BenoitRen

Dream on. Firefox has had a 10+% browser user share for at least a year, and there are still tons of companies that refuse to fix their sites to work in it. The current Linux user share isn't even close to 10%. There is a point in newer computer systems, but only for developers who need developer class systems, and businesses who need to run heavy duty applications to do things like maintain their databases.

Computer usage has hardly changed in 9 years. Most people use their computer as Internet terminals these days, and the web is here to stay, as it was built on open standards. Back in the days of the Commodore, it was chaos. You're calling me insane because you assume that I think you would take my word for it? The right term is naive. You don't know me, so you can't judge my abilities. Have you been sleeping under a rock for the past 5 years? Viruses that use exploits aren't that common. These days it's all about social engineering. Viruses that do use exploits are geared at WinNT systems, with their high amount of network services, just begging to be owned.As I explained earlier, the only door in Win9x is the browser. If you have a secure web browser, you're pretty much safe. With a hardware firewall, even more so. Closed formats are a problem on all OSs. Knowing M$, and their new OpenXML format, I think it will still be compatible with older documents. I've read about it, and sure, it's a real danger, but you can't assume that they will succeed. You're trying to look in a crystal ball. So much can still happen. By the way, there's only a Fritz chip on IBM Thinkpad computers since May 2002. I saw no mention of those being on other motherboards. Really?-My browser won't, as the Internet is based on open standards -My picture viewer won't, as the specification of PNG, GIF, etc. doesn't change -My FTP won't, as FTP is an open standard -My CD burner won't, it will keep working with CD-ROM drives -My IM clients won't, as they are based on protocols -My plain text editor won't stop being able to edit plain text etc. Then you caught me on the wrong channel, as I'm talking from the point of view of a home user, not some salary man or corporation. I don't play games a lot on this computer. I use it mostly as an Internet terminal. I surf the web(web browser), maintain a couple websites (plain text editor + FTP client), hack Firefox/Thunderbird extensions to make them compatible with SeaMonkey (plain text editor, ZIP tool), view the odd picture, sometimes play a game...I would say I'm quite productive. Hold it! Those are video games, not traditional programs, which PCs were not designed for. Game consoles were. Now, I know there are games that you can only play on a PC, but I feel it shouldn't be a point in this kind of discussion.

I didn't add a line, I renamed the file so Windows wouldn't load it. Yes. I optimised my boot sequence. It doesn't auto-detect my hard drive, I let it save the paramters. It doesn't look for my floppy drive at start-up (separate from the process of trying to boot from a floppy). On the Windows side with no IE desktop shell, Windows is noticably quicker and more stable (or so I hear, I never had it installed). The install is also IE-free. I think the rest of the performance is because Win95 is smaller and more conservative in its functions. I don't load anything at start-up either, because in my experience that's slower than starting it manually after Windows has booted. Yes, if you use DHCP to get an IP, Windows will wait for it before continuing. You will lose at least 5 seconds that way. I made my network card a static IP to prevent this.

NOOO, my reply of yesterday didn't get posted! f***ing stupid quote limit! Amen to that!

I renamed autoexec.bat to autoexec.old, and rebooted while using a timer. After that I renamed it back, and timed again. The difference was barely not one second, my autoexec.bat processes in less than one. My system needs 28 seconds to boot (months earlier, it was 29 seconds). And they say that WinXP broke the 30 second barrier (they cheated, many things are still loading after your desktop appears). The procedure was starting the timer when my BIOS screen appeared, and stopping it when my desktop appeared. This is on a Pentium II 233 Mhz CPU with 160 MB of RAM. It could boot faster if I didn't share my printer over the home network. I'll try config.sys next, since you claim one line makes a noticable difference.

Religion? Yeah, there are a lot of Firefox advocates, but here is the core idea: any browser but IE-based ones. Why? Insecure, and has bad support for web standards, even promoting the use of non-standard ones (what do you think those coloured scroll bars and ActiveX are?). When you use IE, you're holding the web back and causing a lot of grief to web developers who have to keep their sites compatible with IE because of its browser user share. I'm sorry for this off-topic post, but I can't stand this kind of ignorance/undeserved bashing.

Interesting. My config.sys only consists of two lines, so emptying it wouldn't help. My autoexec.bat isn't heavily populated, but I'll try experimenting with it.

You're talking through a closed-source mindset. Closed-source browsers will have the problem you mention, not open-source ones. As long as there are people that want to continue Win9x support (like me), it won't happen. How is this a problem? I haven't had a virus in years, because I'm not a luser that clicks "Yes" on every download/warning prompt. Also, viruses target newer Windows systems, and services that only exist on those. The only door in Win9x is the browser, and if that door is secured, you're safe. A hardware firewall gives even better protection. 1) When you use an older OS, you use older software. Except for the browser, as the outside does change.2) Again, open-source. I doubt it ever really was productive on the web. Aside from that, I don't know what the Commodore 64 could do aside from text processing and Basic, but I'm sure it didn't just lose those abilities. Seriously, what are you smoking? The applications I use now won't suddenly vanish in 10 years. True, but that's not an OS problem. I think the one needing examination is you. Again, the web is built on open standards, and there are open-source browsers. As for documents, that's why open formats exist. Again, my programs won't disappear. We are but a small hardcore group of users, just like the current Linux community already is. It won't make a difference. You obviously don't know how much is out there.

I'm curious, how does hiding DOS make the system boot faster? Is it some calls it doesn't do?

I think you should have tried Win98 SE for a better comparison. Thanks to IE4 integration. WinME still has DOS, it's just hidden from view, which is quite silly. DOS can be nice for playing older games. It's also much faster to switch to DOS than to boot from a floppy. You would have to make the floppy yourself anyway, so it is a disadvantage, considering your positive "more features out of the box" stance. And if Windows complains that you can't mess with a file, DOS comes to the rescue. Basically, it's an extra OS that you can use to do maintenance or tweaking of Windows while it's not running, or without having it check what you do. For instance, I don't have IE installed, but there is the odd application that will create the Favorites folder (probably with a hidden desktop.ini) for no reason, and Windows will claim it's a system file that should not be deleted. Open a DOS prompt, and delete it from there, and you're done. Win98 can do that, but only from BMP files. I read that somewhere. My problem with this feature is that the explorer is a file manager, not a picture browser. As such, viewing 20+ pictures in a folder is really heavy on resources, and slows things down. More features out of the box means less choice, and not everyone likes that. There's also the problem of where it ends. Someone explain to me what that program is good for. I have the second version on my WinXP laptop, and I can't figure out why I would want to use it, or how it would be productive. Didn't Windows have that since Win95? Win98 had that too. I think the same thing sometimes. But I don't really care, as I don't use either as my home OS (though my newer PC will have Win98 SE).

Not all of us dislike Windows. I love my Windows 95. But that doesn't mean I don't want to try other things. That's all. What, just because official support stopped? Support for Windows 95 stopped years ago, and I'm still trucking along nicely. There's so much software out there, and open source projects, that official support doesn't really matter.If you're talking about hardware support, that's a totally different topic. I don't think that should be much of an issue, though, if we're already comfortable with our older hardware setup. The web? Why would that be? I can't express how silly that thought is. The web is not dominated by Microsoft, and despite years of an IE monopoly, Linux and other systems were not shut out. Why not? Because the web is built on open standards. They can't be shoved under the rug like that, or we'd need a whole new web, and no one is going to have the will or the cash to do something like that. In fact, open source browsers and the rise in correct implementation of W3C standards make us less shut out from content. That being said, due to the nature of the web, if your browser doesn't support a certain feature, the page will degrade nicely. It will not deny you access, unlike an application does when an important dependency isn't met. You're saying that as if Windows is the only OS in the world that's viable. I don't think so. The open source community and the groups of hackers are strong. DRM gets cracked. A good, simple distribution with clear documentation can solve this. I've been tinkering with the Debian base install and FVWM95. It's looking pretty good, though I haven't completely set it up yet. At the moment I'm hesitating between starting over with the testing version of Debian Etch, or waiting for Debian Etch's official release (Sarge is two years old, a long time in the Linux world). ReactOS IS open-source. I feel quite free on Windows 95, thank you.

I want to reinstall Windows 95 this weekend or so, and I was thinking... Can't I slipstream the updates to the installation? Like, replacing the files in the cabinets with updated files. It would probably need editing of layout.inf too to accomodate the change of the size of the cabinets. What do you think, would it be possible?

Not much. An IE-free Windows 95 install is as good as crap-free and I'm not really into tweaking system files and internal stuff. However, recently I found and used some good stuff thanks to MDGx and Nathan Lineback: MSDOS.SYS: BootDelay=0 (default in Win98, in Win95 the default is 2) Registry: MenuShowDelay -1 I have always been clicking submenus to open them, so doing this made sense, and stops other submenus from opening out of the blue. Registry: HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Control Panel\desktop\WindowMetrics Create Shell Icon BPP string, set to value 16. Now you have 256-colour icons in Windows 95 without the Plus! Pack!

Here's one:

He could try Flash 8. As for the 26 MB RAM bit, I think that's a typo, as you can't have that amount of RAM, and a missing 5 fits right in to form 256.

Look up the program PROtab. It creates registry keys that make it appear as if IE is installed, fooling applications that check that. I used it to register version 9.99 of IE on here.

To start with, can at least two people on Windows 98 look for something called RandSeed in their registry and post what values it has?

Make a plan for a release which has all the features you want in it now, that you think is feasible. Then stick to that plan. After the release, you can go back and add more features and repeat the cycle.

Bumpity bump.

I think this project would be in Alpha then. Beta is when you have implemented all the features you want, and the code is stable enough, leaving room for bug-fixing only.

I intend to step up to the plate now that SeaMonkey 1.1 is out, but first the exams have to be over so I can have some breathing space already. The project would be recognised as a Mozilla community project in the same way that SeaMonkey is.

JavaScript in Gecko (which is SpiderMonkey) is pretty secure. JavaScript in itself should be secure. You're just being paranoid.

That's against the spirit of open-source, as Word documents are a proprietary format. Release either in the OpenDocument format, a plain text file, or a HTML file, or something else that everyone can easily read.

That option was removed from the GUI in Firefox 2 because it never worked right in the first place. It's still there in SeaMonkey 1.1, but the implementation (in Gecko) is the same. It's a false sense of security. No site should have access to ActiveX. It's far too dangerous. JavaScript should be secure, they were never designed to be able to do higher level stuff, so trust shouldn't be an issue. As for the download thing, that's just a vulnerability that got turned into an option, just like you can allow IE to read and change your clipboard, which shouldn't be possible in the first place.

Of course it does. Your newer computer is powerful enough to even take on WinXP's massive resource usage. My laptop that I bought one year back is about the same.