It's ironic, I've been messing with getting Win9x up and going in a couple of different VM setups lately, going through memory lanes a bit with DOS and Windows 9x. Ultimately planning to get some games going, but still a bit limited in what modern CPUs can truly handle well. One Issue I've absolutely been running into is I'm finding all sorts of things saying you need to install this or that and being oh so friendly as to point the way to Microsoft's official sites or etc and, of course, those things are all gone. The Internet Archive has a lot of stuff, but some just simply aren't possible (for example, a lot of stuff from MS' site simply wasn't archived because of the way it was put behind scripted buttons and etc.) It has, honestly, been kind of a pain and I've had to grab a few things from sources I just wasn't all that sure about. (Though my biggest problem is really DOS stuff rather than Windows stuff.) In a few cases I went ahead and virus scanned, but it makes me paranoid because, would modern AV software even still have signatures for stuff like Windows 9x-specific viruses? Some of these viruses might have 16-bit code which won't even execute on most modern systems (well, I guess a few out there are still running 32-bit, but that is super rare even for embedded devices at this point.) Would AV software even have signatures for viruses that physically can't execute on modern systems? Ironically I've been considering trying to track down old AV software and viruses to look for period viruses. (Maybe an old version of ClamAV.) But so far it seems like it hasn't been all that necessary. Biggest problem I'm running into is the games I most want to see get going again are closer to the Windows XP era of things and emulation just isn't that far yet (or, more specifically and importantly, modern CPUs couldn't possibly emulate a PC processor and GPU fast enough to handle such things anyway.) As we go more and more into all the kernel changes and such that were pushed from 7 on up, more and more legacy stuff is breaking and that means an entire era of gaming is getting harder and harder to even make work with no viable alternatives.
I think at the least I might want this bookmarked in case I need it. I've ultimately tracked down most of what I needed, but it sure could have saved me a lot of pain and suffering searching for alternate links and archived sites. In the entire time I've used the Internet I've never used the Internet Archive all together as much as I've been using it these past few days, lol.
And thats the sort of example I was looking for.
Now....I would NOT subject my medically critical system to OS patches from....'some guy'.
Well, to some extent I agree. Though getting the updates from random spots on the Internet otherwise isn't any better either. Like I said, somewhat can be gotten from the Web archive from what were (presumably) reliable sources 10-15 years ago, but not all. One key thing though that does apply regardless is a lot of really official things do actually have known signatures -- and those can be checked. In some cases it's better than nothing. Especially when you consider that some of these components that have largely disappeared from the Web are necessary for even getting many things to work. For example, there is a Windows Installer update without which many things won't even install.
I do have to say that medical equipment running on Windows 95 or 98 needs to be updated though. Period. Yes I realize how expensive medical equipment is and yes I realize how hard it can be to go through such a process. But nonetheless, Windows 9x is simply not suitable for such a thing even putting aside just how incredibly dated it is. It's simply not stable enough for something so important and can, at any time, even be rendered unbootable by various things (for example, FAT corruption occurred frequently enough to become my bane back in the day.) I'm actually a bit shocked that they chose 9x for such an important task as handling any sort of medical equipment. Even NT4, as limited as it was, would have been a much better choice. Honestly, if it were possible I'd say even DOS would be better, ironically. (Since it's not really multitasking or anything and basically nothing is going on in the background except possibly TSRs doing virtually nothing most of the time anyway, it actually can be pretty darn stable.) That's if you stay solely on the Microsoft side and don't consider the various *nix systems and the like of the time. Actually, honestly, at this point I'd say if you have such equipment running in a mostly working setup it may even be best just to leave it alone and not add updates and such. (Presumably at this point the system is either
heavily firewalled or disconnected from the Internet entirely.
RIGHT??? I would say backup the HD on that thing (there is Ghost and other alternatives even for old systems, but a modern open source alternative should run on that system and can backup to USB) and leave it alone. If anything goes horribly wrong, restore the backup.
That said, if you can do nothing else, you might consider moving it all over to a VM at least if that is possible (not sure how much hardware access it needs.) You could backup the VM image and if anything goes wrong restore the backup, plus moving to other machines would be relatively easy. Though if it needs special hardware access this may not be possible I know. I think some stuff -- such as parallel ports -- does have adapters to get working on modern systems, but the actual compatibility with specialized equipment outside of the very minimal stuff they originally expected (eg mice, printers, etc for such ports) could be limited at best. I do definitely recommend at least looking into possibilities to get something at least somewhat reliable going into the future if it really must run this way and just absolutely cannot be upgraded to something at least more stable.
BTW, a lot of such devices these days are simple little bluetooth things that can connect to a cellphone. Might be a realistic look going forward rather than an ancient Windows 9x machine that could break down at some random unknown point. It may not be the worst idea to find some cheap cellphone supported by LineageOS and TWRP (make sure of TWRP -- it's not supporting newer OS versions and such lately) and install a minimal setup, turn off automatic updates, etc, connect such a device to it, and make a backup image of the entire thing via TWRP. Then you'd at least have something semi-stable. This should be relatively cheap (you can get such a phone or tablet less than $100 potentially if you shop well and I think most of the sorts of medical devices I'm thinking of can be in the lower $100 range depending.) Though it depends on exactly what they really need out of that for how viable this is. Might be an option for a cheap way forward.
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