14 DAY TRIAL // Windows 98 was pronounced dead back in 2003 when Microsoft first intended to kill the outdated operating system. Fierce opposition from users has changed the companies' mind and it has offered support and additional 3 years to help customer upgrade and transition to more recent of its OS products. The fact that the Win 98, Win 98 SE and Win ME application was considered obsolete even three years ago has not stopped over 70 million licensed user from successfully running the programs. And it seems that Microsoft's decision to pull the plug on Win 98 was met with a certain amount of protests as the company announced that it would pull the plug on the July 11.
The Redmond Company has ended free support for the products since 2003, the remaining users having to pay for the critical security updates. But no more. All support will be seized. Users that cannot set aside their loyalty for the trio of applications will still have access to all updates published to this date, but Microsoft will not issue any additional patches, not even those addressing critical vulnerabilities.
Microsoft claims that the decision was brought by the necessity to remove from the market a potentially unsafe application that had more chances to damage its users than it had to helping them. This argument has received criticism as the three operating systems mentioned above are actually looked past by malware and other online threats that are designed mainly for Windows XP.