From: Virus Guy <Virus@Guy.C0M>

Shadow wrote:

>>Yes, I still primarily use win-98 on two systems, one of which (the one 
>>I'm posting this from) has 2 gb of ram and several 1TB sata hard drives.
> 
> 
> 	I seem to remember that win 98 could only address up to 64MB
> of RAM. That was one of the reasons I switched to XP in 2006 or so.

Windows 98 se, out of the box, can handle 512 mb of ram.  In fact, when 
installing 98se unless you modify some of the installation files the 
system must not have more than 512 mb of ram.  Once installed, and some 
vcache settings are changed, the hard upper limit in terms of installed 
ram is something like 1.195 mb of ram (something that can be achieved 
with creative use of a ram drive that consumes some system ram to limit 
what is "visible" to win-98).  Most situations involving a Pentium-4 
based motherboard (socket 478 or 775) should have no problems running 
win-98 with 1 gb of installed ram and that is indeed very useful 
compared to the more anemic 64 - 256 mb amounts of ram that most people 
think is suitable for win-98.

Quite a while ago a trivial hack was discovered to VMM32.VXD and VMM.VXD 
files that allows win-98 to see and use up to at least 3 and maybe all 4 
gb of installed ram.  Above 2 gb you might have problems with some 
motherboards and VGA display ram (something about the amount of ram on 
the video card and/or the bios video apperture size setting).

It would have been very common back in 2005 - 2007 time-frame to see 
win-98 installed on a (at the time) new or current motherboard with at 
least 512 mb of ram.

>>But in terms of internet security and exposing a system to remote
>>exploit code, the NT line fell far short of being as invulnerable to
>>such exploit paths as 9x/me was, and the Secunia numbers posted above
>>are perfect examples of that.
> 
> 
> 	Nevertheless, I'm still going to use XP. Have not used a
> resident AV for more or less 5 years now.

And likewise I have not used an AV program on my win-98 systems since 
probably 2008.

> A very large number of softwares no longer work on 98.

A surprisingly large assortment of older versions of current software 
runs just fine on win-98, aided by a kernel compatibility layer known as 
"KernelEx" that was developed maybe 10 years ago and contines to be 
enhanced today.  And there is a similar project for XP I believe.
--- NewsGate v1.0 gamma 2
 * Origin: News Gate @ Net396 -Huntsville, AL - USA (1:396/4)