The little Pentium II laptop I bought for my son has been a real hit with him. He has discovered some of the old Windows 95 games (which run perfectly on Windows 98) like Myst and Chessmaster 4000. So today, I reformatted the hard drive and reinstalled a brand new, clean copy of Windows 98 (the one that came with the computer had been customized a bit – no networking capability, etc.). Which is when I found out that when Microsoft abandons a product, it does so with a vengeance. You can't get an update of any sort from them through Windows Update and the only one I tried to manually download crashed – hard. Internet Explorer 7 does not run on Windows 98 (hence I am using Firefox only at this point.)
But there are unofficial update "service packs" for this old software out there and they appear to work very well indeed. It's a shame that Microsoft has abandoned all the older operating systems – not everyone can afford to upgrade and they are actually hurting themselves in the long run. The older computers and systems could be "feeders" to the newer systems if they remain usable. It isn't a really smart long-term move on their part, I think.
On the other hand, I may just try to make this little old computer into a dual boot system using Xubuntu (a stripped version of Ubuntu meant for older systems). It will take a larger disk drive to do that, but hey, maybe that's the way to go. Ubuntu appears to want to support older computers.
