There is nothing wrong with my "doorstep"; in fact, if it does crash, I
am extremely surprised, as this is a rare event of once a year. "Heh,
seems the AV company botched the memory checker, eh?"
There are doorstops and then there are doorstops. I'd class this as more of
a doorstop capable of providing some basic fan heating services to a room,
hence not completely inert, despite being what must be 5 years old or more?
After getting the opportunity to test on a Cyrix PR333 128MB machine running
98SE I found that the Advent Calendar installed and ran without any
problems, although it should be noted that the machine itself wasn't bogged
down with dozens of third party widgets/themes/tweaks or other "go faster
stripes", though it did have AVG and Zonealarm running during the
installation.
My point is that there's old and then there's obselete. Demanding that a
piece of software be run on nothing short of a P4 with a gig of RAM is
totally unrealistic, but expecting a modern day piece of software to run
without a glitch on a Pentium 1 with seriously limited system resources
really is stretching things a bit. Having said all that, my understanding
is that Jo managed to get the Calendar up and running on her doorstop
anyway, if not on her initial try, which for all I know could be down to her
machine needing a reboot after an hour. I certainly wouldn't try installing
anything on a doorstop like that which had been up for an hour without first
rebooting to let it "clear it's head".
There are not only old and new computers, there are safe and unsafe
machines, too. Win98 doesn't offer "service" to the whole world, as XP
does; so there is nothing there at all, that can be exploited. I hope,
Longhorn has learned how to tell intra- and world wide net apart.
Especially if everything is baesd on this .NET technology.
Hehe, it always amuses me when people are intimidated by running an NT based
OS in case they misconfigure it and end up "broadcasting services to the
whole world". What many fail to realise is that even the most simple minded
of users can configure an XP machine to be secure. It reminds me of my
elderly neighbour who refuses to buy a car with an automatic choke because
he's afraid it requires some special professional knowledge to operate it.
And just like his current car, Windows 98 will continue to rust due to a
lack of maintenance and support while later operating systems like Windows
2000 get service packs, kernels recompiled with buffer overrun protection
and security enhancements. While I'm not saying anyone running ME or less
needs to "get with the program and upgrade" (I'm sure plenty of them are
happy in their own little world), I do think you need to wise up a little if
you think 98 is more secure than XP.
Alex Clark
