it out yet.
Now, I don't suppose that there is anything sinister about this, but really - to the best of my knowledge, he's just some random guy on the internet. Why should I trust him?
It's official. Most of you are morons.
Little Brother, watching the watchers
I run windows XP on a p5mmx-233 laptop with 96M of ram.
It runs rock solid, and quite snappy too.
I used to run win2k but the wireless support in winxp makes the upgrade worth it.
.
I've tried this patch with mixed results:
On my main system (triple boot, XP Pro, 98Se, Mdk 10, a PIII 600 with 768MB RAM), the patch was a definite improvement, faster bootup, better USB and nicer (Win2000 ish) UI.
On my parents system (dual boot, 2000/98SE, PII 300), it screwed up 98 so badly that it wouldn't boot and so I had to reinstall.
So go figure.
I'd used the earlier 1.1 and 1.2 patches on my own system as well previously with success..
Linux fan and Win32 developer
I installed it. Very nice thing to have since I have 768MB RAM.
So far, nothing suspicious going on. It does however remind me a bit of *spit* Windows ME *spit*.
All rites reversed 2010
It is now 2004. This is a operating system from 1998. WTF? In other news, I have finally developed fixes for the 1946 Packard Station wagon's carburator issues. Anyone driving a 1946 Packard on a daily basis can get the kit from me. Details will be given on a headline on /.
You're implying that as time has gone on, that MS operating systems have gotten better somehow, rather than worse. Bigger, bloatier, cruftier, that's about the only direction things have increased. I routinely tell people that Win 98 was the last version of windows that was any good. 2 of my machines still use it, and the only reason my primary machine doesn't use it is because it has 1.5GB of ram in it. So I'm going to give this 'service pack' a try, and finally get my hardware to have the speed that I bought it for.
I think poor active X is a plus, but I have forgotten, does NT4 support USB? I have been contemplating switching the 98 box here to that, I have a disk for NT4, put it on once but don't recall if it does USB well or not. Reason being a crappy little usb digital camera I have, a vivitar, it really borks my FC1 box,like major kernel panic, all the lights start flashing on the keyboard,nothing works, keyboard or mouse, you are forced to do a hard power off reboot, which sucks. So I download the pics to the 98 box now, then sneakernet them over, but I've read many times that NT4 is somehow better.
.8 even slower, almost unusable at all,not even close to opera which is bad enough on the antique,BUT it loads and draws the best looking pages at like 3 minutes or more a page, but explorer 5 runs pretty zippy actually, loads quick, draws quick. Not really sure which other browsers to try, I know to not do netscape 4 series on it...
sidenote: spent the last three days (well, off and on ofcourse) playing with an old toshiba laptop running 95, no cd player for it, so it would be hard to change OSes. Got given to me as a total scrap piece, wouldn't even boot when I first got it. Cleaned the battery terminals,that worked, then when it booted the hard drive sounded like acorns in a rusty blender (something to do with industrial strength "health" magnet being put close to the machine before). Started with scandisk, ran it for more than a week until it stabilised enough to get to it and really work on it. Deleted a lot of kruft from previous owner, then spybotted it (hundreds), then antivirred it (some), reg supreme (200+ cleaned up, nice program), installed tiny personal firewall (no longer any zone alarm for 95, rats!)and XPrampro set on automatic, and been surfing with it. 16 megs ram, pentium 100, full color GUI, all works nice. 95 is lightweight and functional at least.. Latest opera 7.5 beta runs (kinda) real slow,you go nuts qucik with it, firefox
I think there's life in old boxes if you keep them clean and use a modicum of net savvy with them. Looking forward to the time there's an easy to use distro that'll run some linux on this and similar machines, full easy to use GUI out of the box.
The absolutely brilliant scheme Microsoft has come up with to date is product activation. When Windows XP goes off support in Dec 2006, you MUST upgrade if your PC gets hosed or you upgrade your hardware, because you won't be able to reinstall it. Of course, businesses are exempt (software activation not required for bulk purchases/installs), so there's little chance of backlash from the majority revenue markets. Us home users, on the other hand, are screwed.
Yeah, right.
Didnt have any probs installing. I do have a 6gb disk, it would be pretty tight on a 4gb.
You probably need more memory too, right now with nothing running the commit charge is ~80MB, so even 64 -> 96 would make the difference between having to swap or not.
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I agree with what you've said here, but with a caveat that may seem obvious to some, not so to others: MOST big companies operate this way. Take for example the company I work for, which will remain unnamed here, but is a Fortune 500 company. The software we design is used in mission-critical systems as well as average not-so-critical situations. We routinely have hundreds of bugs that we know about, but choose not to fix. Why? Simply put, it's not profitable to fix them unless they rise to a level that threatens our revenue. Now that's not my decision, mind you, just the way things happen to be. I've got two friends who work at Microsoft, one of which works in an area dealing with OS bugs. Just before Win2K was released, I was sitting with him as he showed me the millions of bugs (yes, millions) that they (Microsoft) weren't going to fix... ostensibly for the same reason as my company.
I'm not saying that this is right, or we shouldn't strive to be better. It just sometimes gets old to hear "Microsoft bad" all of the time (and I'm not disagreeing) and not have the sort of group realization that, the way Microsoft operates is pretty much business-as-usual for most large corporations (and not just software corps).
That's why we need a strong regulatory climate (but not overly heavy-handed), and a market that takes care of the rest. And to all of those who say that Microsoft is too big to take down with just market-pressure, what about IBM? What about the little geek with an idea who juked one of the biggest companies in the world so bad they almost didn't recover? Someday... if the Linux idea keeps growing, it will reach a point where it too can do to Microsoft what Microsoft did to IBM.
Wow... looking back that that little rant, I seem to have wandered off the reservation. Hmmm... I wonder if I toss in a quick "Microsoft Bad" if it'll be enough to protect me from the inevitable flames?
"...The mice will see you now..."
Take the guy's word for it. If you can find a 98 to 98SE upgrade (they were about ten bucks in the day) run that first, THEN try his service pack.
Brackets contain world's first nanosig, highly magnified:[.]
You haven't read The Art of Deception: Controlling the Human Element of Security by Kevin D. Mitnick, have you?
"If he was trying to get you to download and install a Trojan horse," which I suppose he isn't, he should in fact do exactly that.
Probably, but just not for the reasons you describe.
Sincerely,
Pan Tarhei Hosé, PhD.
"Homo sum et cogito ergo odi profanum vulgus et libido."