Win98

[Paul Conrad]

Zero support for it here. Why doesn't the client upgrade?

"The clue train passed his station without stopping." - John Simmons / outlaw programmer "Real programmers just throw a bunch of 1s and 0s at the computer to see what sticks" - Pete O'Hanlon

[Chris Losinger]

we just stopped supporting it for one of our apps. but not explicitly, rather, we decided we needed a certain version of SHLWAPI which isn't available on anything pre Win2K.

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[Hans Dietrich]

Paul Conrad wrote:

Why doesn't the client upgrade?

It's a retail app. It's the client's customers who have to upgrade, and my client doesn't want to ditch them.

Best wishes, Hans

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[Paul Conrad]

I gotcha now. Your client should show the customer why they need to move up from Win98. Help them by giving them convincing evidence and hope the customer goes with it.

"The clue train passed his station without stopping." - John Simmons / outlaw programmer "Real programmers just throw a bunch of 1s and 0s at the computer to see what sticks" - Pete O'Hanlon

[Mike Dimmick]

That link's for w3schools own pages - you won't find many non-web-developers hanging out there. Net Applications' Market Share site[^], which has a wider spread of sites providing data, reckons 0.43% and that's a drop from 0.98% this time last year. However, it's more important to find out from the client how many of their customers still use Windows 98 and whether they can be expected to upgrade. I'd be surprised if it was that many, since it's now 10 years old, but some organizations (public sector, charities) may just stick with old PCs if they're still getting use out of them. (Personally I'd recommend everyone gets at least XP SP2 and keeps it regularly updated if venturing onto the Internet.)

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[Phil J Pearson]

I never supported Win98. I went straight from 95 (and 95 OSR2) to 2000.

Phil

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[El Corazon]

Hans Dietrich wrote:

Just curious how many of you still support Win98 versions of software.

at least one project I know of still supports DOS. I have to keep a copy of my ancient DOS user interface libraries used to build that code set, just in case they should ever have problems.

_________________________ Asu no koto o ieba, tenjo de nezumi ga warau. Talk about things of tomorrow and the mice in the ceiling laugh. (Japanese Proverb) John Andrew Holmes "It is well to remember that the entire universe, with one trifling exception, is composed of others."

[Nemanja Trifunovic]

At my previous job, we were just considering giving up on Win98 when I left (this January). Now it is only XP and Vista :)

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[Mike Poz]

You could have your client's salesman (salesperson?)walk from Win98 machine to Win98 machine that is "password locked" and press the ESC key, then start copying data off the systems. Show them how insecure the OS really is because it only supports FAT/FAT32 and all data on the systems can be read after booting from a DOS floppy disc. Just a thought...

Mike Poz

[Jeslan]

Computers that are used by low-paid employees (such as retail clerks and call center people) rarely get upgraded. Then again, not many of us ever have to write applications for such systems (because the people responsible for not upgrading the computers and operating systems are also responsible for not upgrading the sales applications, too). In the early 2000's I had a call center job over Christmas that still used a sales application made by IBM around 1980 or so. Ridiculous hours were spent teaching people to use the system and making up for the errors that people caused (due to the system not being intuitive). I also got a new phone at Fry's Electronics last weekend, and I had to wait 30 minutes or so for the sales guy to stumble through the DOS-looking user interface and eventually call his manager in to help (who also had trouble with the thing).

[Anna Jayne Metcalfe]

Nope. We start with Windows 2000 (but recommend Windows 2008 ;)).

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[peterchen]

Someone just a week ago tried to install our software on a Win98 system. It phailed :D

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[Roger Wright]

I no longer accept clients running Win98, or DOS for that matter. It makes good business sense to resist the urge to upgrade every few weeks, but there is such a thing as carrying a good thought too far. Sadly, many good potential customers are locked into custom solutions that are entirely dependent on obsolete platforms. Convincing them to allow assimilation is always a challenge, and rarely in the customer's best interest.

"A Journey of a Thousand Rest Stops Begins with a Single Movement"

[Mike Dimmick]

I primarily write handheld software, and the company mainly does contract work. We still support our thin client on DOS-based devices, but because of the environment they're used in (retail, warehouses), there's always a large amount of attrition as the devices get dropped and run over (handheld + forklift = flat handheld). They're more robust than consumer handhelds, but they do break and require replacement. The Restriction of Hazardous Substances regulations required many devices to be redesigned and the manufacturers decided that redesigning the DOS devices would be uneconomic. Many of our customers are therefore slowly moving over to Windows CE-based devices as they find it ever harder to replace or repair damaged devices. There's a certain amount of used equipment out there - either from someone else who's replaced all their old gear or through liquidation - but of course a limited supply implies a high price, and adopting the CE equipment, even if it requires a rewrite, is cheaper long-term. We have a porting library for Symbol Series 3000 C APIs which, if source is available for the old application, usually allows a fairly cheap port (so we charge per-device royalties for the library). I still need the DOS tools and Series 3000 libraries to verify that any modifications work on both types of device, where the customer is doing a phased roll-out. I can see the time coming soon when the thin client software drops support for Series 3000 (mainly to remove time spent on validation). On the server side, the thin-client server software removed support for Windows 9x a few years ago; the minimum is currently NT 4.0 but I think we may drop that soon. There's a small push for WCF in other, thick-client applications, which will of course require Windows Server 2003 SP1 minimum.

DoEvents: Generating unexpected recursion since 1991