Mijzelf

The LBA48 problem is bound to the standard IDE harddisk driver of W9x. So all other ways to access disks are not affected: SCSI, USB, Firewire, ESDI (Well, I don't think you will find a 127GB+ ESDI drive), or even BIOS calls. This does not mean that these interfaces don't have other limits/bugs, but they don't have this one.

1991? Is it possible that this keyboard has an XT interface? AFAIK Linux supports XT keyboards, but Windows (at least the 32 bit versions, the 16 bit versions use BIOS functions, I think) don't. When it has an XT interface I would expect you can't access the BIOS with it either. Maybe it has an XT/AT switch on the bottom, or maybe you can find an XT/AT convertor like this. Else you'll have to write your own keyboarddriver, I'm afraid.

I second this. MS has a patch which cures a hang after each 49.7 days. This prooves that W9x can be up for this period.

That doesn't help. The mechanism used to hide a partition is to set the 'hidden' bit in the partition descriptor. So W98 still has to parse the partitiontables to see if it should ignore the particular partition, which it already does, since W98 ignores all unknown partition types.

I've just feeded a clean W98SE image to a virtual machine, installed IE6, and clicked on Windows Update. It found 23 critical updates. So I suppose everything still works.

If everything beyond 128 GB is left blank, it will work fine. It will also work fine when you create one big NTFS partition in the remaining space, since W98 indeed will not touch it. In this case a problem can rise. DaveLH seems to have 7 partitions. That could be 3 primary and 3 logical, but more likely is 1 or 2 primary and 5 or six logical. I've seen several partition managers which create these logical partitions as a linked list. (Maybe all do so). The primary partiton table defines a 10 GB partition 1, starting at 0, and an extended partition 2 (which is a partition table itself), starting at 10 GB. Extended partition 2 defines a 50 GB logical partition 3 starting at 10 GB plus a little, and an extended partition 4, starting at 60 GB plus a little. Extended partition 4 defines a 50 GB logical partition 5 starting at 60 GB plus a little, and an extended partition 6, starting at 110 GB plus a little. Extended partition 6 defines a 50 GB logical partition 7 starting at 110 GB plus a little, and an extended partition 8, starting at 160 GB plus a little. ... W98 has to check all extended partitions, to see if they define a logical FAT partition, but when reading extended partition 8, it will read the data what happens to be at address (160 mod 137) ~ 23 GB. This may or may not look like a partition table. Both cases are bad, and can damage the W98 memory structures. To safely use an unpatched W98 system on a huge IDE disk, al partitions used by W98 and all partition tables have to be below 137 GB.

That's not necessarily true. The 320 GB drive is divided in 1*10GB, and 6*50 GB, I presume. This means that there's a linked list of extended partition tables, which are partly located beyond the 137 GB barrier. At boot W98 is following these links, to see if there are supported partitions in the list. When reading an extended partition table beyond 137GB, it will read (semi) random data, which can cause problems. I'd suggest to just install LLXX's patch. If it doesn't help it will not hurt either. You can do the patching from XP.

Do you mean the cd tray cannot open because the hole in the front cover is too small? I think that in that case you'll have to go shopping with a measuring tool.

What do you mean with 'the TTL value is knocked out completely'? If you mean that it's 0 or a very low value, than it's normal that you can't connect to anything. In each router the packet passes TTL is decremented, and when it reaches 0, the packet is dropped. This mechanism must prevent packages from travelling forever when the destination is unreachable. So with a value of 1 or lower, it cannot even pass your own router.

AKOT, a city in India

SKUG, Yet another river

Really? Did you check bootlog to see what caused that time?

On the other hand, when all applications you need are available for W95, why use XP? Seeing the specs I suppose this machine will boot from BIOS exit to GUI in 3 seconds. XP will do it in maybe 30 seconds?

TUAT, people from the north of Algeria.

You can use a batchfile: PING 1.1.1.1 -n 1 -w 300000 >NUL YourApp.exe where 1.1.1.1 is a not reachable IP address.

LIFF. A book, the contents of which are totally belied by its cover. For instance, any book the dust jacket of which bears the words. 'This book will change your life'.

When you've got antivirus stuff in the BIOS setup, disable it before trying to format C:. This 'feature' disables writing to the bootsector.

PERU, a country in South America

I think you can find her here.

BURE, Yet another river

JORK, a town in Germany

You want to read the SMART status, while the drive is an USB mass storage device. AFAIK there is no standardized way to get SMART data from an USB device. Besides, it's dangerous to wait until SMART alarms you to backup. A drive can die without warning.

Probably not. For streaming video the videocard seldom is the bottleneck. In most cases no processing can be passed to the GPU, so only the bandwidth to the video memory is important.

... or use a decent webbrowser which doesn't have a problem at all.

You will be immune for any exploit in any webbrowser, and AFAIK W98SE itself doesn't have any security holes in it's internet interface (especially not when you don't install the 'client for ms networks'). But you will be vulnerable through any exploit in the games you're playing. W98SE. It has a better dos support. I don't think so.