jimc52

Sorry, I know I shouldn't double post...but I am not getting anyone to answer elsewhere. I didn't realize there was a separate nLite section here on the forum. Please forgive, but I would like an answer if possible.... Hello everyone I just did a slipstream XP Pro + SP2 disk using nLite this weekend, with all hotfixes and security updates + drivers. My disk size grew to 680 MB and I was using a 700 MB CD total capacity. I was wondering, does it make any difference if I do a bootable DVD? Everything I have read about slipstreaming talks about CD's...not a word about whether or not it will work on a DVD. Does anyone have an idea or clue? Thanks - Jim

Hello everyone I just did a slipstream XP Pro + SP2 disk using nLite this weekend, with all hotfixes and security updates + drivers. My disk size grew to 680 MB and I was using a 700 MB CD total capacity. I was wondering, does it make any difference if I do a bootable DVD? Everything I have read about slipstreaming talks about CD's...not a word about whether or not it will work on a DVD. Does anyone have an idea or clue? Thanks - Jim

Hello everyone and thank you for the replies. No intention here to insult anyone at all. So apologies all around. I just wanted to hear some reasons why people continue to use 9X beyond the "old games" reason. I guess if you are satisfied with 9X and want to remain there, all well and good. I just wondered why anyone would stick with it when so much has been done to advance beyond 9X. BTW, I always found it adviseable in '98 to first uninstall the older graphics driver and then re-install a new one. I believe I remember that you can have multiple graphics drivers installed simultaneously in 98SE, but quite often, this caused more problems then just uninstalling the old driver and re-installing the new one. I remember having some serious conflicts from time to time when trying to install a newer graphics driver on top of an already installed older driver...this caused blue screens sometimes, and other times, odd or difficult to troubleshoot instability errors. And sometimes, things would work alright for a while but then I would see other issues which seemed to be unrelated but eventually could be traced back or troubleshot to the multiple-graphics driver situation. After a few experiences and talking with a lot of other 9X users at the time on forums such as http://www.computing.net (which I sat on for years as a troubleshooter), I advised to remove the old graphics driver first and then re-install a single new graphics driver. This solved the majority of problems people had in 9X with graphics driver issues and a host of other problems that seemed to result from different drivers, multiple drivers, or disperate multiple installed drivers. Even though this part of the forum is for 9X users, the fact is, a lot of us came from the 3.0/3.1/95/98/9.8SE/ME era and in fact, we all have things in common as a result. No intention here to create a flame war at all... more curiosity than anything else.

I just thought I would throw this out to the 9X community. I ran Win 98SE perfectly well years ago on an AMD K-6 500 Mhz processor using some off-brand motherboards. I never had a problem with crashes that i could not relate to some other non-AMD problem. It wasn't AMD's fault that vendors built poorly constructed drivers, it was more like, Intel people being bigoted against AMD. I remember that AMD made more sense to me in terms of dollars when it came to price camparisons...at the time, I could buy a 500 Mhz AMD processor for $90 while Intel was charging $350 for it's Pentium III 500 Mhz and I could see absolutely no apparent performance difference. Sure, if you ran SYSMARKS against both procs, you would see slight improvements in the Intel hardware, but who cared???? The differences amounted to nanoseconds, not minutes. That meant I had over $250 to spend on memory, m/b and other things I wanted.... I was reading the post argument on whether or not Intel or AMD were better processors for Win 98...in my opinion, at the time I used Win 98, the AMD K-6 processors were perfectly stable and as far as I can see, transparent compared to Intel processors or m/b's. Frankly, I despised the Intel m/b's at the time and found them inferior to cheap Taiwan boards. When the very first 300 Mhz Intel Pentium III came out, 128 Mbytes of SD 66 Mhz RAM at the time cost $600! An 8 Gigabyte HD from Maxtor cost $420. And Intel released their first m/b's for the Pentium III without the AGP drivers! Go figure! They were so eager to release Pentium III they didn't have the time to build adequate drivers for the AGP bus. I just want to remind you 9X fans out there, of what Intel cost compared to AMD and the fact that AMD didn't have the driver support from vendors like Intel did, in a time when Intel didn't have the ba**s to build adequate drivers for their own motherboards. I can see only one reason to even think of Windows 98/SE/ME these days and that is if you have an ancient computer you want to use for some miserable task like being a firewall to a server. The fact is, I run a lot of games on Windows XP from the Win 98 era using the Program Compatibility Wizard with no problems. I think it is a mis-understanding generally that Windows XP does not run older software well, in fact, I think it does.... and does so, much better that 98 ever could. I like the fact that the NT kernel on which XP is based, is much more stable, much less likely to crash, blue screen and have significant hard disk error problems (like lost clusters and so forth). I found myself constantly battling '98 over stability and driver issues. Especially, graphics driver issues...as I remember, I had to completely uninstall a graphics driver in Win 98 before I could re-install a new one. In XP, it's on-the-fly. I have never had an actual blue screen in the 6 - 7 years of using XP, pretty dogone stable, on dozens and dozens of new computers I have built. And further, who wants to deal with DirectX 7 level graphics on a 1X, 2X or 4X AGP card with 16 or 32 MB of dedicated memory on the graphics card???? Whew, those days are long gone friends! Not only is AGP bascially a dead issue, it's a done-dead issue. So if you cannot get good drivers for newer hardware, why are you complaining? The vendors aren't going to waste their time building drivers for dead hardware and a dead o/s. Ya gotta step up to the plate sometime, I figure. I like XP more than any other MS platform because of its rugged stability and I prefer NTFS over FAT32. I think it is a mirage to think that FAT32 is preferable to NTFS. It also has age on its side now, with 6, going on 7 years of improvements and is still supported until April 2009 when it goes into extended support. Just think about the improvements in Windows Explorer compared to '98...a world of difference in file handling. Unless you are running a very old computer which is incapable of Win XP I don't really see the point in using Win 98/SE/ME. MS isn't supporting it any longer. Most vendors have said "Adios" to it and maybe its time to move on and spend a few bucks to upgrade to a newer hardware. I remember building computers back in the '98 days could cost 2 Grand. I can build a computer today, which is vastly faster, vastly greater in memory, hard disk and video abilities in every respect, for around $600 give or take. So unless you are into antique's, why bother with this outdated O/S? I would like to hear some rational reasons other than you want to play quake 1 on it or you prefer the 9X version of MS Solitair...just trying to figure out why anyone would be running '98/me in this day and age.

Hello everyone . My name is Jim, and I logged on here to get some help with nLite, but I can see there is a lot more to be had here...I spend a lot of time on forums just studying problems and learning answers, more like curiosity than anything else. I have taken note, that humanity wouldn't be at all happy unless there were problems to be solved...which probably means computers were built just to create problems to occupy human space, mind and time...therefore keeping us busy. Just to let you guys know how old I am...I still have my original slide rules from taking physics and chemistry in high school... I've been around computers since the 1970's...I used to work on old fashioned clunkers from Honeywell, IBM and others when a hard disk was as big as a pizza platter and held a whole huge gigantic 1 MB of memory...and fed programs into the computer with a pink ticker tape or punch cards... I don't know if your memories (any of you) recall a small pc called a "Kaypro." But it had all the engineering students at Oregon State University buzzing.... My first personal computer was an Intel 286 8 Mhz with a wopping 640K memory and a 1 MB extension with DOS 1.1. My favorite was writing batch files using EDLIN...whew! Anyway...the one thing I miss is just a simple and very basic BASIC interpreter like MS had back then. I think the biggest mistake Microsoft has ever made was getting away from character driven computing...so I got ambidextrous and use Linux as well...the GNU compiler and the infamous command line editors like BORN-BASH shell are still there. I get nostalgic for just having my hands on the actual hardware. So all of my computers at home are dual boot Windows - Linux. I happen to like both MS Windows and Linux, and I don't take sides like a lot of people do...sort of silly, when there is a lot to be learned using both operating systems. I write code in several languages, C++ in particular, BASIC, PASCAL, VISUAL BASIC are my favorites, but I like some of the other interesting languages like PYTHON.... I am of the opinion that everything should be cross platform, all of the Linux distros should work within windows and vice-versa. There is plenty of room for everyone in the computing world. When I am on Linux forums there is a lot of anti-windows nonsense. And Windows users tend to be "afraid" of Linux like its some kind of techie-guru o/s...really, I encourage all of you to try Linux out. My favorite is Red Hat or Fedora Core. It's not hard to create a dual windows-linux computer. I have tried several distros, and my latest project will be to try UBUNTU on a different computer. I also design and build computers on the side, as a hobby...this keeps me going on the latest hardware and software developments. Don't get me wrong, I have been around a long time, but I am learning new and untried things every day, so I am very appreciative to be on this site and I hope that I will be able to continue my never ending learning here. One other thing...I firmly belive that the only stupid question is the one that you were afraid to ask. I never look down on other people or deride them because they are struggling with something that is hard for them {but easy for me}. I think that being compassionate and understanding, patient and helpful, is the best way to garner friends and assist others. I may post questions here that sound dumb or stupid or even illiterate by someone else's measure...but I think it only goes to show, you have the answer and I don't...respect is what counts. Hope I haven't said too much, but hello everyone. Sincerely - Jim in Oregon

Hello everyone. I have built an AMD 6000 X2 proc based computer with an ASUS M2N-SLI Deluxe m/b, 2 gigs DDR2 RAM and one single (and only) 500 Gig WD SATA2 drive, which I have connected to SATA1 on the m/b. I have a single full version of Windows XP Home OEM Ver 2002, so I realize I need to do a slipstreamed disk to update to SP2 + a bunch of other things. I discovered nLite on the net and have read about 100 different how-to articles on slipstreaming and nLite. However, every last one of these articles deals with a RAID configuration of one type or another. When it comes down to the explanation in all these articles of including drivers in nLite, it always has to do with a RAID configuration. Well...as you can see, I have but one SATA2 hard disk and that means, no RAID config...nor do I want to RAID configure. This leaves me with wondering what I should do when I get to the DRIVER section of nLite during my slipstreaming. I know the SATA2 drivers are on the m/b disk to make a floppy for a typical F6 install of the SATA2 drivers. However, I want to slipstream, but not sure what I should do in nLite if I do NOT want to RAID. Should I make the floppy and then point nLite to the floppy to copy the drivers to the HD? Does a RAID or non-RAID driver config make any difference (do the same drivers that do RAID configs also recognize just one non-RAID config hd)? What would you recommend? I am referring specifically to the nLite section where I would add the SATA2 drivers. BTW this is an nVidia 570 SLI SATA2 m/b. Thanking anyone here kindly - in advance