Modern viruses and old versions of Windows

LOLZpersonok · April 16, 2015

I have a trashy old laptop that I just started playing with yesterday after I found some older PC games at Value Village. This laptop is an old IBM ThinkPad - great in its day, nearly useless today. It's sporting a 500MHz Celeron (basically a cut-down variant of the Pentium III), 192MB of RAM (which is the unfortunate limit) a 6GB hard disk and Windows Millennium Edition. It works good, and Windows ME is actually rather usable on this machine because it's fully updated and the drivers are complete. It even has USB ports in it, with drivers that Windows ME actually likes. The only real downside to this machine is that it has some pretty nasty stress cracks on the bottom left corner of the screen bezel, something that's pretty much irreversible.

What I'm wanting to know is how a modern virus/trojan/adware/other crapware would work on such an outdated version of Windows. Protecting this machine with antivirus software is not an easy task due to the low memory cap. I can connect it to the Internet through Ethernet, and browse basic websites decently on this machine.

Now, for a necessary Q and A:

Q: Why do you want to do this?

A: Because I'm bored, and think it's fun using old computers in a modern era. I'm that oddball that's fine with (and actually enjoys) using outdated hardware to do simple tasks.

Q: Why not install a new version of Windows?

A: Because I've installed many different versions of Windows on this machine and I simply don't feel like searching for the drivers.

Q: Why not use a new computer with a virtual machine?
A: Because the experience is not as authentic.

SImoHayha · April 16, 2015

hmmmmm not sure...you might still get infected with certain viruses, but play smart and everything will be ok.

tyrz_939 · April 16, 2015

I don't protect modern computers let alone my old ones. It's almost 100% safe since browsing the internet on that hardware would make you want to cut your eyes out anyway.

I have a windows 98 machine and with KernelEx you can get a usable version of Firefox running and even watch YouTube but it'll choke so hard, lol.