Must have software for windows 98!!

[DarkTXKnight]

I am refurbishing several older PCs (K6,PII\III ) and using win98SE with the service rollup . These machines were built from leftovers and everything works but they have neither the funds nor whatnot to upgrade to Win2k which is just fine since they'll be used for children and light duty etc. I am thinking of putting some of the freeware firewall and antivirus apps on there as well as something like izarc or 7-zip, but wanted to know what else I should find for these machines. In particular some type of OS\FW office app and CDburner programs would be appreciated. Any other tools I didnt think of would be nice as well.

Thanks!

 

[sourceninja]

*cough* linux *cough*

you could get more for your memory/cpu. Its not like they will be playing high end games right?

 

[jjones]

Express Burn

or

DeepBurner
Not sure if it runs on 98SE but it probably does.

Irfanview

 

[SleepWalkerX]

Originally posted by: sourceninja
*cough* linux *cough*

you could get more for your memory/cpu. Its not like they will be playing high end games right?

QFT

 

[DarkTXKnight]

linux would be fine except that these folks have zero linux exeperience and i wont be there to support them. thanks for the advice though. what should i use for some kind of nice word processor?

 

[jjones]

You might take a look at AbiWord.

 

[imported_goku]

If you can get 256MB of ram on that system, windows 2000 with all the updates will run perfectly fine. I've run windows 2000 on a P166 with 128MB of ram and it wasn't "unbareable".

 

[xgsound]

I run win98se with rollup on a 700 Mhz athlon. I use Kerio 2.1.5, AVG current, Winamp 2.8, picasa 2, and winzip 6.3. The machine with these programs is more efficient than a new Dell 2.4 Ghz as delivered, not that that is saying much.

I assume the efficiency would lower rapidly if I tried to use the latest and greatest versions of most of these programs.

For childrens games, http://www.scummvm.org has an emulator for all lucas arts games that works fine. That's Monkey Island, Sam n Max, Fate of Atlantis, Day of the Tentacle, and so on.

For machines of that era, I've found the limiting factor to installing win2000 to be finding functional device drivers for sound cards, modems and such.

Jim

 

[DarkTXKnight]

I actually have had win2k streamlined on a few machines of this vintage and it ran pretty darn good, but the issue is licensing.There are plenty win98 licenses but none for anything else. These are really going to be spare machines wherever they go and no 6-12 y.o. has a NEED for anything more than a somewhat stable OS and a few apps.Also about the Abiword stuff... is it compatible with MS word??? I know that my nieces are already using that in school and so I assume that any child who uses a word processor for anything might as well use something that can at least be taken to another computer and opened if necessary. Thanks for all the replies so far and keep em comin!

 

[Zelmo3]

Originally posted by: jjones
You might take a look at AbiWord.

I wouldn't rely on AbiWord just yet--too many unimplemented features. It's still maturing, but isn't ready for full-time use just yet.
OpenOffice is the de-facto standard OSS office suite. You can grab version 1.1.5 if you need assured stability, but the betas of version 2 have worked nearly perfectly for me (except for the new database program, which might just be my ineptitude with database software) and are now very near release quality.