tomw

It has been a couple weeks.. No, a decade... but my memory is that the windows 95 CD had a duplicate file name some where that caused xcopy to barf. For that reason, I remember copying subdirectories one at a time under a WIN95_CD or simiilar directory on the C: disk. I do remember you could specify the setup directory in the 'setup' command to install windows, along with the TMP / TEMP directory for file storage or expansion of the CAB files. As I said, it's been a while. tom

The 'Cash Cow' has gone on a diet and is not producing milk any more.... thus the 'warning' to buy something new. As long as the OS works reasonably well, people will continue to use it. Once the browsers can no longer surf and Office components won't work to read the 'latest and greatest' versions, then the XP machines will start to trundle towards the boneyard, one by one. They have been touting their wares for ... Well, I remember seeing a pre-release demo of 'Windows' at the SF Computer Fair in the Civic Center back in the last century (1982?). The successful versions seem to be outnumbered by the dogz. tom

If you have not gotten it already, Process Explorer will let you look at what is using your cpu: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb896653 You can also use ctr--alt-del to get to the monitor provided with XP. Vishal has some good speed-up tips here: http://www.askvg.com/category/windows-xp/ and hist tutorial: http://www.askvg.com/master-tutorial-to-make-your-windows-xp-super-fast/ tom

If you want to try a Linux distribution, check out puppylinux from their download site: http://puppylinux.org/main/Download Latest Release.htm Down the page a bit you can find a program to put Linux on a windows partition and install a boot loader to select Linux or window at boot time (grub boot loader) http://puppylinux.org/main/Download%20Latest%20Release.htm#winEXE It can run from USB or CD, and there are a few other versions that support boxes running old Pentiums, such as the Wary version here: http://puppylinuxnews.org/releases/new-wary-puppy-is-released/ ( I run it on a P4 with 192M IIRC) tom If you take a look at the capacitors on your board, check for them having bulging tops as that is a pretty good indicator of failure. Some will blow out the bottom and sort of 'pop up' from their original position, leaving their solder leads still in place.

For those interested in a cardbus WiFi adapter, the Airlink101 AWLC3028 works fine on a Toshiba 7020CT laptop running 98SE. The adapter is 802.11B/G compatible, and will do WPA2-PSK and WPA-PSK security. Their similar PCI wireless cards work also, but leave a couple processes running after you run the config utility that may be killed if your CPU is loaded heavily {or doesn't have enough horsepower}. They both use a Realtek chipset. The USB<=>ethernet adapter works also.