Analada

When will this proposed project be carried on Mozilla's website and/or made official? I can't help but think you're going to need more than a book on C++ to write something this big and complex.

Yes, thanks 'endeavor', i realised your reply was about 'offline' playing and so were my comments. As for online, Firefox (1.5.0.9) with plug-in for flash movies works great. I recently installed the videodownloader extension to download google videos. Again this works great. So now with offline as well as online sorted out everything's fine :-)

Has since been updated (31 Jan.) so probably worth another look if you've not been there recently: http://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~pgut001/pubs/vista_cost.html and Microsoft's response http://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~pgut001/pubs...t.html#response

Thanks. Although the VLC player will play my flv files it only will do so manually (can't double-click). Can live with that but also the navigation doesn't work. It consistently starts playing from the beginning. That's ok for short clips but a bit of a pain for long films. Quality is good though and no synch problems. MPC is?

Seems related more to network congestion problems than anything else. So perhaps not an OS issue.

Does anyone know of a way to get v1.3.3. of FLV (Flash Video Player) to work in win98SE? It'll install but doesn't work in win98SE. Guess there's some library dependency...

Done all available Win98se updates. Am getting synch delays watching You tube and other flash play videos. There's about three seconds delay between audio and video. Wonder why? All other multimedia stuff plays well.

Thanks Eck. These shut-down problems with Nvidia drivers - which you describe well - cause me problems sometimes too, but their frequency can be reduced by disabling NvCpl at boot. So far only Nero seems affected by this disabling, but i found a workaround for that (start the Nero app directly rather than through the Nero control panel app.) Maybe i'll consider upgrading to a Radeon card.

A couple of years ago I spent six months on linux. Downloaded every distro and gave them a workout. Same as you I missed a certain "feeling". Also got fed up with endless configuration files. Still it has its place. Now as regards Ghost 2003. I think it could really help a load of people on this forum given the postings on reinstallation. To expand on what I said before: -- When you have a working and stable (yes it should be) win98se with your commonly used applications/games installed, do a Ghost of the partition(s). Let's call it backup A. Then a few weeks later do another on separate DVD-R/2nd HD: backup B. Then if after subsequently installing some software that messes up your system revert to backup B. Do subsequent backups regularly and cycle the DVD-R media. If you do this it's highly unlikely that you'll ever have a problem that you can't solve quickly and easily. For example I can replace C: partition and reboot perfectly within 6 minutes, complete with all configurations and customisations. What other software or procedure can achieve that?

This should perhaps be filed under tips but there really is *no* need whatsoever in the vast majority of cases to re-install win98SE. Here's what to do: (1) Somehow or other get a copy of Ghost 2003, standalone. It fits on a floppy disk and runs from DOS. (2) When you have a working stable win98SE system, use Ghost 2003 to back-up your C:\ partition, and any other partitions, on to either a DVD-R (it will span DVD-Rs if necessary) or another hard disk. (3) Then simply restore the partitions if your PC hard disk or something else goes belly-up. Or if you want to clone on to another PC. It's never let me down once in four years. Futher info SEE: http://ghost.radified.com/norton_ghost_2003.htm

Agreed. Count me in as well. There needs to be some mini-organization though, as otherwise it'll just end in chaos. Anyone got experience in this sort of thing to take role of Team Leader? And someone to organize a properly managed forum with definite goals, tomescales, co-ordinate check-in modules, etc.

Some good useful information here on the ATI front, thanks. I'm still not sure on the Nvidia side though as to how far up on their graphics cards one can go and with what drivers. Anyone got faster cards than 6200 working reliably under 9x? models after

Thanks. As I said, I'm using a 6200 and would like to know how far above that one can go, sticking with Nvidia. As for Vista drivers on a win98SE machine - wow you are ambitious! :-) But IMHO it might be better to avoid such drivers for win98SE, though it will be interesting to see what results you get! If you get a result at all, that is. Do post back - especially after you've tried playing back some audio-visual clips and movies. One of the reasons for the enormous file size (100MB) is that to get MS Vista compliance, graphics card manufacturers *must* incorporate MS specified "functionality" including content protection. One writer has described this as "DISABLING of functionality". SEE http://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~pgut001/pubs/vista_cost.html - and the recently added sticky which is essentially saying, "if you're thinking of a new graphics card or of upgrading in general probably it's going to be better to do it sooner."

Many thanks for NUSB. Used it to get Samsung MP3 player working. Their supplied driver wasn't much use :-( But yours worked like a dream. Now all I've got to do is to figure out how to use the thing ;-)

I've been using 6200 for past six months on home-built PC dual-boot. I also had that shutdown problem (not consistently) with win98 but not with XP. Now it's solved by the simple expedient of running Msconfig and disabling Nvcpl on start-up. I also disabled nvidia services. Neither of these are essential so far as I can see and it shuts down fine now. O, also disabled ACPI in the BIOS. Using 81.98 drivers.

Maybe now is the time to consider upgrading graphics card, hard disk, etc, for our Windows 98, 98SE + ME machines. Tomorrow may be (will be?) too late. Peripheral manufacturers wanting Vista conformity are required to sign-up to that OS's internal encryption (content protection) mechanisms. As this paper makes clear, this requirement is going to affect ALL PC users. It's quite a paper methinks! SEE: http://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~pgut001/pubs/vista_cost.html See also Steve Gibson's site for an audio recording of an interview with that NZ computer scientist at grc.com: http://www.grc.com/sn/SN-074.htm

Thanks, I'll try that. Be useful to have the flexibility. I guess (?) xmsdsk is from: http://www.uwe-sieber.de/util_e.html I've flagged up the "bug"/feature to the Author so maybe there will be a fix forthcoming - to let the user choose the install folder or default to %TEMP%. Feel free to email him :-) MEANWHILE, came across this: http://www.chilkatsoft.com/ChilkatSfx.asp It's FREEWARE. I thought there must be a catch but it does seem genuine. It's very flexible and incredibly easy to use. Only requirement is for the batch to be first zipped, and since there is freezip (different website, or winzip non-free) to do that, it seems like a good solution. I'll probably do both and see which is better solution for win98/XP. The chilkatsoft solution means that you don't have to add additional libraries to get dual solutions for win98/XP, as, for instance, choice.exe to get CHOICE command interpreted by winXP. What do you think? Spot any drawbacks?

Spent time trying to find that £$! edit button...<Grrr> Take your point but .NET is not possible really, since I want to make sure that it installs on the widest range of windows PCs. BTW I've not explored it yet but it seems that the bat2exe may extract to TEMP folder under some conditions. It appeared to be doing that this morning when I ran from my E:\ directory. Was wondering if it could be forced to extract to a specific folder. I suppose in the worse case I could do a batch wrapper to install the exe to a specific folder. But that's a bit cumbersome. Any other option you can see? Thanks for the feedback so far.

CORRECTION: apologies, should have read: <Here is the link to freeware program, "Batch2Exe Converter v1.2". Beware that the icon/version information windows will NOT give a workable .exe if used on on Win98, only on XP. But otherwise, i.e. ignoring these windows, it runs fine on Win98.>

Yes, that seems to be the case: it extracts it to the current folder...Hum...How do I get around that? (This is hopefully going to be distributed, and a person might well try and install from a CD-ROM rather than from its hard drive). Help appreciated! Here is the link to freeware program, "Batch2Exe Converter v1.2". Beware that the icon/version information windows will give a workable .exe if used on on Win98, only on XP. But otherwise, i.e. ignoring these windows, it runs fine on Win98. Download and extract the English version from here: http://www.f2ko.de/VersionsinfoB2E.html

Yes, the batch works from a CD drive, but NOT the exe. As I said, the .exe works fine from a hard disk drive. This applies to ANY batch, even something trivial, such as "echo hello world"(so there's no point including code here). ANYWAY, I guess I need to include the command interpreter COMMAND.COM with the .exe so that the program can execute? Does that sound plausible? Will try it in a minute but it's a bit of a pain to have to include it (will bloat the size yet more -- it's already large.) Any other possibilities? NOW one more thing..What's a simple piece of batch code code I can use to determine if the destination PC OS is win98se or XP? TIA. (I'd be glad to post the finished stuff when it's debugged including links to the freeware which is used to convert batch to exe.)

I've written a simple batch (using choice and copy) to install some files on to a win98 PC. Converted it to an EXE. It works fine when the .exe is placed on a hard drive and executed from there, but nothing happens at all when it is run from a CD-drive. (It doesn't run.) I wonder if one of you batch gurus could help? TIA