Windows 98 viral protection?

August 10, 2008 5:16 PM

Suggestions for antiviral SW for Windows 98?

My folks have a vintage Windows 98 PC that they will cling to tenaciously as long as humanly possible. As antiviral vendors have dropped support for Windows 98, they have begun having trouble finding vendors for software.

I have spent a while looking and have verified that AVG Free does not support Windows 98. Winclam (Clam AV) does. I have not found any reputable commercial software that claims to support the older system.

Any suggestions?

posted by mwhybark to computers & internet (8 comments total)

I run NOD32 on my desktop (Vista), which seems to have 'legacy systems' support.
posted by fogster at 5:32 PM on August 10, 2008

I use the free AVAST. It supports even win 95
posted by JayRwv at 5:34 PM on August 10, 2008

2nding Nod32.
posted by iamabot at 5:54 PM on August 10, 2008

So go with Clamwin.
posted by softsantear at 6:25 PM on August 10, 2008

Sorry, I see that you wanted commercial software.
posted by softsantear at 6:26 PM on August 10, 2008

My folks have a vintage Windows 98 PC that they will cling to tenaciously as long as humanly possible.

I can sympathise with their desire to do that. The Microsoft upgrade treadmill is absolutely offensive. Nobody in their right mind would want to spend money upgrading a system that's served their needs adequately until now.

I bet they drive an old, well-maintained car as well, and good on them.

As antiviral vendors have dropped support for Windows 98, they have begun having trouble finding vendors for software.

It ain't just antiviral vendors; it's everybody. This is just what commercial operating systems do.

Microsoft took Windows 98 out back and shot it in July 2006, and it's getting increasingly hard to find new software that will still run on it. At some point (hopefully before their existing hard disk with all their never-backed-up stuff on it dies) they really will need to upgrade their machinery.

My best advice to you is to do your best to help your folks see computing as an expense, rather than a computer as an investment, and help them find ways to minimize that expense into the future.

If they're going to upgrade their hardware at some point, they are unlikely to find Windows 98 drivers to work with most of the new stuff, and they will need to change environments. This will cause them pain and suffering. There is no way around that.

However, instead of taking one more step on the commercial OS upgrade treadmill, they may well have the option of jumping off it entirely, and getting rid of the need for antivirus and antispyware at the same time. It all depends on what they're using their Windows 98 box for at present.

My mother's running Ubuntu 7.10 (Gutsy Gibbon) on an old jellybean iMac, after jumping off the Mac OS upgrade treadmill. Her old Mac was running OS 8, but her printer died, that model wasn't made any more, and we couldn't find a new printer with an OS 8 driver. She likes the iMac because it's compact (for a CRT-based machine) and neat and quiet (no fan, only hard disk noise). But when it dies (and it will, because they all do) I will be able to migrate her entire existing operating environment, complete with all her settings and look and feel and everything she's used to, onto any replacement machine because Ubuntu runs on anything. She won't have to deal with the re-learning pain a second time.

Most of what she does is word processing (lots of bilingual stuff, lots of color stuff too) and she's fine doing that in OpenOffice Write instead of ClarisWorks. Took me a few days to migrate her several hundred existing documents and make them so they printed the same, but it wasn't too hard to do.

I'd probably have been able to persuade Dad to dump Windows for Ubuntu as well, except for Microsoft Excel. Dad has made thousands of insanely detailed financial charts, heavily abusing Excel as a drawing tool (because it was the first thing he found that could draw a rectangle), and his carefully measured-by-hand-with-a-ruler-held-up-to-the-screen layouts don't render exactly right in OpenOffice Calc (or in Excel 2003, for what that's worth). Because all these things are hand-drawn works of art rather than machine-generated representations of some kind of underlying data, there's no reasonable way to migrate them. So Dad's stuck with Microsoft Office 2000 on Windows XP, and god help him when the antiviral vendors stop supporting XP.

He still has an old Windows 98 PC that he fires up occasionally to do stuff that won't work for him on XP. That machine is going to become virus-unprotectable soon too. My current plan involves sharing the entire C: drive on the LAN, and running virus scans from the XP box.
posted by flabdablet at 3:40 AM on August 11, 2008

On the plus side, trojans and viruses are written for NT-based machines. Id be surprised if a lot of the popular exploits ran on your machine. I'd go with clamwin, like someone suggested above and have it do a weekly scan.
posted by damn dirty ape at 8:22 AM on August 11, 2008

Thanks all, that's a helpful range of choices.

And for the record, yeah, older, well-maintained car, you betcha.
posted by mwhybark at 1:55 PM on August 11, 2008