archsan wrote:

^Security. And I don't have that hobby. 😀

With security through obsecurity the risk is minimal. The convenience of being able to download things directly far outways
any risks.

Seriously? I suppose it might be with Win7 and later. What happens is, on the 98 machine you browse network neighborhood and connect to a share. It eventually pauses and finally errors out, perhaps after showing a partial file listing. I spent a lot of time reading forum posts about it but never got it working. I just use a USB stick for transfers / storage now.

I can confirm I cannot access a W7 share. It doesn't even come close to listing a directory listing though.
I can see the machine in network neighborhood but clicking it causes

"The computer or sharename could not be found. Make sure you typed it correctly, and try again."

And net use J: \\192.168.1.9\<sharename>
fails with error 31
--edit---
Hold on. I figured it out.

Had to turn off password protected sharing (obviously a security risk)
but I can access W7 shares from 98 just fine

smeezekitty wrote:

archsan wrote:

^Security. And I don't have that hobby. 😀

With security through obsecurity the risk is minimal.

Security by obscurity? Minimal risk? Ehm I'll call that security by luck. To never ever catch some decent exploit kits as you freely roam the internet--yeah, good luck. 😀

For goddamn windows, NO EXPOSURE is minimal risk.

The convenience of being able to download things directly far outways
any risks.

Any risk?

Limiting usage to (offline) games only, not having to spend too much effort to maintain/cleanup the system, not having to reinstall/recover stuff due to avoidable infections, ... these are the long term convenience for me.

By far the most problems with malware and attacks has been with Windows XP

Every other windows version (3.1-7) has been minor issues at best. I don't hesitate to put my old machines online

smeezekitty wrote:

I can confirm I cannot access a W7 share. It doesn't even come close to listing a directory listing though. I can see the machin […]
Show full quote

I can confirm I cannot access a W7 share. It doesn't even come close to listing a directory listing though.
I can see the machine in network neighborhood but clicking it causes

"The computer or sharename could not be found. Make sure you typed it correctly, and try again."

And net use J: \\192.168.1.9\<sharename>
fails with error 31
--edit---
Hold on. I figured it out.

Had to turn off password protected sharing (obviously a security risk)
but I can access W7 shares from 98 just fine

I'm sure I disabled password protected sharing simply because otherwise I never would have seen a directory listing since it would have been demanding authentication.

swaaye wrote:

smeezekitty wrote:

I can confirm I cannot access a W7 share. It doesn't even come close to listing a directory listing though. I can see the machin […]
Show full quote

I can confirm I cannot access a W7 share. It doesn't even come close to listing a directory listing though.
I can see the machine in network neighborhood but clicking it causes

"The computer or sharename could not be found. Make sure you typed it correctly, and try again."

And net use J: \\192.168.1.9\<sharename>
fails with error 31
--edit---
Hold on. I figured it out.

Had to turn off password protected sharing (obviously a security risk)
but I can access W7 shares from 98 just fine

I'm sure I disabled password protected sharing simply because otherwise I never would have seen a directory listing since it would have been demanding authentication.

Huh. That's weird.
Seemed to work fine. I could read and write files and it didn't seem too slow (considering the 98 machine is a 486 with 64MB RAM and 10M ethernet)

smeezekitty wrote:

Huh. That's weird.
Seemed to work fine. I could read and write files and it didn't seem too slow (considering the 98 machine is a 486 with 64MB RAM and 10M ethernet)

I will have to mess around with it again someday.

I wonder if the problem might be something like a character set incompatibility with filenames in the shared directory...

Big thanks for your very helpful replies!

I'd personally prefer a gaming notebook with Windows 98 SE, XP is kinda not retro enough. I figured out that there are unfortunately no audio and chipset drivers available for Windows 98 concerning the linked Medion (Aldi) Notebook. Anyway, would a GeForce 2 Go even be sufficient for older Direct3D games? My personal benchmark were games like Blood 2, Jedi Knight or Quake II.

Thank you!

The GeForce 2 Go is DirectX7-class and TnL capable so yes, it should do well with all of those games.

Mr.Blade wrote:

I'd personally prefer a gaming notebook with Windows 98 SE, XP is kinda not retro enough.

Eww. If you're planning on running some games that are known not to work well in XP, that's one thing, but for $deity's sake don't let your decisions be driven by whether or not something is "retro enough". You'll save yourself a great deal of anguish.

Anyway, would a GeForce 2 Go even be sufficient for older Direct3D games? My personal benchmark were games like Blood 2, Jedi Knight or Quake II.

Probably.

Jorpho wrote:

Mr.Blade wrote:

I'd personally prefer a gaming notebook with Windows 98 SE, XP is kinda not retro enough.

Eww. If you're planning on running some games that are known not to work well in XP, that's one thing, but for $deity's sake don't let your decisions be driven by whether or not something is "retro enough". You'll save yourself a great deal of anguish.

I agree. You could split the difference and run Windows 2000. W2K is based on the NT core so it can use newer hardware effectively without croaking
But if you do that you will miss out on XP security patches if you do that.
Unfortunately there are quite a few games that only work on 98.

smeezekitty wrote:

I agree. You could split the difference and run Windows 2000. W2K is based on the NT core so it can use newer hardware effective […]
Show full quote

Jorpho wrote:

Mr.Blade wrote:

I'd personally prefer a gaming notebook with Windows 98 SE, XP is kinda not retro enough.

Eww. If you're planning on running some games that are known not to work well in XP, that's one thing, but for $deity's sake don't let your decisions be driven by whether or not something is "retro enough". You'll save yourself a great deal of anguish.

I agree. You could split the difference and run Windows 2000. W2K is based on the NT core so it can use newer hardware effectively without croaking
But if you do that you will miss out on XP security patches if you do that.
Unfortunately there are quite a few games that only work on 98.

Is there a list of win 9x era games that cannot run on Xp or newer OS?

XP is pretty damn compatible with older games, it's only when you get on Win 7+ that many older games really start to break. As far as XP is concerned though, most old games run pretty flawlessly.

That laptop may have a bunch of driver issues (especially regarding the audio), so after capping the RAM, you might not have any audio or proper video. Should be possible to run though.

archsan wrote:

I wouldn't even try to get win9x online.

I do sometimes, works fine. If you're under a firewall and don't go on 'bad' websites there is no security risk, no greater than XP or 7 considering that the OS is so old, not many people bother with it anymore. I use a newer version of opera (I think it's 10 or 9) for 98SE. Allows me to do a lot, actually.

If you're that paranoid about security, don't use windows and use something like AIX. I know some people who use PS/2 model 25s for banking.

raymangold wrote:

That laptop may have a bunch of driver issues (especially regarding the audio), so after capping the RAM, you might not have any […]
Show full quote

That laptop may have a bunch of driver issues (especially regarding the audio), so after capping the RAM, you might not have any audio or proper video. Should be possible to run though.

archsan wrote:

I wouldn't even try to get win9x online.

I do sometimes, works fine. If you're under a firewall and don't go on 'bad' websites there is no security risk, no greater than XP or 7 considering that the OS is so old, not many people bother with it anymore. I use a newer version of opera (I think it's 10 or 9) for 98SE. Allows me to do a lot, actually.

If you're that paranoid about security, don't use windows and use something like AIX. I know some people who use PS/2 model 25s for banking.

It's not even really about the OS anymore in many ways. And since most people are behind routers, which is a natural firewall, older worms and malware that used to get in are no longer really relevant. Almost every "random" exploit these days is from web based malware exploiting the brower or its plugins. Just get a secure browser and plugins and you can use whatever to be honest.

GeorgeMan wrote:

Is there a list of win 9x era games that cannot run on Xp or newer OS?

The more popular a game is, the more likely it is that someone has managed to come up with some kind of patch to fix it in XP or newer. And the more popular a game is, the more likely you are to have any interest in it.

Well, you're right, actually every game developed for Windows 98 works fine on XP, with a few exceptions of course. On the other hand, I could even install Windows XP on my current notebook with a GeForce 420M and a Core i3-370M as a second OS. Afaik there are still drivers for XP for this Nvidia graphics chip and chipset, even WiFi would work fine. Only the CPU is probably too fast for some old games, sometimes they run a bit strange with a too high framerate (Perhaps it could be fixed with Dxtory).

What do you think?

Mr.Blade wrote:

Well, you're right, actually every game developed for Windows 98 works fine on XP, with a few exceptions of course. On the other hand, I could even install Windows XP on my current notebook with a GeForce 420M and a Core i3-370M as a second OS. Afaik there are still drivers for XP for this Nvidia graphics chip and chipset, even WiFi would work fine. Only the CPU is probably too fast for some old games, sometimes they run a bit strange with a too high framerate (Perhaps it could be fixed with Dxtory).

What do you think?

Don't be so sure on that. "Every" means no exceptions. If you said most I would agree
I know of some 9x games that do not work right on XP.

One rare game that I can think of off the top of my head is called "The day the world broke"
The disk ships with a 3.1 and Win 95 version. It runs on XP but hangs during parts of the game
making it impossible to finish. It doesn't work at all on Vista/7

archsan wrote:

Anyway, try IBM Thinkpad T42(p) with ATI Mobility Radeon 9600 for an example of a notebook with Win9x drivers readily downloadable from the manufacturer's website (well, Lenovo in this case, not IBM). This was a 2004/2005 model IIRC.

Hi. Do you know for sure that those drivers will work with W98 and Radeon 9600 version of T42? Because in WinNT drivers' readme file it says "(Mobility RADEON/RADEON 7500/9000) ... (Mobility RADEON 9600)", Win2000/XP's readme file says "ATI MOBILITY RADEON 7500 ... ATI MOBILITY RADEON 9000 ... ATI MOBILITY RADEON 9600", but in Win98/ME's readme file there is only "(Mobility RADEON/RADEON 7500) ... (Mobility RADEON 9000)"... So, no 9600 for 98/ME?

I've tried to find a Radeon 9000 version here in Finland but have only found several 7500's and only one 9600, which I would buy of course if I only knew if the drivers will work or not...

Considering there's hardly a new laptop loaded with Win9x (with the latest hardware) after 2002.... there probably wasn't any testing for the 9x support enough to write about it. From here on it's totally an AT YOUR OWN RISK kind of thing.

Also don't use Outlook Express and don't impulsively open random VBS attachments that come your way 🤣