Lwood

It always blows my mind when people tell me how superior XP is to 9x, how stable and secure it is, when I've been running the same installation of Windows ME for more than five years without problems (except for the first KB891711 update) or a single security breach. I don't remember the last lock up or freeze I had, probably when that crappy update was still installed.

Everything's back to normal after I did some maintenence. I realize that it was not much of a difference anyway, but I just recently installed this graphics card and wanted to see if anyone else had "noticed" a performance hit. Quite an upgrade from a TNT2 16MB, sure is nice to play all my games at max settings without any hesitation whatsoever. Wish I could find a 1.4 ghz Athlon with the right type of everything for this board so I could upgrade it too, but I think they're pretty rare. 1.4 ghz is the max this board can handle. I could probably play a lot more games with that cpu upgrade.

I think my board was made by FIC. I'll give it a go, but I use F10 to get to the bios. I think Compaq bioses are very limited. Not much cpu upgradeability either nor overclocking. I think I've upgraded this thing about as far as I can. It runs all my games fine, it's just that I can't play more modern games, can't afford them anyway.

Thanks MDGx, My Compaq bios seems to lack a lot in the way of tweaking possibilities, I can't even change the AGP aperture size (default/unchangeable is 64MB). I'm running a Compaq (Presario 5005R) version of WinME (came preinstalled), I don't know if there are any differences in it and a full retail version. I have used OppCom (older version), learned about it via your web site, to eliminate some of the unnecessary baggage. The version of OppCom I'm using did not have the ability to eliminate wmiexe.exe, but I got rid of it manually (renamed it). I did not get rid of rpcss with it, my printer seems to need it, but it only starts up when I start a program that requires it. I also got rid of stimon.exe, doesn't seem to hurt anything, but I imagine that if one uses thumbnail view in Windows Explorer it might be a necessary process. I've learned a lot from your web pages over the years, tremendous resource, and I'd like to thank you for it, so thanks a lot!

It's not that Firefox needs IE to work, it needs the updated libraries installed by later versions of IE to install and work properly. Run Firefox in Windows 95 :: Mozilla Stuff :: JohnHaller.com I'm not a big fan of Opera, but if they maintain 9x compatibility and Firefox doesn't, then I'll probably have to give it another shot. I think Mozilla will maintain 2.x with security updates for quite a while after 3.0 is released and hopefully we'll get it ported to 9x by knowledgeable programmers. Also hoping for security updates for 9x by generous programmers.

Thanks to all who replied, I just did some maintenence; scan disk, Spybot Search and Destroy scan (removed usage tracks, setup logs etc.), defrag (only 6% fragmented), and scanreg /fix /opt and my 3dMark score is back in my normal range, so maybe this update didn't cause me any problems after all. RESULTS 3DMark Score 6851 Game 1 - Car Chase - Low Detail 88.0 fps Game 1 - Car Chase - High Detail 28.3 fps Game 2 - Dragothic - Low Detail 137.7 fps Game 2 - Dragothic - High Detail 77.2 fps Game 3 - Lobby - Low Detail 84.8 fps Game 3 - Lobby - High Detail 38.4 fps Game 4 - Nature 43.5 fps Fill Rate (Single-Texturing) 865.7 MTexels/s Fill Rate (Multi-Texturing) 1904.4 MTexels/s High Polygon Count (1 Light) 41.3 MTriangles/s High Polygon Count (8 Lights) 10.2 MTriangles/s Environment Bump Mapping 128.3 fps DOT3 Bump Mapping 121.0 fps Vertex Shader 81.5 fps Pixel Shader 99.8 fps Advanced Pixel Shader 71.2 fps Point Sprites 25.4 MSprites/s Still haven't tried the unofficial patches yet, but plan to do so in the near future. Maybe I'll try extracting the older gdi32.dll also sometime. Thanks again.

Apparently, the KB918547 update can't be uninstalled via add/remove programs. I guess I'll have to live with the slight degradation of performance for the time being. I'll make a backup of things and try the unofficial versions of KB891711 and KB918547 after, probably be a day or two before I can get around to it. It seems U918547 uninstalls KB918547 before installing itself? Thanks again and I appreciate any further input.

Hi LLXX, Thanks for the reply. It's the most recent update issued by MS, the one that added KB918547.EXE to startup. Not sure how to go about reverting gdi32.dll to a prior version. My version of gdi32.dll is 4.90.0.3000, dated Thursday, June 08, 2000, 5:00:00 PM. I may uninstall the update and see if things go back to normal. I've been reading a bit here in the sub forum of this one, it seems there are "customized" versions of the KB891711 and KB918547 updates available. I'm a little confused by the process that needs to be followed to install them though. I'll read some more.

Hi everyone, New guy here. Has anyone else noticed a performance hit from the recent graphics engine update? My 3DMark 2001SE benchmark went down 50 points after I installed it. Went from ~6850 to ~6800 on my Presario 5005R, 1.1ghz Athlon, (generic) Ti4200 128MB with 8xAGP (running at 4x), 512MB pc133 SDRAM (Mushkin) running Windows ME, DirectX 9c and 56.64 nVidia driver (best driver I found). I realize the difference isn't very much, but still. Any suggested remedies?

Hello everyone! Glad to "meet" you! I run Windows ME, soon to be unsupported by Microsoft. My Windows installation has been going strong for several years and I don't really want to change OSes and hope that knowledgeable people will continue to provide security patches if and when new vulnerabilities are discovered. I also hope that knowledgeable folks will be trying to create a port of Firefox 3.0 (and possibly SeaMonkey 1.5) for 9x when the time comes. If I knew how, I would try to help do this, but I'm just a guy without a lot of computer knowledge; I just have a tiny amount. That is all for now. Sincerely, Lwood (it's really spelled Elwood, but someone here already has that screen name )