Re: Anit-Virus help for all of us??????

[William Allen Simpson <wsimpson () greendragon com>]

"Vivien M." wrote:
> > if haveto(M$)
> >       use(W98SE);
>
> Have either of you actually followed this advice?
Yes.


> (30%ish free). That machine got totally unstable needing a reboot after
> about 3 days. On the same hardware (with additional RAM), Win2K could easily
> run 3-4 weeks and run any app I wanted just fine.
ROFL. :-)  My relatives run their machine(s) for a couple of hours and 
turn them off.  My 3000+ customers are primarily dialup, and presumably 
turn them off, too.  If they didn't, the Nachi infections would be much, 
much worse.


> No wonder people think Windows is unreliable. 98SE may be preferable from a
> security-from-external-threats POV, yes, but 

This thread primarily concerns security.


> ... I'll take rebooting every week or two for the latest XP
> security patch any day over rebooting every day or two because Win98SE is an
> unreliable piece of poorly designed legacy junk.
All M$ software is "an unreliable piece of poorly designed legacy junk."  
This is about which piece of junk to recommend to customers, that keeps 
support costs down, and Nachi et alia from showing up.


> The way I see it, there are two uses for 98SE (or 95, 98, Me, etc) in the
> modern world:
> 1) People who use their computers as game-only machines (or who dual boot a
> real OS for non-game purposes)

That's me, personally, for games that are not available for Macs -- 
after all, GreenDragon is a Mac game company!


> 2) Advertising for $OTHER_OS, where $OTHER_OS can be Win2K, XP, or your
> favourite Linux distro with KDE, GNOME, etc. Anything that actually WORKS
> reliably.
Although we do run YellowDog Linux on old Mac hardware for much of  
our server needs, the security monitors and such run NetBSD or OpenBSD.  
Just had a Linux nameserver hacked the other day....

I have horrible, horrible, support experiences with 2K and XP.  Every 
customer that I know runs XP has been infected with one thing or another.  
In the case of 2 DSL customers in particular, they seem to be infected 
again a week or two later, even tho' they swear that they applied all 
the patches.  This has been a major pain in support costs.

My brothers both run XP for Civ3 PTW, and both crash within a half hour 
or so, while the W98 machines just keep running that program all day, 
leading me to host on much slower W98 machines -- contrary to the usual 
instructions.  So, I can personally attest to "actually WORKS reliably."
-- 
William Allen Simpson
    Key fingerprint =  17 40 5E 67 15 6F 31 26  DD 0D B9 9B 6A 15 2C 32