dencorso

Sure! The great freeware Driver Cleaner Pro Version 1.5 (*NOT* Driver Cleaner .NET !!!) is the best option.

So, (1) is the new, more generic patch to allow for unsigned updates, and (2) means: <Update> "update\update.exe", as opposed to <Service Pack> "i386\update\update.exe", the difference being the prepended "i386\", since the 0x20 => 0x60 edit remains the same. Enlightening, thanks a lot! P.S: @tomasz86: our recent posts got lost in yet another database rollback. So I tried to insert all relevant info from them into this post and the previous one. Please correct me if I forgot anything of importance.

I stand corrected! It does indeed need patching, all right! Turns out you were right all along, caps_buster!!! Sorry! So, let me tell you how it's done (for setupapi.dll v. 5.1.2600.1106 ENU, MD5 = D82C5FB1175BC5E0975184CC5AEB35E6): At file offset 0004C83C one finds <558BEC8B45> and mods it to <33C0C23000>, as usual. And don't forget the good old < modifype setupapi.dll -c > at the end. Later edit: I've checked... same offset also holds for the CSY version.

You can only strive to keep alive something that's about to die. Windows XP is way far from it, BTW. Bear in mind that the curves depicted in the graph below are segments of Gaussians, not straight lines.

Yes, I agree with your points there. But I also need sed, so I did compromise. Now, our friend submix8c (thanks, man... you do rock! ) found a pearl he pointed me to on another thread... the link he gave works no more, but good old Wayback Machine is always there for the rescue (at least for the time being...): UnxUtils 2001 version (real standalone)!!! Grab the sed from it and do give it a try (it's a 45 kiB PE file!)... you'll fall in love. What's *really* limiting with sed is that it's ASCII, period... so if you need UNICODE, then that's not an option. But life is like that, anyway...

Why tip-top around sed for so long? Granted, it converts DOS ASCII to unix ASCII. Then one pipes it through unix2dos -D, and lo!, it's DOS ASCII all right again. Both exist in cygwin, requiring just the inevitable cygwin1.dll (and, perhaps, one or two more .dlls), since way back. And I bet there's a good Mingw standalone implementation too... sed1line.7z

Do it. If nothing turns out to work "as is", then we undergo the trouble of trying to edit the .inf of some of them, OK? ATi drivers usually are well behaved but, in case of need, do have at hand the great freeware Driver Cleaner Pro Version 1.5 (*NOT* Driver Cleaner .NET !!!). So, please, make sure to get it, just in case, OK?

I think you can get past that by editing the .inf ...

OK. Good luck!

Nothing! And care less. That's "unsupported" beyond their wildest nightmares.

You all want the thread split, I may do it... but where's the list of which post goes where? And appropriate titles for the new threads, please.

Not quite. You can navigate very passably still, even without KernelEx, using Opera 10.10... But I wasn't trying to make the case for 9x/ME... I only mentioned those OSes to say they went out of support in July 11, 2006... and remain usable today. There'll be navigators supporting XP SP3 for a long time ahead: its usage share is still about half the windows users... The best years of XP are still to come. Relax, stop worrying, and enjoy them instead.

Driver Guide? Nah!... Here's much better (and pushes no downloader on you). Er... (from post #4) you mean, like this? And it was manufactured on the second half of Nov '99, I think...

Good to hear from you again Hoko! And to see you're going for 95 precisely for the best of all the reasons, that's great!

Well. If we can get Super Pi to run, fine. If not, no sweat. Format & Scandisk (with surface check) the HDD, make it DOS bootable, create a folder called Win98SE and copy the CD to it, while preserving the CD's directory structure. Then boot from the HDD, and let's install from that folder.

Are you sure the CD is good and the CD reader too? All this behaviour you describe sounda like haphazard hardware failures at some point.

That's good enough. You can move over to super Pi... 2 -3 h should be enough to builld our confidence in the CPU. Then boot to DOS, format and scandisk (with surface test) the HDD. After that, we get to work on the OS, OK?

With all due respect: MS let go of 9x/ME way back (July 11, 2006) and we're still using it (I mean, the 9x/ME community I'm part of, as you all know). I'll do likewise with XP. I really fail to see what's the big deal. Why being *in-support* is so important to you all? While there remains compatible hardware, I see no obstacle whatsoever to continue using XP in the next 10-20 years. After that, it'll probably become really problematic... Then again, by that time, so much water'll have passed under the bridge that we can hardly know what we'll be interested in doing, IT-wise. This is just my 2 ¢, of course.

There's a lot about the technical differences between win-95 and win-98 that I don't know. Technical differences that have an impact on usability and stability. I would be eager to learn about perhaps the most important of these differences so that I (and perhaps others) would have a basis to switch over from win-98 to win-95 during a future OS re-installation. (I do not mean to question the subjective feelings that people may have for one OS or another). Besides the posts by LoneCrusader, most posts by BenoitRen, and also those by Andrew T., together with some posts by erpdude8 and a few by RLoew are all you need to read, to form your own opinion. The materials are there, it's just a matter of taking a deep breath and plunging into them. As you progress along that material, you might as well open a new thread, in order to discuss those tech aspects you're interested into.

You're much welcome! My take here is simple: the machine is old, and is misbehaving... so let's build some confidence the hardware is still reliable, before moving on to software. And those two tests I suggested are long, but can be left unattended, so that's a good start, IMO.

Well, but the MemTest86+ Live CD is much easier to get at this day and age than pc100 or pc133 ram sticks. And he can always extract the floppy image from the boot of the CD and deploy it as a real floppy, in case the machine cannot read a CD.

Do a Memtest86+ for the RAM (at least 12h, unless it fails before that), then SuperPi, for the CPU/MOBO. Let's eliminate hardware as a cause, OK?

The HDD is toast.

Deep Purple - Mistreated (interpolating "Rock Me, Babe" -- 1975 live in Paris)

Can you please elaborate. Been looking for info on it for a long time. If I recall correctly 7-zip supported initially only some types of .wim compression, but not all. To date the 7-zip 9.30 beta seemingly supports all of them. What was the question? It was what/how did .wim change, in fact, from Win 7 to Win 8. Somewhat off-topic (or dispersive) I admit, but I just couldn't resist. You've managed to answer it without disrupting the thread, but now that the OP considered his problem solved, you might as well expand your reply, if you feel like it, though.