dencorso

Go to Panopticlick, do the test and ponder. Even if one's machine cannot be traced personally to one, machine fingerprinting may be enough to destroy any reasonable hope of true privacy, let alone true anonymity. Add to that stylometry, and that's how we are. However, when IPv6 becomes the only way to connect to the net, then things will be even worse, because changing deliberately dynamic IP address can provide some long term privacy due to PEBCAK on the part of the provider (incompetency or neglect to keep records). But in the US, EU, Japan and many other places, even that may not work, and it's possible they really may know which telephone line got which IP number, say, at noon, twelve years ago... but my point is: human incompetence (on the part of those in the middle) is one's best bet at some degree of privacy.

I really doubt it would simply pass unnoticed in Chile either.

This topic has been updated! What's New? on post #2: RLoew's 9th machine has been added! Let's keep the list up-to-date: If you are using 9x/ME with more than 1 GiB RAM, do PM me your info and you shall be added to the list!

You used to have an nVidia GeForce 7950GT AGP on the X5DAE. You didn't tell us much about your new graphics card, apart from "it is a completely different graphics card now" (and it ought to be so, since the X7DAL-E cannot accept an AGP card for lack of a proper connector for it)... what's it? Is it another nVidia card? And what drivers are you using right now? After we know that, we may decide about upgrading graphics drivers or not.

Great it's fixed! I was betting on a LAN related PME (= Power Management Event) from the start, because most of the recent action was around LAN drivers, but I confess the add-on LAN card was a bit of a surprise... the "wake on shutdown" was set on the card (via a jumper) or through a BIOS interface? In any case, jaclaz was right! It was hardware after all, and yet, 98 and XP behaved differently on face of it. And hence, that means the hinges of reality remain intact: terrible things use to happen when jaclaz happens to be wrong!

Usually, the best way is to repeat the installation while using this:

While I'm the resident pessimist, I think you're being too pessimistic, jaclaz! Remember: (I) Dave has a true backup of the XP system. (II) His XP initially wasn't exhibiting this odd behavior. So, if push comes to shove, it's just a matter of redeploying the backup and starting again from scratch (= the state of the previous machine). That's why I'm being quite optmistic, up to this point.

Yes. It sure does. It's not in the BIOS configuration or it would affect both 98 and XP. That's really good news. Did you disable the double onboard GLAN using the motherboard jumper (I seem to remember you've mentioned it)? Did you restart XP in safe mode and remove all those non functioning drivers for it? That's the 1st step, now.

You can use Letter Assigner for 98 and DOS and you can assign the letters of all drives (except the System drive) using Disk Management in XP. Whatever fdisk's "opininion", there's no good reason to start repartitioning HDDs, Dave! The assignements done per the above methods will hold forever, or just until you decide to change them. Let's instead concentrate on finding out what is restarting the machine.

Found this elsewhere... Please do revise the BIOS events setup, just in case. BTW, when you have it shut down from 98, does it restart too?

I use 5.2 on XP SP3, and it remains working OK. So the problem is just another MS device to force people to upgrade. I wonder whether there may be a way to by-pass it or not...

Yes. As submix8c already told you, "/noexecute=AlwaysOff" disables DEP (and the other new switch "/PAE" enables PAE on a processor that supports it). Now, it must have said that "only software-based protection was available" on your previous machine, which was x86, because, AFAIK, all x64 do have "hardware-based protection", as yours certainly do. One of the "benefits" it offers is, as you had the opportunity to experience, to lose the ability to run most 16-bit DOS software! In any case, the really paranoid say DEP is a must, and run with ESET tightned to the max. Myself, I turn DEP off first thing, and never installed ESET. But I do like to use all memory above ca. 3.2 GiB to create a RAMDisk (I use the Gavotte), so I need PAE. Those switches I suggested result in running XP with PAE but no DEP, while the default is PAE with DEP. Of course, I do run a real-time antivirus (AVG 2011, somewhat tweaked to be less paranoid) and the mandatory firewall at the router (and do have full, up-to-date, back-ups). And no, I really don't want to turn this thread in another discussion about the best way to secure XP, so sorry for the off-topic comment...

Runing with case open or closed gives the same result? If so, exchange the heatsinks, and while at it, clean both processors and heatsinks thotoughly in the parts they contact, and then apply a very thin, but very homogeneous new layer of thermal compund, just before remounting. This is a procedure where practice makes perfect, so doing it once again won't hurt, but may very well help. Moreover, if, after exchanging the heatsinks, the other processor begins to wail, then we may suspect the heatsink, right?

Which version of ntkrnlpa.exe (or ntkrpamp.exe) are you using? I'd expect it to be "5.1.2600.6419 (xpsp_sp3_qfe.130704-0421)". Check it in the File Version line of the Properties window, s that you get the full version string and not just the numbers. Moreover, I'd recommend for the boot.ini the switches "/noexecute=AlwaysOff /PAE /fastdetect", without the quotation marks, of course, now that you are on x64 processors. Please bear in mind that the supersedence order of the updates is the following: KB2859537 (MS13-063) > KB2839229 (MS13-048) > KB2813170 (MS13-031) > KB2799494 (MS13-017) > KB2724197 (MS12-068) In principle, the latest qfe update contains all the previous fixes, but sometimes there's some registry modification or the like that falls over into the ether and needs to be done by hand, instead. One example is KB2724197: MS blabing mumbo-jumbo about 'security', but said nothing that it would impact EMS availabilty on NTVDM.Well, the previous "security" update, KB2707511 already caused NTVDM to crash on opening a pipe, an issue that hasn't been fixed. Since security updates are cumulative, KB2724197 must have both issues. Now, ain't those latest updates really awesome? Just to yet again point out that maybe two rollbacks may be in order, not just one... KB2633171 being the last non-flawed krnl set. I can't believe that Microsoft hasn't been very helpful remedying the issue of EMS not working for 16-bit apps under Windows XP as I personally believe that the important of the 16-bit Windows subsystem is increasingly deprecated. True enough. BTW, if you really need EMS, EMS Magic seems to be the way to go... That's a very good idea! Good news! At least the NTVDM pipe and UMB issues seem to be solved by KB2785487. Not sure about EMS availability, but EMS Magic is known to solve that.

Of course! But save as images all that you've already accomplished, take care of all that remains, but that, get into day-to-day working order again, and then, in absolutely no hurry, we can apply ourselves to solving that GLAN conundrum. Just my 2 ¢, of course.

In any case, you really should contact Josh and help him develop his great software even more, because it's precious in avoiding many headaches MS doesn't mind causing their customers, and it does so in a perfectly legal way, so it should be encouraged and helped in all possible ways.

Well, now I think it's time to give it a VIA 6105 or the like (a *very* plain-vanilla PCI) LAN card, create images (not clones) of both partitions (I use a 2 partition 2 TB USB WD My Passport for storing intermediate images) and solve all remaining problems but the LAN. While I'm confident you may end-up creating an .INF / driver combination that'll let you use the onboard hardware on XP, that won't happen on 98, so that maybe the PCI card will end-up being more than an interim solution (even if, for now, I'm proposing to use it precisely as an interim solution, and nothing more).

He does have a known-good complete backup. But due to his preference for using a single-partitioned ginormous RAID as the system disk, he ended up preferring to pay again, rather than to redeploy the backup, as discussed in Posts #5 and #6, above...

Yes. With all due respect, I wish to offer you some considerations. Please do bear with me, as no offense is intended. If, instead, you used the set-up model I consider best, you'd have a 60 - 80 GB (not more) system partition (not more) for Win 8.1 Upd 1. If having the hybernation file and pagefile in the system disk and partition is unavoidable (as it may well be on 8+, for all I know), then the size must be bigger, but those files may and ought to be deleted and zeroed-out before acquiring the dd-like image (see below). Then you'd have created a blind, dumb, byte-by-byte image (dd-like) of just the system partition, right before falling into the trapdoor. Then, after finding out what happened, you'd deploy back the image and be back where you started. I'd've cost you ca. 2 h or less to create the image and less than 1h to redeploy it. And US$ 0. And you'd be back exactly where you started. Of course for added safety, the system partition could be instead a single partitioned smallish (even perhaps 64 GB) fast-as-lightning SSD, and then the image would be full-disk, which even safer. So, even if MS set a trap-door for you, you were unable to recover (fast enough to be viable) mainly because of the achitecture you consider best for system deployment (which is also what MS imagines everybody is using, BTW). Think about that. Here is one of the rare instances where security-through-obscurity (viz. using a simple but uncommon system deployment architecture) works beautifully.

If I may, I think GrofLuigi hit jackpot or is very near it, IMO.

It does not work, because it's unicode and requires the NT NativeAPI! Hence, case closed! Not only PowerShell won't run, but not even the secret Run entry can be created!!! So, don't worry: the said malware cannot possibly run under 9x/ME. So it seems! If you run RegDelNull /? it'll display it again in "Usage: RegDelete <path> [-s]"

Opera 10.10 & ClamWin, in my opinion.

Nobody is ever safe, but you'll be probably as safe as you were before April 8, 2014. I'm splitting this to another thread, to prevent too much off-topic posts in this thread.

No. Anything not specifically designed for Dutch will not work right and it'll hose your installation. There's no easy way to get all the official Windows 98SE updates released by Microsoft anymore. Win 9x/ME Support ended on July 11, 2006... there's still plenty that can be done for English... But most of the hotfixes and/or updates for most other localizations are not available anymore.