i'm messing around with my wife's ancient laptop running Win98 ... Clamwin appeared to install properly, but it won't launch. In PrcView I can see clamwin.exe start up, but then it dies after about 10 seconds. No warning messages or dialog boxes ever appear. Same deal with Clamtray. It's only got 32MB of ram; any chance that clamwin would behave this way if there's not enough free memory?

clamscan database requires ~100mb, clamwin requires some memory too, try increasing swap
anyway you should have ClamWin.log in temp dir that says what's happened

thanks sherpya, does this log file mean anything to you?

Traceback (most recent call last):
File ("ClamTray.py", line 34, in ?
File ("Config.pyo", line 26, in ?
FIle ("Utils.pyo", line 31, in ?
File ("win32com\shell\shell.pyo", line 9, in ?
File ("win32com\shell\shell.pyo", line 7, in __load
ImportError: DLL load failed: A device attached to the system is not functioning.

okay, did a win98 re-install and everything is now fine with clamwin ... apparently something was messed up with win98; not a clamwin problem.

... and, whew, it's brutally slow ... 32MB just not enough; i'm going to have to find some other alternative.

Hello,

I think Clamwin is almost the only virus scanner that currently supports Win98 (I think Avast will discontinue support soon, if not done already).

An alternative could be to rely on online scanners. Check on the antimalware resource section of Clamwin, maybe this can provide come help.

Regards,

Here are some links to improving Win 98:

https://www.informationweek.com/news/windows/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=12803660 on the web and

https://helpdeskgeek.com/windows-xp-tips/99-ways-to-make-your-computer-blazingly-fast/ on the web.

Also check out Clam Sentinel at https://forums.clamwin.com/viewtopic.php?t=2411 on the ClamWin site. It simulates real time scanning with API hooks, which the ClamWin developers don't like, but it's about your only choice. It's still in development but it does work.

Regards,

Hello,

Trend Micro's HouseCall is and on demand online scanner which still supports win98. Minimum RAM requirement however is 64 MB.
Perhaps a try is worth anyway.

regards,
antonio