Windows 98 in 2011?

Yes, you read that correctly – Windows98…

My wife teaches a thirteen-student gymnastic’s home-school that depends heavily on online content, each student having their own computer.  She recently added another student, who is currently on a different curriculum but still has a need for internet content, and who has to share another student’s computer when one is available.   The school had several old Pentium3, Windows98, computers, that were previously used for a daycare, that she thought they might be able to use so, of course, she brought three of them to her IT department (me) to look at.

My first thought was to install a lightweight Linux operating system and let them use that but, since these are probably only going to run until the end of the current school year, I thought they might spend too much time learning how to use Linux and would probably just shut them down in frustration.  So, I decided to stick with Win98 and see what I could do.  I went through each of the PCs and decided on the two most “powerful” ones – both P3’s with 128M of RAM and 10G hard drives.

First, I deleted all of the old games and software, including Nortan Antivirus 2000, then ran the disk cleanup and defragment.  Then, after finding each was running IE5, I focused on how to install a more current browser.

The first challenge here was just getting these old computers online.  I have several old ethernet cards laying around but was unable to install any of them because of compatibility issues with Win98 using the drivers that are currently available.  Since they actually use USB wireless network adapters at her school, I asked my wife to bring a couple of spare ones home the next day.  These Encore 802.11g USB wireless adapters were extremely easy to install once I downloaded the software because they still had the Win98 drivers!  I downloaded the software, installed it, rebooted and was able to connect to one of my wireless routers right away.

I soon found that current browsers are not compatible with Windows98 UNLESS you install a nifty little, open-source, compatibility program called KernelEx.  During installation of KernelEx, it told me that I should install The Microsoft Layer for Unicode on Windows 95/98/Me Systems.  After installing the Layer for Unicode, I was able to complete the KernelEx installation.  Following that, I found that installing Firefox 3.6 was a breeze.  I kind of wish there was more of a story there but there isn’t.  Firefox installed, and is currently running on both computers, with no problem whatsoever.

The only issue left was installing an antivirus program.  I tried AVG and Avira but both are a little bulky for the limited resources of these PCs.  So, I opted for the install of little old ClamWin since I occasionally use ClamAV on my Linux machines.  I set it for twice a week full scans and, voila, they have two internet capable machines that they can use for the rest of the school year.