Windows 98SE? What's that?

[yesthattom]

Ok. Pretend that during the Windows 95/Windows 98 years I had a job that let me only deal with Unix-like systems and all Windows stuff was handled expertly by a co-worker so I didn’t have to.

So now I’m helping a non-profit with a donated PC. It is Pentium II, 128M of RAM. It has “Windows 98” on it.

The only network nearby is WiFi. I bought a Linksys WUSB11 ver 2.6 device, plugged it into the USB port, and loaded the driver. However, the system doesn’t recognize it. The manual says it works with “Windows 98SE” but never mentions “Windows 98” without SE.

a. What is SE?
b. Am I fucked?
c. Can anyone near North Brunswick (GSP exit 129ish) loan me the right disc?
d. Would anyone like to just donate a couple thousand dollars so I can get this non-profit a modern PC so I don’t have to deal with any of this?

Comments

[vasilatos]

I do believe you are fucked, my friend.

[yesthattom.livejournal.com]

Thanks for the support.

[vasilatos]

Now I feel bad. Tell me where to send the two grand.

To clarify, we have exactly your circumstance at our house: the Windows 98 with the hardware configuration you have, plus a linksys wireless thingy. I had high hopes, but no. It won't play ball. Thus my tactless comment. Sorry about that, but you asked.

[yesthattom.livejournal.com]

Your donations can be sent via paypal to trespp [at] njlgc.org :-)

[rmd.livejournal.com]

"98SE" was a later version of 98. sort of like 98.1, i guess. i know one of the big differences between 98 and 98se was better usb support in se. i'm not sure if this means you're fucked or not.

[mrfantasy.livejournal.com]

It stands for "Second Edition", and yes, it's different enough that I could see USB driver problems.

Maybe you can get Ubuntu or some other free Linux running on it? Would that help? It might even work with the USB WLAN card

[yesthattom.livejournal.com]

Linux... ha ha ha ha. No, I'm trying to make them self-sufficient.

[thefoxes.livejournal.com]

Using bittorrent, you can download an "all windows" 2 disc dvd set. The last one I downloaded had everything from 1.0 to 2003 server. You can also burn standalone installation cds/diskettes.

Well, dude

[mrfantasy.livejournal.com]

supposedly Ubuntu is easy and friendly. Their homepage has freshly-scrubbed beautiful people holding hands!

[lovingboth]

I have been very pleasantly surprised how naive users respond to being given Ubuntu. Web browsing, email, word processing/office = they're sorted.

It's only people like us who want to twiddle until it's broken :)

[xeger.livejournal.com]

Searching on google says that it's "Windows 98 Second Edition". Searching google for information about upgrading from Windows 98 to Windows 98SE finds the comment that it's a paid upgrade - and also that it's fairly easy to find and cheap, depending on where you look, and whether you have Windows 98 already.

... which suggests that it should be fairly straightforward to obtain the Windows 98 SE Upgrade online, with a bit of hunting. This of course may not help if you're not currently able to get online.

[whitebird.livejournal.com]

Windows 98 Second Edition fixed a lot of marginally broken things in the original release of Windows 98. Think of it as a for-pay service pack release, and you're just about right. If you're going to go about installing a new version of Windows, I'd recommend using 2000, or XP, if you can. Windows ME (millenium edition), however, sucks big donkey dong in a big messy way, so avoid it like the plague it is.

A new computer, with Windows OS (usually XP Home) is roughly $400 these days for a minimal system that will be a great improvement over the current piece of hardware, if you're going about getting a donation.

[yesthattom.livejournal.com]

Would XP Home work well on a Pentimum II?

[whitebird.livejournal.com]

Well, probably not. Windows 2000 probably would, however.

[misteropinion.livejournal.com]

Very very likely yes. I (unfortunately) have a lot of P-II + W2K in the office.

[lovingboth]

With some more memory.

[lordlnyc.livejournal.com]

I don't know myself but I will ask my co-workers tomorrow. Maybe I can find an Upgrade disk that might be hanging around.

[bruhinb.livejournal.com]

Every 501(c)(3) recognized organization needs a copy of this.

[sfo2lhr.livejournal.com]

Would anyone like to just donate a couple thousand dollars so I can get this non-profit a modern PC?

A couple thousand!?!

There are perfectly good brand new computers for under $500. My Dell server, which handles email for a bunch of people, and serves web for a dozen or so small domains, cost $299 new. (OK, that's without Windows, since it runs Linux. But still.)

[yesthattom.livejournal.com]

The sentence was originally "a couple million" to be funny, but then I changed it to "thousand", which was less funny. Oh well.

For a couple thousand you could fund the PC as well as the projects that it will be used for.

[lilbjorn.livejournal.com]

For a couple of thousand you could buy the PC and the extra software needed to make it useful.

[dr-memory.livejournal.com]

a. What is SE?

"Special Edition" if memory serves, which I believe was really just what they called "service pack 1" in those days. I think the primary "specialness" was that USB drivers (woo, modern!) were included in SE.

b. Am I fucked?

Yes, very. Win98 officially fell off the MSFT support treadmill a while back now, in the "no more security patches, ever" sense. You don't want to put that thing anywhere NEAR a functional internet connection.

Moreover, the entire Win95/98/ME family of DOS-on-crack OSen is all officially dead and off support, so your odds of getting a modern peripheral to have proper driver support for it are slim to none.

c. Can anyone near North Brunswick (GSP exit 129ish) loan me the right disc?

I wouldn't know. :)

d. Would anyone like to just donate a couple thousand dollars so I can get this non-profit a modern PC so I don’t have to deal with any of this?

Couple thousand? Do the monitor and keyboard function? Apple usually has refurbished Mac Minis on sale for $500-650, and the G4 Minis can be found for $350-400 on ebay.

[dr-memory.livejournal.com]

An addendum: Windows 2000 SP6 will run semi-comfortably in 128MB of RAM. If you can squeeze a little more memory into that box, that would at least be a step in the right direction, and would almost certainly fix the immediate problem of getting the wireles dongle working.

By the way, in case it's not entirely clear, MSFT has been selling two entirely different operating systems over the past decade:

DOS -> Windows 1.0->3.1 -> Win95 -> Win98 -> WinME

Windows NT 3.0 -> 3.51 -> 4.0 -> Windows 2000 -> Windows XP

Both OSes supported some of the same API libraries, making it possible for software written for one to (sometimes) work on the other , but the underlying technology was VERY different: big chunks of Win95/98/ME were still just a 32bit-ified version of DOS with dodgy memory management, while the NT family was a Real OS(tm) that was effectively VMS' spiritual sucessor.

For most of its life, the NT family was targeted as a server/business-workstation OS while the Win95 family was sold to home users and gamers. XP was where they finally put a stake in the heart of the DOS-based family and started using the same kernel everywhere. (Frankly, they should have done it 18 months earlier and spared the world the abortion known as WinME, but oh well.)

And while I do think that a Mac Mini is probably the best possible solution for them, if they're married to Windows for application reasons, Dell Dimension desktops start at around $350 these days.

[yesthattom.livejournal.com]

Yes, I know the Win95 vs NT families. At Bell Labs we skipped directly to the NT stuff, which may have been harder on the sysadmins but turned out to be much better on the users. As a result, I missed the whole 95/98/98SE stuff.

I found a 2.4Ghz P4 on ebay for very little money. I've bid on it and will donate it to the group.

[dr-memory.livejournal.com]

At Bell Labs we skipped directly to the NT stuff, which may have been harder on the sysadmins but turned out to be much better on the users.

Heh. Heh. Heh. Three gigs ago, I was head of IT for a shop where the desktops were a mix of Win98SE and Windows 2000. Trust me: it was better for you and the users. The amazing thing to me about Microsoft's current position in the OS market isn't that NT succeeded -- there's actually a bunch of good things you can say about NT -- it's that nobody else managed to kick their ass during the Win95/98 era, because those things were every bit as bad as their reputation had it.

[sweh.livejournal.com]

As others have said, you can get a new PC for a lot less than that. Frell, you can get a Dell for under $600. Heh, from their outlet store, P4-2.8Ghz (Pentium D dual core, it claims), 250Gb SATA, 1Gb RAM for $460.

I've got a PIII-500 sitting around in my junk pile 'cos I can't think of what to do with it. I might just make sure it's fully wiped and freecycle it. Not worth trying to build anything on it.

[auntiemisha.livejournal.com]

I upgraded to win 98 second edition at some point so I probably have a disk somewhere. BUT I am totally frazzled due to something else and have managed to jam open a file cabinet drawer, drop a keyboard and a glass on the floor (don't ask) while searching so perhaps I will take this up again in the morning before I injure myself or cause the neighbors to bang on the walls.

I also have several game CDs that only work (er, are cleanly playable) on the SE machine. Of course THOSE I found right away. :-)

Perhaps a cheaper new computer would be better? *Jumps on the bandwagon*

[nooks.livejournal.com]

It's "Second Edition". As someone whose ability to eat used to depend on his ability to to 98 -> 93SE -> 2000 -> XP upgrades, I'd say that yes, your chance of getting the driver to work is basically zero (though check with the manufacturer for a revised edition of the driver) but the upgrade to SE is easy and harmless if you know how to do it without wiping the hard drive.

(In case you're wondering, my estimate of the likelihood of the driver working comes from the implication that the driver hasn't ever been tested with Vanilla '98, and the fact that unlike a real operating system, 98 comes with almost no tools that would be useful at telling you what was really going wrong (though later editions of Windows do, somewhat).

[mbarr.livejournal.com]

There is one other thing you can do. Assuming you've ditched the idea of a Linux, etc... go with a wireless Game Adapter or the like- they are basically an access point switched into a bridge mode to yield a fully functional wired ethernet connection to the wireless net.

On the other hand, if they want a slightly older than current laptop, i've got one here for donation to some nice cause... It doesn't do battery at all,but it should work OK for them.

[tactisle.livejournal.com]

I saw in the comments that you're solving the problem with a whole new PC (*grin*), but I just wanted to mention... I'm near North Brunswick and have a bit of a collection of middle-aged PC hardware and software. Including, somewhere in the basement, a copy of the USB-support update for first-edition Win98.

And yes, the Win3-based stuff -was- hell on admins too; the only people it was (allegedly) easy on were accountants, as half-assed self-taught Win9x support techs were a dime a dozen. You had to pay a lot more to get half-assed NT help, and they were usually hamstrung by the MCSE course into thinking NT was hard.

(why yes, I did move up from data entry into Win3x tech support in 1991 with no pay raise, why do you ask?)

[yesthattom.livejournal.com]

I might tag you when it installs and I need tips :)

[kathdem.livejournal.com]

Everyone else has answered your questions about SE (oh yes, I was pretty much on that team).

I would recommend getting the non-profit an account on techsoup.org - they can get brandy dandy new copies of various software for cheap cheap cheap. However, as you mention, the PC they have cannot run any of the new OSes. Also on techsoup is this: http://www.techsoup.org/stock/rci/default.asp.

Does said non-profit have anyone on the board that works for a medium sized business that regularly depreciates its hardware? That's where my non-profit gets hardware.

Bottom line -it's not terribly responsible to set up a business (any business) with Windows 98 because it's much less secure and business ready than XP or 2000. Moreover, as was also mentioned, there is no more support available.

[yesthattom.livejournal.com]

> Everyone else has answered your questions about SE (oh yes, I was
> pretty much on that team).

What was you??? :-)

Thanks for the tip about techsoup.org. I'll check that out.

> Does said non-profit have anyone on the board that works for a
> medium sized business that regularly depreciates its hardware?
> That's where my non-profit gets hardware.

That's how I ended up with this box :-)

> Bottom line -it's not terribly responsible to set up a
> business (any business) with Windows 98 because it's much less
> secure and business ready than XP or 2000. Moreover, as was
> also mentioned, there is no more support available.

That's a really good point. In fact, that's the argument I'm going to use with the board. Thanks for helping me there.

Tom

[kathdem.livejournal.com]

Hehe, if you've just gotten that box, the company in question doesn't upgrade hardware too often.

Yeah, Techsoup is great - their prices on Microsoft stuff are better than employee prices.

You can run Windows 2000 on a PII box. You may even be able to run XP. Here are the sysreqs for XP: http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/pro/upgrading/sysreqs.mspx. I would concur with another commenter, though, that you want to upgrade the memory if you can.