BenoitRen

More like a downgrade. It's Windows 95 + IE4, including the s***ty new shell. And some bugfixes.

I don't know if it has all the features you want, but I personally use WinAmp 2.90 Lite for the odd MP3 every once in a while.

Yes, I would have suggested Win95, but I see you already have Win98 SE on it. I would suggest you keep K-Meleon as your web browser. It's the best fit for your hardware. I've never experimented with other shells, but ripping out the web integration was the right thing to do.

Bumpity bump again. Come on, it's not a hard thing to do...

Neil has taken a look at the issued updates by M$, not the actual components themselves. For example, maybe someone looked at the TCP/IP stack when a flaw was found in Windows 2000's TCP/IP stack, and produced an unofficial patch for Win9x. Stuff like that. As I said, official support is gone. Now we have to make unofficial updates to whatever flaws are found in the networking components.

I'm not. Any browser but IE-powered ones.

I'm not sure about that. Neil is very knowledgable and pretty neutral on these things, so I trust his judgment.

If you ever run into a certain KaiRo on #seamonkey on irc.mozilla.org, beware as he's blinded by his hate for Win9x. Yet, I think he had a point today. There's more than just the browser in Win9x that is important to security. The TCP/IP stack, DNS cache, and other things. So, did anyone have a look at those yet? Are there any unofficial updates? Now that Win98 is unsupported, it won't be easy to know possibly flaws...

OK, I asked on IRC, and Cairo is indeed used for SVG since Gecko 1.8.1 (that's Firefox 2.0 and SeaMonkey 1.1, folks). Cairo has always been used for canvas, though. Before Gecko 1.8.1, GDI+ was used for SVG. Looks like it's mainly the text rendering part of Cairo that is incompatible with Win9x.

What needs to happen is to have programs that behave well. Also, turning off Active Desktop may help.

What do you mean? Cairo hasn't been used in any final releases as of yet. The problem is the VC6 compiler, it compiles parts of the SVG library incorrectly.

Where's the AMD Athlon XP on your list of processors?

Using the IE engine is like raping the Internet (and indirectly, its developers).

Windows 98 FE is basically Windows 95 + IE4 + some bugfixes.

I know, I was only pointing out that it was compatible. ...What? Arachne?

Why would you want to do that? Heh, I thought that was a new feature of WinXP.

Since these are to be enterprise machines, and the work doesn't involve any music, I would stick with the on-board sound card. I don't know how much resources CAD programs need. You'll have to use your best judgment for that. By the way, why a Pentium 4? AMD processors are cheaper, and are just as good. Word has it that for games, which are graphically intensive, they are even better. Since CAD is graphical work, maybe...

*cringes* Oh, God, will it never stop? **** the Mozilla Foundation for giving the Mozilla prefix to Mozilla Firefox, making users think that Mozilla = Firefox, when it's actually the Mozilla Application Suite, at least before Mozilla became a brand...SeaMonkey is supported on Windows 95 (my signature shows I use it ). Firefox has run on Windows 95 until version 1.5. The only issue was a crashing bookmarks import tool that appeared the first time you started it. In version 2.0 there's a bug that makes it crash on Windows 95. K-Meleon is great for older computers. The interface is built directly with WINAPIs, instead of based on XUL, so it's fast. I wonder if pages would have rendered faster if had turned off the images. Or maybe it's because of the complicated table-based lay-outs that websites and message boards insist on using. I don't think you can turn off CSS (not sure if it would have made a big difference anyway). I wonder if Foxit Reader would work better. Absolutely. Everyone should have access to the web. Plus, if you don't have the latest CSS feature, websites should degrade nicely. In the end, you'll still be able to access the actual content. It's also a nice example that the latest version of your offline program isn't necessarily better.

Yes, as I learned earlier today, not only a shim library, but some work on Cairo too has to be done to achieve Win9x compatibility. But that won't be easy, because of API calls like SetWorldTransform, and such. I don't know how many W APIs are implemented in Microsoft's Layer for Unicode, and would prefer to avoid it if possible. As I said, Gecko already has the necessary functions to convert to Unicode and back. Good news: one of the developers who was instructed to participate in removing Win9x support is going to help me put it back. And he only lives one time zone apart.

I already know C. I picked up the book to learn what C++ has added, and to learn about #define. I've been programming since I was 12 (though in recent years I'm more involved with the web). I like to program. So it can't be said that I'm some newbie who thought he could mash something together just by picking up a book.

Big and complex? I'm not rewriting the browser. Many of the APIs that I have to catch are easy to do, as they differ from their Win9x counterparts only in that they return Unicode, instead of a WORD value. Things like SetWorldTransform will definitely be harder, but I'll see. The least I can do is try, right? Who knows other people will get interested in helping when I produce the start of the shim library.

You don't even need 500 Mhz to view the web. The thing that is heavy on resources is Flash, and complex JavaScript scripts. Since I'm already posting, here's a progress report. Sunday I got to know that Gecko internally has code that converts values to Unicode as part of internationalisation. Yesterday I picked up a C++ book from the library, so I hope to get something done in the next few days.

Yes, safer. But not as safe as a real browser, Maxthon is just a shell. Of course it displays well, IE is still the dominant web browser, so everyone has to make their sites compatible with it, which leads to a lot of headaches. Please be respectful and switch to a browser that doesn't use the IE engine. Look at http://www.seamonkey.be/ (which I didn't bother to get to display fine in IE6), and tell me if it displays well. It won't.

Laptops seem to have customised BIOSs, so they don't have all the options that desktop BIOSs do. It always amazes me how people don't (want to) realise that there's something wrong with the OS when it runs that slow on such hardware, when earlier versions run fine on it.

I'm sure corporations have an influence, but I don't think it's as big as you're saying. Many businesses haven't migrated to Windows XP, or just have, yet it's the most prevalent OS anywhere you go. One of the problems of today's industry is that there's no separation between computers for corporations and computers for the home user. There's only one 'package', so to speak. If there was a package for each, they could have different OSs, chosen for how it's going to be used.