I have an ancient W98 machine on which I play vintage games. Although I rarely use the internet on this machine for sites other than GB, I would really like to be able to use it to access other sites.
Following advice that I received from GB (Jenny100, I think), I switched to Avast anti virus about a year ago when AVG stopped support for W98, but it seems that Avast has now gone the same way. I received a message from them that my licence had expired, but when I tried to re-activate it, I was informed that "..had expected a newer version of Windows" and would I please update Windows.
This would kind of defeat the object of the exercise, for obvious reasons.
Are there any other free AV programs available for W98? I tried Microsoft Security Essentials but it won't download.

petert

My lowly opinion would be that I wouldn't use Windows 98 to access the internet under any circumstances. I do have a 98SE computer and I only use it for legacy gaming - no internet at all. MS Security Essentials is only for operating systems that Microsoft still supports - which only go back to XP. I did a bit of looking around and I didn't see anything that I would trust.

Maybe someone else knows of a program for Win 98.

I don't know of any free ones other than Clamwin.
http://www.clamwin.com/

Clamwin doesn't do real time scanning. You have to manually scan or schedule it to scan in order to look for viruses. That may be an advantage for a gaming computer because it won't conflict with running a game. But it's not as secure as a real time scanner that can catch things before they get on your computer.

There may be others, but I'm not familiar with any.
Clamwin is based on clamav, which has been used as an antivirus for computers using Linux for years. Even though Linux might be unaffected by most viruses, Linux users didn't want to pass them on to Windows computers so clamav was developed.

Be very careful where you browse in Windows 98 and be sure to disable VBscript.
http://www.sophos.com/support/knowledgebase/article/10359.html
Unless you do programming, you'll never use it. But there are viruses that use it to infect.
You can also remove or rename the wscript.exe file in C:\Windows

You can catch viruses just by browsing to a particular website. Even a trusted wesite can be hacked and have malicious scripting added.

To secure your web browser, you might try installing an older version of Firefox (version 2) and then try to get the NoScript addon for it. That will block most malicious attempts to hijack your computer through your web browser just by browsing.

Thanks to both of you. I have disabled VBScript and installed Clamwin, but shall only connect to the internet in extremis. Henceforth the machine shall be known as BOGIF - Battered Old Gamecomp(internet free).

petert

Love it, Petert!

petert,
My 98 does not go on the net at any time. It is for gameing only. No if GOG would just do Mummy, Beyond Time, ect. ect I wouldn't have it in the shop for a bit of work. But's it still one of my babies.
Charllotte