Virus Guy  news:m6gc4f$jug$1@speranza.aioe.org Sat, 
13 Dec 2014 03:38:19 GMT in alt.comp.anti-virus, wrote the following 
message:

> FredW wrote:
>  
>> 40 Reasons Why People Think They DON'T Need An Antivirus
> 
> And not one of them is:
> 
> 41. You run windows 98, a version of windows that (by design or just 
>     dumb luck) is incredibly less vulnerable to remote exploit and
>     control, heap sprays and buffer over-runs as its supposedly more
>     superior and "secure" NT cousins.  You've seen browser exploits
>     and droppers fail miserably as they try to hook themselves into
>     an imaginary service handler or make calls to non-existant 
API's.

You're insane. Seriously. it's not by design or dumb luck. It's due to 
the fact that the OS is for practical intents and purposes, extinct. 
When it was still popular and actively abused, plenty of malware was 
written to deal with it. Some of it still works just fine. Think of 
browser addons and various viruses/trojans.

Most malware unless it's doing something NT only specific will have no 
problems running on windows 9x/Me.

Think of actual viruses (they have a blast on win9x, no real security 
to evade other than whatever resident AV the person might have; and a 
behavior blocker or two, if the person is using one).

Since there's no real protected memory area, any program can stomp on 
anothers running space. So even if you have memory resident 
AV/behavior blockers, the properly crafted malicious code can still 
locate, stomp on, and take your box from you, with very little hassle 
compared to an NT OS. Windows 9x doesn't make you immune from malware. 

You're passing very bad advice when you tell people otherwise. Not to  
mention the total waste of new hardware being forced to run it. 
Windows 9x can't take advantage of multi core CPus or machines that 
are actually running more than one physical processor (as this one 
is). it's unable to run in SMP mode under windows9x. So, I'm 
effectively wasting an entire processor in my case if I were to run 
windows9x real, outside of virtualization.

It cannot read 4gigabytes of memory, either. It cannot remain online 
without a hard reset for more than 40 days at a time, assuming NO apps 
crashed the entire OS between the 40 day time. This machine hasn't 
been reset or powered down in atleast five months now. It was powered 
down the last time to changeout a failed power supply.

I could stick this machine in a closet, without a monitor, and, it 
would continue to run for years without being restarted (pending 
hardware failure) as a dedicated network file server. Your windows9x 
machine would require me to physically deal with it, atleast every 
fourty days; assuming no apps crashed the entire OS beforehand.

In most cases, even if an app does go down on this NT machine, it 
doesn't take the entire OS with it. The same cannot be said for 
windows 9x machines.









-- 
My truck does not leak. It's just marking its territory! 
--- NewsGate v1.0 gamma 2