Will the Spybot 1.5.2 work with Win98SE?
Yes, I'm using it now to type this reply on an old notebook. If you are a newbie 1.5.2 might be a better choice than any of the 1.4 versions as those have a bug in one of the popups that makes it hard to read the dialog buttons - 1.5.2 fixes that. Yes there are workarounds for 1.4 (reshack), but if you can follow them you are over the newbie hump and would no longer need to ask for advice!
And, regarding the Win98SE notebook -
If I install Spybot 1.5.2, will it work with the other programs I now have loaded?
#1- NIS 2005 (soon to be deleted - when defs run out - and then will install AVG AV, I think);
NIS may be problematic. I used to use NIS2003 but one of its updates made it not play nice with ANY of my other security apps, and caused MAJOR memory leaks. Could never figure out what was wrong until I uninstalled it and suddenly ALL problems magically cleared up. I am currently using free AVG 7.5 which works well. You should also get a replacement firewall when you uninstall NIS. Some ISP's provide their subscribers with a package from Computer Associates called EZ-Armor (yes it is Win98SE compatible, the ISP-provided packages from McAfee are not!). I am using just the EZ-Firewall component out of that - it is a relabeled older version of ZoneAlarm Pro (but make sure to turn off MailSafe as it conflicts with AVG). There are also other places you can get ZA-Pro, or even just use the Free version with fewer features. I haven't been to their site for a while, so you may need to look around for an older version as I think the latest releases have dropped W98SE compatibility, only supporting W2K and later.
#2- AVG AS 7.5;
#3- SpyBlaster 4;
#4- AdAware SE (soon to be deleted).
Assuming you mean Spy
wareBlaster 4? I tried that and it seems to work well enough for browsing in IE but has problems with SeaMonkey compatibility so I went back to 3.5.1 which does work correctly for SeaMonkey (more important for me as I never use IE). I am still using AdAware SE, no need to uninstall that - there ARE still manual updates available, see the 5th post in thread
http://forums.spybot.info/showthread.php?t=23917
I have not tried AVG-AS though.
Spybot 1.5.2 currently has severe problems with Win 98 with memory usage and other conflicts.
For me the memory use was an annoying temporary problem - it took 17 minutes to load up at boot or when opening Spybot, then memory use dropped back to normal. It looked hung and unresponsive but just needed a LOT more time to finish loading, then worked normally (well, except for the slowness). What fixed it for me was to go to the Immunize panel, make sure the only items checked were the ones relating to Mozilla/Firefox, then click Undo. It would chug another 17 minutes then finish. Next clear the Mozilla checkboxes and check all the other ones - especially for "Global (Hosts)"- click Immunize (this one goes much faster). Since the same bad sites are listed in the Hosts file that is enough to keep Mozilla based browsers from getting cookies, scripts etc from those sites (not that I go to them anyway!) and the duplicates in the other lists (which cause the slowness) are redundant. Works well enough to go from over 17 minutes down to about 30 seconds to open the app now, roughly what it took for 1.4.
If you are able to follow the above un-immunize procedure there shouldn't be any other problems with 1.5.2 (yes even with W98SE) so I'd recommend that over the older versions that have other problems. Moreso if you browse with IE, then it is even more important to use the latest TeaTimer and SDHelper. As to your XP notebook, a friend is using same apps I list on his XP-SP2 notebook as well with no problems, he didn't even need to bother about the un-immunize details.
