On a tight budget ! Advice please

Conor_3

Marty_J wrote: »

Not really considering that Microsoft no longer release security fixes for Windows 98, and you have to use an older, less secure browser.

Sorry but you're wrong. Current malware is designed to take advantage of exploits in current OSes. These don't exist in Windows 98 as most of the files (dlls etc) and registry entries and services simply do not exist or are used. Current malware is also designed to take advantage of the Windows NT 5.0 kernel flaws, again something which Windows 98 doesn't have. Current malware tends to be designed to hide in the System Restore directory, again something which doesn't exist in Win98. Some malware looks for user files and expects to find them in a specific location and Windows 98 doesn't use the same locations as 2k/XP.

Finally, malware authors write malware to target the biggest number of machines they can as its all about bragging rights and it is this which has left Linux and Mac OS X basically untouched as there's just not the market share to make it worthwhile.

Marty_J

Conor wrote: »

Sorry but you're wrong. Current malware is designed to take advantage of exploits in current OSes. These don't exist in Windows 98 as most of the files (dlls etc) and registry entries and services simply do not exist or are used. Current malware is also designed to take advantage of the Windows NT 5.0 kernel flaws, again something which Windows 98 doesn't have. Current malware tends to be designed to hide in the System Restore directory, again something which doesn't exist in Win98. Some malware looks for user files and expects to find them in a specific location and Windows 98 doesn't use the same locations as 2k/XP.

So you think Windows 98 is more secure than XP?

Finally, malware authors write malware to target the biggest number of machines they can as its all about bragging rights and it is this which has left Linux and Mac OS X basically untouched as there's just not the market share to make it worthwhile.

That has always struck me as being an entirely specious argument. There are millions and millions of Mac and Linux users in the world. If they were as vulnerable as Windows, one would expect that at least some of the thousands upon thousands of malware programmers would write programs targeting them. It would certainly seem a much easier way to distribute your malware, especially considering that most Mac users don't use anti-virus or anti-malware apps on a regular basis. Yet we're to led believe that shooting fish in a barrel "isn't worth it".

And of course, when Microsoft discontinued support for Windows 98, there were still some 70,000,000 users of it. That's a lot of people.