Still running Windows 98?

From the Wash­ing­ton Post: Microsoft has finally ended Win­dows 98 prod­uct sup­port in North Amer­ica. Rob Per­goro of the Wash­ing­ton Post dis­cusses some inex­pen­sive, legal alter­na­tives to a Win­dows XP upgrade.

Any­one who is still run­ning Win­dows 98 needs a real­ity check. The first ver­sion of Win­dows 98 didn’t sup­port USB, and this is a key rea­son many users have upgraded over the years.

Now that Microsoft has stopped issu­ing patches and secu­rity updates, any com­puter run­ning Win­dows 98 is a poten­tial entry point for viruses, worms, and Trojans.

One final rea­son: any com­puter that is run­ning Win­dows 98 is likely to be sev­eral years old right now. On aver­age, desk­top com­put­ers seem to last a few years. Note­book com­put­ers have an even shorter life span. Yet accord­ing to this arti­cle, 3 per­cent of com­put­ers are still run­ning this oper­at­ing system.

Win­dows 98 is an exam­ple of legacy soft­ware that is more of a bur­den than a ben­e­fit in most organizations.

Tagged as: hardware, legacy, malware, Microsoft, security, software, USB, Windows