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Making my life difficult - Windows 98 - advice needed

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iphigenie:
My in laws have been talked into donating one of their old PCs to a lovely old lady, and I am tasked with cleaning it and putting some reasonable basics on it.

Problem is the machine is running win98, and has been gathering dust for a few years now so it has very out of date software and updates on it. I can't seem to be able to download the browser(s) to do anything useful (netscape 4 just refuses to go to any page as it is out of date) or to get any updates.

I know some people use win98 around the forum - either on old machines or as a testing platform, so you might have a collection of links for the updated MS libraries and perhaps basics such as browsers, virus scanners etc. Would love any advice eg small utilities, tricks etc to make it more friendly/up to date.

Browsers: Opera is available for Win98, if the memory fits I might use that (not sure about the memory yet). Amaya is available too. As far as I can tell IE 7 or 8 are not available for win98, neither is ff3. Chrome and Safari don't work. Kmeleon works, i have been told. And I have heard of another browser called "the world". So far that is all. If I dont have the ram for opera it'll be an odd set of choices.

Anti Virus: Clamwin and AVG are the only ones offering a win98 offering that I can tell, at least in the free crowd.

I'm going through a "windows 98" word search on fileforum to see what's available http://fileforum.betanews.com/search?s=windows+98&x=0&y=0
and http://fileforum.betanews.com/search?title=&description=&os[]=15&last_days=&alphabeta=&min_rating=&licenses[]=Freeware&licenses[]=Open+Source&search_advanced=Search+Fileforum

app103:
K-Meleon would be the best choice on 9x. Anything else is outdated or inferior.

As far as getting the updates, there is an unofficial service pack that should have everything from MS in it, and then some, available on this forum...along with any and all info you would need about software for running Win98 in the modern world.

http://www.msfn.org/board/index.php?showforum=8

See the sticky posts in that section for all the info you need.

Oops, forgot the other link with the rest of the goodies that you will most likely be amazed by:

http://www.msfn.org/board/index.php?showforum=91

MilesAhead:
Check this out for old Netscape
http://sillydog.org/narchive/full67.php

Eudora email client old
http://www.eudora.com/email/archive/

btw find out if the old lady is thinking about getting broadband!! If she does she'll prolly overload the file system with a few downloads :)

iphigenie:
Thanks for the links, that'll save me loads of search :) - seems there is loads of stuff to make her a nice machine that is easy to use.

(thankfully my cheapie usb wifi key worked with win98 - 108G too!)

I'm not even sure she has dial up (let alone broadband), but better find out.

Eóin:
What are the specs? If you can upgrade it to just Win2k it'll save a lot of hassle.

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