dencorso

With all due respect, JodyT, not everybody feels like you about submix8c. Please do bear with me and, just for a moment, do consider whether, or not, your continuous returning to what you call "Windows XP's afterlife" (I, for one, disagree: XP remains very alive!) might perhaps annoy, more than a little bit, much more members of these forums than submix8c's behaviour.

Well, I guess that, if consulted, Mr. Gracious would certainly have told us something along the following lines: "There are many vulnerabilities in Win XP, which have not been discovered yet and for which existence there is no proof whatsoever, but, then again, this is no reason to feel complacent about it. Of course, most of those vulnerabilities have been carried over to Vista and thence to 7 - 8.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1..., in addition to newer ones, unique to those later systems, which, sooner or later, might see the light of day, despite the nooks and crannies of code they lurk within."

And, BTW, were it so dire, where, pray, is the out-of-band Security Update for those OSes not on EoS (POSReady 2009 and Win 2k3 among them)? I said it before: FUD... but I can say it again: FUD!

How to convert your Win 2k3... to a Workstation!

MS usually (but not always) releases a KB page for each update/hotfix at most. Then, when and if they ever get updated to v2, v3, v4, ..., vn, MS usually (but not always) stays mum about them. The updated versions of updates/hotfixes usually contain at least one updated file, relative to the original updates/hotfixes, and no additional files, beyond those that already existed in the original updates/hotfixes. Exceptions, there are some. Then again, it's said that exceptions do confirm their rules...

As I said before: Hence, choose the sp4.

@5eraph: Thanks a lot! You rock!

Let me contribute a further test. Cheers!

I've seen no hysteria whatsoever around the places I use to visit on the 'net. That must be a twitter/facebook phenomenon, as is usual, of late... Now: MS Security Advisory 2963983 "Vulnerability in IE Could Allow Remote Code Execution" Published: April 26, 2014 IMO, MS already knew this and delayed the advisory to some days after their cherished EoS date, just to add to their FUD. Deregister vgx.dll for now... an unofficial patch of reliable source will soon be available, I'm sure. What's this "flashed" fix you mentioned? Is there an unofficial patch already available? If so, where?

You ask by the KB number only. What you get in return will be marked v3. Try using this form. In case you're offered many alternatives, pick up the one having the most recent date. If, perchance, you get v4, meaning they released yet a further one, be sure to tell me.

In your opinion (as the great Judge Patrice Lessner would put it..)! That's why you love Vista. I don't. I love XP. So, IMO, the XP UI is the best one there is, hands down! At most, we can agree to disagree... @ NoelC: Marketing is an euphemism for Propaganda... why would you expect them to act any different?

Just provide a title (may be via PM, if you so prefer) and I can split this thread starting at post # 69, so that you then become the thread starter of the new thread. Or do you prefer to split this thread even above that (and if so, at what post, exactly)? BTW, by "general use" I mean the first one one employs to unravel any unspecified crappy blorkiness he/she may encounter on his/her day-to-day work (from an ontological point-of-view, of couse).

So, IMO, the correct bootsect.exe for general use is version: 6.3.9431.0. So here is again a download link to the older GWT which retrieves it: GetWaikTools_150.7z And, BTW, it's never too much to say: Thanks, JFX, you rock!

OK, OK! So I stand corrected. Let whoever reads the above assertive instead read it: "And yet *another* variant, independently developed by RLoew, of the *same* alternative jaclaz has provided a link to (viz. the "Wintricks" driver).

It's OK! What's really important is to have alternatives. The fact that both RLoew and S. Neddi eneded up deciding to use Lexar drivers as the base for their generic drivers independently from one another only shows it was a good choice. Probably even the best possible choice at the time. Then there arrived NUSB and it was fated to become the most known option, at first, and then it also became more comprehensive, in its later iterations.

True. In fact it looked very good at least from early 2007 up to a couple of days ago. It may even be some transient quirck... But, since I went there to check just as I was writing the above reply, I noticed it, and decided to mention it, in the hopes of helping to prevent people from getting scared away because of it.

Rest assured that the installer is smart enough to update only files which are of lower version than those in the hotfix being installed. Moreover, in this present case, higher versions do mean newer versions, alright, although that is not always necessarily true, as you said. Now, in fact, if your machine's XP SP3 is up-to-date according to MS update, you'll need just two hotfixes to have all the most up-to-date files installed: KB948101-v3 and KB2828030, which are both by request. BTW, I retract the note of caution I added in the 3rd post. Those issues were caused by badly seated RAM sticks in my machine, and never reappeared after I fixed that.

No. I don't think so... RetroOS's discovery was already incorporated by M-D in v. 3.5. For some reason I cannot fathom, our good friends at www.technical-assistance.co.uk seem to have lost all interest in NUSB, but their page, clearly needing some maintenance, still is the source for NUSB v.3.3 and a great number of localized versions of NUSB. Note one'll get a full page of warnings about missing components on the page... but it's OK, by just scrolling down, one'll find the links to NUSB. Just in case:

OK. OK. OK. Now... wasn't there an "Orangeware" driver, too, which is also generic?

dencorso, This is all very good to know! In a way, it's reassuring to learn that it's still possible to boot a fairly recent machine with DOS 1. Sorry I didn't get to reply sooner. It was a hectic week, capped by a Saturday snowstorm that felled trees and cut our power. --JorgeA I have reproduced the above results with my new machine. It's an Asus P8Z68-V LX with an Intel Core i7 3770K (Ivy Bridge) on it. The main problem was how to perform any test in a board that has only SATA devices and no floppy disk drives at all, when I intended to turn SATA off. The solution was to use an external USB 2.0 CD/DVD reader/burner. So there it is: still I can boot PC-DOS 1.00 and 1.10, as well as MS-DOS 5.00 - 8.00 flawlessly, regardles of whether the SATA devices are turned on or off, but only when they are turned off can I boot PC-DOS 2.00-4.01 or MS-DOS 3.00-4.01 !!! So, it's not some quirck related to the VIA 8237 implementation of SATA (150, BTW) nor is it related to the Intel Z68 implementation of SATA (600, BTW): it is related to SATA in general, probably at the most basic and general level of the SATA standard... and it might be worthy of investigating while there still is hardware in which one can turn SATA on and off at will. Of course there's no real use for those really old legacy versions of DOS, but that, IMO, does not lessen the interest in finding out what DOS used to do that so utterly breaks down the workings of SATA to the point of freezing the machine.

Sure. NUSB is language dependent, and there are versions of it for other languages at the link given by Flasche. But the point is: there's absolutely no problem for using USB Mass Storage Devices on Windows 98SE at all !!!

But we're still struggling to survive the Eternal September (and usenet news already isn't much more than a fond memory, BTW)...

And yet *another* alternative in a freebie offered by RLoew on his Prerelease and Beta Software page!

Flasche had already given a link to MD's NUSB elsewhere, now I add the thread about it here, too. Maximus-Decim: Native USB Drivers (NUSB) for 98 SE No specific driver is needed. Everybody and his/her cousin knows NUSB works flawlessly!

I'm sorry I cannot help with brand recommendations... most of the pendrives I own are precisely those that claim they can survive being put through some cycles in the washing machine, being dropped from tall buildings and being run over by a truck (although I've never put any of them through such resistence tests). That said, any "el cheapo" pendrive that's honest enough to actually be the size it claims to be should work fine with NUSB and give you no headaches under 9x/ME at all.