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Windows 98 antivirus

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First post, by fractal5

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I don't need to be educated that Windows 98 is insecure and always will be.

I just would like a suggestion for what antivirus is recommended on Windows 98, these days. By these days, I mean, something that comes with a nice offline database that doesn't try to seek out definitions or require online functionality that is long deprecated. The intended use case is that instead of moving stuff to a modern computer, checking it with virustotal or clamav -- I'd like to have some minimum sanity check of sorts on the Windows 98 computer itself. I might run various utilities on an old CDR.

While this isn't a critical system in any way, I'd still rather not have to mess with unwanted side effects from malware. This seems like a low cost effort to mitigate that, a little bit.

Reply 1 of 9, by dormcat

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IIRC Avast 4.8.1368 (released in November 2009) was the last Avast officially supported for Win9x.

Reply 3 of 9, by fractal5

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dormcat wrote on 2023-06-30, 23:00:

IIRC Avast 4.8.1368 (released in November 2009) was the last Avast officially supported for Win9x.

Thanks for the suggestion, this one unfortunately didn't work, "not enough thread space" or something like that.

Reply 4 of 9, by dormcat

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fractal5 wrote on 2023-06-30, 23:52:

Thanks for the suggestion, this one unfortunately didn't work, "not enough thread space" or something like that.

"Not enough space for thread data"? How much RAM do you have?

Reply 5 of 9, by jakethompson1

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F-Prot was another that supported DOS, and then Windows 9x, up until the bitter end. I believe until around 2007 or so. But they are out of business entirely now, I think.

Reply 7 of 9, by fractal5

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This is the error, if anyone is curious, happens with all the oldest versions I could find on oldversion.com (including the very oldest): "r6016 not enough space for thread data windows 98"

Reply 8 of 9, by shevalier

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Backup?
It's faster to recover than to defend.

Aopen MX3S, PIII-S Tualatin 1133, Radeon 9800Pro@XT BIOS, Audigy 4 SB0610
JetWay K8T8AS, Athlon DH-E6 3000+, Radeon HD2600Pro AGP, Audigy 2 Value SB0400
Gigabyte Ga-k8n51gmf, Turion64 ML-30@2.2GHz , Radeon X800GTO PL16, Diamond monster sound MX300

Reply 9 of 9, by fractal5

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shevalier wrote on 2023-07-01, 11:43:

Backup?
It's faster to recover than to defend.

I have backup.

The use cases are: Install Windows 98, install some games, utilities and programs, some of which are shareware and freeware, from various CDRs and miscellaneous places, e.g. I might find one utility online, I might find another on an old CDR. I just want to see them again, for nostalgic reasons.

If I don't have any antivirus, I might get some old malware that is easily identifiable through signatures and the benefit of this, over reinstalling from backup, is that:

* I don't need to spend time on reinstalling.

* I don't need to reinstall, without knowing what caused the issue in the first place.

And yes, there's the downside, that:

* The antivirus might not identify it at all.

* I have to spend time on finding a working antivirus.

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