InBox

Neil's American friend recommended that he should download Skype. He got part way until he was informed that he had a restrictive firewall. The message told him that "to work reliably, Skype needs unrestricted outgoing TCP access to all destination ports above 1024 or to ports 80 (preferred) and 443". It will also be "greatly improved if outgoing UDP traffic to all ports above 1024 is opened up and allow UDP replies to come back in." Neil wants to know what all this means.

Essentially it means you have to set the firewall to allow those ports to have access. It depends what your firewall is - if it is the built-in Windows firewall, it's simple to add these port numbers to the exceptions needed. Go to Control Panel/Firewall/Exceptions/Add Port and experiment with adding the listed ports to the exception list.

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Terry is one of many readers who could not understand why I suggested getting a new computer merely to upgrade from Windows 98 to XP. He is wondering if that's perhaps a bit drastic.

Machines under three years old should have no issues with the Windows upgrade, but older Windows 98-based machines commonly run on 128 megabytes or less of RAM. At this level of memory, XP runs poorly. Anything more than three years old uses RAM that is often no longer available or hard to find unless sourced second-hand. As for hardware older than 2001, drivers for specific components may not exist or are flaky. The required upgrade may end up costing the same as a new low-end computer, which is far superior in ability. Spending a fortune on sourcing compatible hardware for upgrading, then finding the machine doesn't run at an acceptable speed, is a bad investment. Best to get a new guaranteed box fully updated and conversant with XP and eliminate the need to solve unforeseen incompatibilities? With Microsoft 98 and ME support ending mid-year, their life is in its twilight.