Win 98SE help

[jjmclean]

I still have a couple tp600 laptops and one 300pl desktop running Win98SE and IE 6 /
SP-1. It has become almost impossible to work online with these machines (Example: on this site, the home page took forever and ever to load enough I could click on "Forums" but then after I get in the forums it works fairly decent). I realize the videos and graphics are more than my memory and processor can handle but are there any way you can get around this problem?
Thanks for any suggestions.

[jdhurst]

I have a Windows 98SE Virtual Machine and it is working fine. I am using it to work in and post this message. So that said, Windows 9X (any of them) are remarkably insecure machines. One possibility then, is that it has a bad case of malware. Check for that and see. .... JDH

[dr_st]

Actually, by today, I'd say that Win98 machines are actually more secure... Simply because most of the new malware is written to exploit security holes in components, which are not even present in Win98...

But that is just a gut feeling.

One thing that cripples slow CPUs is Flash. I absolutely cannot browse any flash-heavy websites on my old machine, and even a few small banners (like we have here) make it heavy. I disabled flash or blocked it on my old Win98 machine.

[jjmclean]

I dont think it's a virus or malware because one of the tp600s has just had the hard drive formatted and a fresh reload and it's no better than the others. The flash sounds like what problem I'm having. How do you block or disable it?
Thanks

[dr_st]

On IE you can disable it through the Tools -> Manage Addons.

But my preferred solution is using Firefox and the Flashblock addon. Because it allows you to enable a particular flash banner easily (when you want to watch a Youtube clip, for instance).

BTW, I realized that I was not clear in my previous post. The banners on Thinkpad forums are animated GIFs, not Flash. So they shouldn't slow you down. But a flash of equivalent size would.

[jjmclean]

I can get around good in the thinkpad forum but the thinkpad homepage is a different story, I'm on the 98 desktop now and it's working great as long as I stay in the forum section. You mentioned watching youtube, these 98 machines quit working when you start thinking about goiing to a youtube.

[jjmclean]

I went into tools in IE and all I can find is in "advanced" under "multimedia", there's a place you can uncheck "play animations" and "play videos" but nothing that I can find about "flash".

[dr_st]

On IE you can disable it through the Tools -> Manage Addons.

[jjmclean]

IE 6 doesn't have the "Manage Addons" choice. IE 7 does but I have it on my XP machines and it works great, no need to make any changes on them. I may be wrong on this but I don't think IE 7 will work on 98. I've been down that road before and it may be that they didn't work good together. I do know that I went with IE 6 on my last reloads. In IE 6, you can go "Tools", "Internet Options", then "Advanced" and make similar selections there but there's nothing about flash. That's where I disabled videos but that didn't seem to help much. I'm sure there's some way to get these older machines to run at an acceptable speed, just have to keep working with them.

[dr_st]

I've searched a bit, and looks like you are somewhat right. "Manage Addons" for IE6 appears on XP SP2 and later only.

A bit more searching showed the existence of some addons, such as this for disabling flash.

[jjmclean]

Don't know what's wrong. I've downloaded this twice and still can't get it to work. It keeps telling me to update my Windows it needs a later version and the readme specifically says the program is for win 95 and up. Has anyone else tried to install it?

[SAE140]

I've settled for running Win98Lite with Mozilla Firefox 1.5.12 on my Thinkpad 600's and Dell Optiplex GX1/110's desktops. I've got Flashblock 1.5.6 installed, which blocks all Flash as a default, but still gives the ability to run specific Flash items on demand if they are found to be necessary. Zero anti-virus precautions - the (known clean) system is 'Ghosted' from CD prior to logging-on each day. Has worked without fault so far. Very happy with this set-up.