Rhelic

While I haven't installed this pack because I don't have a handy test box, I'm extremely excited about this project. I'll have to wait until some of you guys test it out before I feel safe of applying it to my home install as I can't risk downtime. I would LOVE it if you guys posted a couple screen shots, especially if you had a before/after cut (I'm a photoshop monkey if you guys want to email the screenshot to be stitched). XPize, please post screenshots, it's the best way to sell your app (considering it's purpose is purely cosmetic). Big thanks for thinknig about this, while it always bugged me there was fair amount of legacy cosmetics in XP and I'm glad I wasn't the only one who thought these little tidbits needed a visual upgrade.

Symantec is about to launch their new website redesign, perhaps they're waiting for that before they announce their new products too. I mean bundling all kinds of improvements together really helps your stock http://preview.symantec.com/

Overrall, this is a myth, there are MANY benchmarks out there that show the performance of various drivers and overall the speed increases, although there are a couple dips here and there. The last round of benchmarks I've seen have shown the 77.xx drivers are the fastest drivers since many releases ago. The biggest reason why this is (partially) a myth is because the same driver doesn't install for every PC. It's actually a Nvidia pack of drivers that detects your card and installs the proper driver. So an optimization for a newer card will give that new card huge speed boosts but won't affect you negatively at all. And if Nvidia restructures their drivers, they replicate this change in the drivers for the older cards. Of course I don't know how using a 9x kernel will affect this because all benchmarks now-a-days are on XP. I would love to see a proper driver comparison that compares the best driver of each series 22.xx, 33.xx, 44.xx, 55.xx, 66.xx and 77.xx and compared on 98 and XP. Here are some older benches that show 71.x, 75,x and 76.x on a 6800 running XP SP1: http://www.bleedinedge.com/forum/showthread.php?t=6055

Being American my view is already biased but.... wouldn't the best solution be to just use an American (English) version of Win9x since almost every app/sp is made as English and every other language is treated as 2nd or 3rd class? Secondly, I'd like to say that I find it silly that an application couldn't run or install on an OS because it has been branded to a certain language version. Was this something that was re-architectured in Win2000 and newer?

I'd like to add that despite how my inital post sounds, I actually think a 3rd party update site that adds more functionality (Win95, Win98, common 3rd party apps, etc) is a good thing but as long as your site DICTATES that you can't use IE and pretends that SP2 is crap is nothing but propiganda pushing. I'm not saying you have to require SP2 but it's still a CRITICAL update to XP, like it or not.

I have to agree here, as they are providing a service to make computing safer & better by delivering the updates that should have been written or have been written but intentionally are excluded from Win98 because of political/finacial reasons.

Umm so your site doesn't push critical IE patches and it feels that XP SP2 isn't critical. And this site is usefull how? From a XP standpoint, it's extremely close minded. The fact that I can't even browse the site via IE is just silly. I think somebody and a couple friends got together and couldn't figure out if they should make an Anti MS webpage or a 3rd party site to collect all kinds of updates so they made one site that tries to do both, and poorly at that. PS: I'd like to point out that if you haven't actually removed IE but choose to use a 3rd party browser, not installing IE updates IS a critical flaw in your system, even if you don't surf the web with it. And anybody that thinks XP SP2 is bad is sniffing glue.

Gape, Considering registry changes that relate to swap file performance, like how long to hang onto DLLs and other settings directly relate to the hardware specs to decide if such a change will speed up a PC, I was thinking perhaps your installer should simply do a cpu/ram check and spit out registry updates accordingly. As a more specific example: I'm sure somebody here can figure out some more solid numbers but to state what is probably the obvious, on a system with a limited amount of memory (under 32megs) it would be best to unlead DLLs asap, while on a system with a satisfactory amount of ram would be best to hold on as long as possible as the benefit of not having to re-load a DLL from the HD would outweight the 1 or 2 megs ram out of a setup with more than enough ram for Win98.

Speed Up ISP Logon Time Faster Modem Dialing If I recall the modem dialing speed is a HAYES command you type to your modem and while the command is generic to virtually every modem, it's possible it could break dialin for some users who's phone system may not support faster dialing. Plus it's not Gape's job to play with your 3rd party hardware settings, his ONLY concern imho is finding & applying updated 1st party Microsoft DLLs (and other files) and putting them into Win98. And from time to time making a registry change that improves performance for the majority of uesrs. Having Win98 SP2 playing with your modem settings makes as much sense as the SP2 playing with your printer settings. I'm sure you wouldn't like it if he set your default print mode to "draft" because it printed faster. These kinds of settings are user prefrences that DO NOT benefit the whole. Ideas like these would tant the SP from being a really nice security & minor cosmetic Service Pack (see the SP there????) to a SP with junkware/abusive settings. Anything wierd or add/on should be optional at best, and imho Gape should offer two SPs, one with the addon-ware (ex: notepad replacement) and one without (official MS updates only, no 3rd party). The only thing I've seen around here that's both 3rd party and worthy of being installed by default is the newer Defragger as it supports HDs larger than the tiny limit Win98 was originally written for.

But have you updated your USB drivers as I don't think SP2.x includes any USB improvements but I could be wrong. The recommended USB driver update around here is http://www.msfn.org/board/index.php?showtopic=43605

I apologize to the original poster in boatloads, I honestly quick read his post and had no idea he was blind. When I used the term "blindly paranoid" it was merely a figure of speach. It was a total coincidence, I swear! I would never attack somebody with such tastelessness.

Actually this one appears impressively good, I never used it but it seems it was still being worked on only a couple years ago. It has a fully cloned Start button, the task bar, the quick links and the systray, amazing. Review /w screenshots: http://toastytech.com/guis/cal.html Homepage: http://www.calmira.de/

Actually installing Windows 95 helped me live an entirely new philosophy when it comes to technology. I upgraded my Dos 6.x setup (486DX2-100mhz 8megs ram) to Win95. I actually disliked the interface and re-installed Dos 6.x. 3 Months later I knew I couldn't avoid the changeover so I reinstalled Win95 and poked around with it until I discovered the BOOTGUI=1 option in the msdos.sys file. Considering I knew the previous DOS versions of this file contained binary daat, and now this file contained text, I realized it was a secret setting. In fact on a tangent, I had to take my PC for repair and when the tech saw what I did he flipped out saying I hacked Win95 (hardly). This was of course long before it was common knowledge on the Internet that this setting existed, in fact I never read about it until a full year later. I was proud to run what I considered Dos 7 and if I choose to use, Win95, I simply typed WIN in dos. Although Win95 performance wasn't acceptable until I upgraded my PC to a total of 16megs of ram. It was that 3 months of avoiding Win95 when I told myself I would never alienate new techonolgy again (that replaces old technology) as I don't want to be the kind of person to avoid something new just because it's different. I realized oneday you HAVE to upgrade (ok well all you 98 SP2 guys will disagree with me) so I'd rather be an early adopter and be ahead of the crowd than the last guy in the race. It gives me an advantage over my fellow IT workers imho. This means I'm willing to apply Service Packs the day of release, I often install RC1 as my home OS for whatever new MS OS is coming out, I always try to upgrade any server I touch to whatever is newest (now-a-days this means Win 2003 SP1) and am in general, an upgrade junkie. I'm such an upgrade junkie I have about 10 sites I visit almost daily keeping an eye out for updates on various key products I use. I even get involved with a couple products to help steer authors for certain things. Just recently I nagged the 7-Zip author to release 4.x as final since every 4.x version has been beta, and the last "final" release was 2yrs ago for 3.x

Gape, I really hope you keep 3rd party applications as optional items that aren't installed by default, or provide a very easy to click checkbox to allow or disallow all 3rd party applications. Some of us are purists that only want official MS bits installed on the PC. Some of us don't have a choice because we are in a work enviroment and installing 3rd party apps to replace 1st party apps is GREATLY frowned upon. I've been trying to sell my coworkers on installing this across the company but it's been falling upon deaf ears for now. Obviously if 3rd party bits are installed by default it makes it 10x harder to convince an IT team to install this SP1. I'm not asking you ot cater to me, I'm just asking for you to keep this SP as pure (1st party) as possible.

Feature requests like these would totally crapware the Win98SE SP. If you want eyecandy install the newer OSs, the only thing people should want from the Win98SE SP is bugfixes and feature upgrades MS has created but decided not te release publically/easily.

Call me an evil bastard but I have no pity for people who run Win98 and buy new devices, especially USB based ones. Afraid to upgrade to XP, how [edit] paranoid are you? You'd think after 2 service packs, one of them being the biggest, most tested SP Microsoft has ever deployed, would fix whatever paranoid delusions escuses you have for not running XP. Even if I had an old 300mhz 128meg machine, I'd still prefer to run XP with the UI disabled than a 98 box. Update: please note the [edit] was a HUGE mistake on my part and I honestly attest I didn't know the original author was blind as I read his post quickly and looked over this fact. I would never attack anybody in such a tasteless manner.

I think this "fix" would be a bad idea as you shouldn't punish the majority beacuse the minority run 16megs of ram. Now-a-days, it's pretty easy to gather 32 or 64 megs of memory for the old Win98 boxes.

Electro, About the April 12th fixes, according to Gape, they will be in SP2 final but are not in RC3 (RC3 came out before April 12th).

Wow almost 200k downloads? Does that include RC1 and RC2 though? (My guess it does because the SP has been using the same page). In fact, does this include uSP 1.6x downloads too? Despite, worst case scenario means at least 63,000 downloads and I would call that pretty large testing base. I dare anybody to question the stability of installing uSP2.0, especially when you compound the fact each include update has been thuroughly test by MS and the general userbase. It's safe to say that uSP can be the most reliable update you can ever apply to windows (after it goes final of course).

I agree with Soldier1st.... Even if you won't be using the internet, or simply won't be using IE, I would rather install IE6 with the newest patches than run an IE remover utility. As a .Net developer I can vouch that thousands of programs require IE because it's easier to use Microsoft's built in HTML support than code your own (who wants to re-invent the wheel). To remove IE would actually break Windows ability to run, and I would expect a newly patched IE6 box to be, in theory, more secure than IE removed as you can assume there could be shared DLLs IE uses that were upgraded in IE6 but can not be removed with an IE remover because they are shared. And lastly, considering the fact that if you are running Win98, you probably don't have a lot of ram to spare, and IE often uses less ram than 3rd party browsers although I haven't tested this on Win9x, only 2000 and XP. PS: don't confuse memory cache with browser ram usage!

I really hope this goes final ASAP. I currently work at a non-for-profit hospital and it's a scenario where money spent directly takes away from the hospital's ability to buy medical gear. While all 95 machines are being retired, 98 will live on (thank god IT employees get XP). I hope to convince the Network & PC guys to make SP2.0 an official part of the 98 boxes.

Oh no, I fully understand MS wants you to upgrade into a new OS. Which is why I have used this service pack. MS doesn't want to make the improvements into 98 because they are giving users reason to use legacy OSs. Although I'm not going to defend 98SE at all, even with this patch installed. I'm dead sold on the NT 5.x kernel. I just figure if you have a box where you must run 98, might as well have all the improvements. </rant> But now we're on a whole different subject. In MS's defenese, they can't afford to have a massive teams of top notch developers without a constant flow of cash, hence new versions MUST keep coming. Don't hate on Microsoft for needing money, they obviously can't stay in business by selling the same OS for 10 years.

Microsoft has admitted that users who installed the security patch for Windows 98 and ME in January are suffering from slower machines or frozen screens as a result. The MS05-002 patch was issued by Microsoft for the Windows 98, Windows 98 SE and Windows ME operating systems as part of its monthly patching cycle. The problem relates to the way the Internet Explorer browser works with the operating system. Removing the patch returns the machine to normal performance but leaves users open to security vulnerabilities, although Microsoft said it had not yet received any reports of exploits of these vulnerabilities. Full Story: http://www.computerweekly.com/articles/art...Search=&nPage=1

It's amazing how bull headed some people are. Not you guys posting here but the survey people, it's almost 1:1 ratio of those that will upgrade and those who won't. If your hardware isn't ready for Longhorn I fully understand, but considering Longhorn's only real requirement is a video card that supports DX7, unless you're running a 486, your PC supports Longhorn. If everybody really lived under the "I won't use that new thing-a-ma-bob" mentality, they'd still be using Win 3.11 The only real one to lose out is late adopters as us early adopters have a leg up on you.