Francesco

That's because there's a limit in the number of quotes in a single post. (this is why I was forced to use bold instead of the quote block in some previous answers) I don't think that VDMsound (the sb emulator) is made to work in conjuction with other emulators. It's made to enable audio on dos games that work fine under xp (and there are many of them). However I prefer dosbox that even if doesn't have a complete sb32AWE emulation (like any heavy dos gamer would expect) you can tweak the speed and have a better game experience because on newer systems many games' speeds get messed up: for example I tried playing stargunner and quake on dos and they were going way too fast (even with slowmo). With dosbox I just tweaked a few settings and they start running fine.

There are some alternatives, like a sound blaster emulator for XP. I never tried them but some of my friends told me that they're pretty fast. If you have problems you can still keep a real dos partition for games.

Only in certain situations; since NTFS is more complex it has a larger 'critical window' - where interrupted writes can corrupt the entire filesystem. What if that interrupted write happened somewhere in the journal file? Well if the journal gets corrupted there should still be the filesystem structure intact so nothing weird should happen. Most of the writes are cached so NTFS's critical window isn't much bigger. However you still have to be 2x times unlucky by having both a journal corruption and a filesystem structure corruption together.

This is why I said "On the recent games almost always you get better performance and more reliability with more recent drivers. On 9x ATI video cards after the 9800 and all nvidia cards that came out in 2006 are not supported. Same thing for recent nforce/ATI chipsets: they're not supported." WinPE is not an application it's a sort of live version of XP where you can add and run plenty of applications. With some plugins you can enable plug&play, explorer/IE and many other stuff to make it work like a nearly-full XP environment booting from CD. It may take more to boot however you can use plenty of stuff you can't use on DOS (you can even get some games like quake3 running on winPE and this says it all). Maybe because your office PC has plenty of cheap integrated hardware, bloated antivirus etc? It is mostly affected by drivers and OS features (like XP's prefetch, that is why XP usually gets higher scores on winstone benchmarks). After all the NT kernel doesn't have much higher added overhead compared to the 9x kernel. All? What about applications like Diskeeper 11, Office 2003/2007, NETFX 3.0, visual studio 2005 etc? Even firefox 3.0 is going to drop 9x support. Those are usually very rare exceptions. If you need dos support you can still keep a 9x partition for dos stuff like games etc. However on XP there are projects like dosbox that are getting better and better with each version. But an OS that can't be crashed or hanged by most applications is a step above the others, don't you think? I've had my xp laptop running for entire months without a single shutdown (because I use hybernation) on 98 probably I would have been forced to reboot a few times in a week because of crashes or ram being eated up by leaks.

That's a feature created to make crashes efficient. Your system shouldn't crash to begin with. And if you claim XP is nearly uncrashable, it's pointless. What if your PC power suddently goes off? What if the IDE/SATA driver messes up and starts writing everywhere? You know that on FAT32 all the files in the directory structure are stored together? What happens if the power goes out and windows is updating for example the "last access" date of a file in a directory? The ENTIRE DIRECTORY could get corrupted and without journal all the file references would be lost. Most people also seem to forget that NTFS is a proprietary file system, its implementation known only to M$ as a trade secret, while FAT is a partially patented file system whose inner workings have been documented all over. With NTFS, you need M$ to read your files, it partially owns them. With FAT32, I own my files and have full control over them. And? That doesn't change the fact that there are plenty of partition managers and recovery utilities that work perfectly on ntfs (partition magic, acronis (that is linux based), easyrecovery etc). And now linux has fully working read/write drivers for NTFS. Everytime windows accesses a file it updates the Last Access entry in the directory structure for the file, during some boots windows back-ups the registry, etc. If there are people giving PROs about 98 there has to be somebody to point also at the CONs, don't you think? Games belong on consoles. http://www.gamespot.com/pages/forums/show_...pic_id=24525221 what about these games? Are they all coming to consoles? Oblivion looking awesome on a 32mb card?!? Have you even tried running it on a 32mb card? Pratically you see only very-near things. Enemies and other stuff remain unseen unless you get very near to them. It's almost unplayable. Since linux now has a full ntfs read/write driver you can use a nice linux bootdisk if you don't want a large boot cd-rom Marketing? I'd really want to see recent benchmarks of win98 with legacy drivers (because most hardware producers don't support 98 anymore) and xp with recent drivers. But that bloat can be easily disabled from the services console. Can you say the same of the hidden win9x processes? Even XP/2k can be ghosted. But what about all the up-to-date drivers that can be integrated in a XP install with the driverpacks? What? A mess? With just the XPE plugin you can have an almost completely working windows XP (where IE, explorer and many other applications actually work) all booting from CD.

_beginthreadex and _beginthread are preferable over CreateThread especially when using the CRT included with windows 98 because pre-7.0 versions had weird memory leaks. This doesn't happen on the CRT 7.0 included on XP that has been mostly rewritten (to make it more thread-safe). Like I said before if you prefer performance over stability is a different matter. However if you actually test recent hardware, that has legacy drivers for 9x and a much more recent drivers on XP probably you would get different results. Most PC users would prefer reliability against slightly better performances. Because it is in fact superior. Maybe in some cases it isn't as fast as windows 9x however in terms of stability is light years ahead. You can do that with XP too (with a tool called preinst) but I prefer reinstalling from scratch with the driverpacks so I get up-to-date drivers in each install. Well like I said if fine for you means only better performance it's all another matter.

Have you tried running memtest86 after removing the ram stick? Well we were talking about the easiness of a XP install versus a 9x install. Using nlite that does everything is still easier than having to mess up with different utilities.

often but not always On the recent games almost always you get better performance and more reliability with more recent drivers. On 9x ATI video cards after the 9800 and all nvidia cards that came out in 2006 are not supported. Same thing for recent nforce/ATI chipsets: they're not supported. actually adobe 7 has been run on 98 http://www.msfn.org/board/index.php?showtopic=72627 I was actually answering to the comment that acrobat 7 is slow (and 8 is even slower). I wasn't talking about application compatibility. but it still crashed when i only had 48mb of ram Probably because you have some bad drivers or faulty hardware (for example a broken ram stick) I have never seen a 2k crashing because of low ram. http://www.msfn.org/board/index.php?showto...l=unattend' http://www.msfn.org/board/index.php?showtopic=80800 Those 2 utilities aren't as easy as nlite where you can integrate drivers/updates(and updates are really integrated in the cab files)/applications and configure every aspect of your xp/2k install. You can build it from a XP cd using bartPE.

This is why I told that if you have very low ram you can try installing win2000 that has much lower hardware requirements. The common user usually doesn't need many of the services in XP. You can disable plenty of services and still have plenty of uses for your XP install. I made clean installs on plenty of PCs and never got slowdowns because of the OS. The only PCs that slowed down were PCs where the users used P2P software that create a lot of fragmented files (but that happened on 9x systems too), PCs infested with malware or PCs that ran out of ram because of plenty of useless applications running in background. Actually there's adobe 7 lite that somebody in this forum released. It has most of the adobe reader features but loads faster and uses much less ram. With nlite you can do a completely automated install cd of 2000/XP with applications, updates and, if you use driverpacks, all up-to-date drivers already integrated. It's almost impossible that XP crashes unless you have faulty hardware or very bad drivers. Oh well that's an application issue not an OS issue (unless you have ram problems). If you get those kind of crashes with any application and also BSODs i'd suggest you to scan your ram with memtest86.

What about graphics and motherboard drivers? Nvidia and ATI stopped supporting Win9x. And as you may know often newer drivers mean better performance on games. You can create a Windows PE CD to access your NTFS partition, fix the registry, restore your windows backup etc. XP is actually slower only if you run it on really old hardware without much ram or with really bad drivers. If you run it on recent hardware usually you get much better performance than win9x systems, especially since I told you before recent hardware is only supported on XP (and not only videocards, now even chipset producers are dropping 9x support). Better performance than 9x was one of the things that MS continuosly advertized when XP came out: http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/pro/eva...erformance.mspx You can fix XP very fast too with WinPE. I fixed plenty of malware-infested PCs with it.

As long as I remember CreateThread()/_beginthread() leak some memory on Win9x this is why Apache has the following compile switch: PMT_PTHREAD This MPM is based on the PREFORK MPM and begins by forking the desired number of child processes, each of which starts the specified number of threads. When a request comes in, a thread will accept the request and serve the response. If most of the threads in the entire server are busy serving requests, a new child process will be forked. This MPM should be used on platforms that have threads, but which have a memory leak in their implementation. The important advantage of the NTFS is however that since it's journaled it's way more reliable than FAT. Also it has some cool features like additional streams that can be used by antiviruses (for example kaspersky) to store checksum data to avoid scanning the same files twice. There are linux ext2 users that could say the same thing of ext2 because they have a stable setup: that doesn't change that with ext2 or fat32 you risk losing more data if the O.S. crashes or the computer is suddently powered off. If you didn't notice this thread is named "Why continue to use Windows 9x?" so I didn't come here accidentally saying that NT-based OSes are better without reasons just to p*** other people off. I answered in this thread because somebody asked why windows 9x should still be used and I gave my reasons not to use it, because it's unsupported and very unreliable. If you prefer performance over stability it's your preference however that doesn't change the fact that NT based oses are years ahead in terms of stability.

It's almost impossible that on XP/2k an application can bring down the entire OS. Also you can still launch the application with the lowest priority to avoid it to slow down the OS. Why should NTFS corrupt more than FAT32? The point of NTFS, like any other journaled FS, is avoiding corruption. Life of terror? If you keep automatic updates on and don't use IE I really don't see how you can get infected by a virus on XP or 2k. And the firewall on XP uses a incredibly low amount of CPU since it just monitors open ports. Also on Win9x there were flaws that let EVERYBODY access your file shares from the internet just by guessing the first letter of the password so Win9x wasn't magically immune of bugs (and there are plenty of worms that still infect win9x machines with shares turned on and no patches).

Like I said before when the hardware allows XP (or win2k) to run I think it should preferred over 9x. I don't know how can you say that an OS is "running fine" when such OS stability can be compromised by any bad-written application. And as you may know finding an application that doesn't suffer memory leaks or doesn't have any bugs is very, very hard. The only idea of using an OS that has memory leaks even when creating new threads (yes, win9x does) and that relies on a partition type that risks to get completely corrupted with each crash gives me the creeps.

It's not useless XP is easier, extremely stable unless you have hardware with messy drivers and actually more supported by hardware manifacturers (so for example if in the future you'll want to buy a new usb printer/scanner for your pc etc you won't have any problem). Generally XP is better i've installed it on very old machines like Pentium 200 mmx, celerons etc when tweaked down it runs very well (and sometimes even better) than 98/ME (and no, ME doesn't always runs bad with the right drivers). The only problem you may have is with integrated videocard that enormously slown down the user esperience especially on XP (for reasons that are too long to explain now) and with ram that most of the times can be upgraded. To solve the RAM problem I bought plenty of 64mb sticks so if one of my friends wanted to install XP on their ultra-old machine I just had to put 2/4 sticks of 64mb ram and everything would have been running fine. Processor speed hasn't never stopped me as long as the CPU is MMX compatible (so this means at least a pentium mmx with more than 200mhz). Nobody has ever complained that their system was slower with XP, instead people told me that they didn't notice slowdowns and had better esperience with XP, unless the people had integrated videocard (but most of the times I solved by adding some old PCI ATI rage videocards). I understand that 95/98 may be faster on very very old system however I think that if the hardware allows XP to be installed then I think that XP should be preferred over 9x (unless you need specific software that runs well only 9x like games but you still can use dual boot). Also don't forget that if XP doesn't run you (non-MMX cpu, chipset that doesn't support more than 128mb of ram etc)there's still Win2000 that is not bad at all. Yes it probably runs bad because XP wants ram: when I can't install more than 128mb of ram I usually give up the AV (I install for example AOL virus shield (a rebranded version of KAV) and disable all the realtime scans, etc. I just say the user to scan the stuff manually), automatic updates (and all the related services), imapi, time service, sysmon, server, workstation services, all the useless background processes installed by hardware drivers and software, etc. I can manage to get it up to about 50 mb of ram however if you still need the AV or just find the experience too sluggish you can still try installing 2k.

As I told you you can buy on ebay very cheap 64mb sticks of ram (because nobody wants them). If your mb has 4 ram slots (like most) you can get 256mb on your mb. Did you install updated drivers? Did you restore video/audio acceleration? Did you check out that UDMA is enabled? I don't know why you prefer running an OS without memory protection and that also relies on FAT. I've installed XP on plenty of old PCs (even very old 200mhz pentium MMXs) and with the services tweaked and updated drivers most of the time it was running very very well. A 800mhz pc like yours should be more than capable of running XP: do you have an integrated SiS graphics card? That could explain why XP runs slow, drivers for some old SiS hardware, especially video hardware, run horribly on XP. I have XP on a 733 mhz laptop with Ali chipset and it runs very very well, surely better than the 98se the laptop came with. This is because Apple has patents on fonts antialiasing so the linux distros come with antialiasing disabled. You have to enable antialiasing by hand if you want the fonts to look like XP. Unfortunately linux antialiasing is not at the same level of cleartype however it's still pretty good. You can still post your problem on the ubuntu forums probably they'll solve it.

XP works very well on old computers if you disable useless services. Yes you will still need much ram however you can buy plenty of 64mb sticks on ebay like I did (for 40€ I got 40 64mb 133mhz sticks). I have seen optimized windows 2003s (converted to workstations) and windows XPs using less than 50mb ram without essential services disabled (and some of them with the themes still turned on). Most of the usage unfortunately sometimes are related to the device drivers however XP and 2003 without some less-used services enabled don't use very much ram. Actually the biggest memory hog on XP/2003 are automatic updates and the services it relies on however if you connect to the internet with a router (so your pc is not directly visible on internet) and you don't use IE/outlook probably you're safe without updates.

I was thinking to make a theme with: -luna element black -the fake vista sounds (yes I know they're fake but they really sound great) -vista cursors is anybody here interested?

I have the same identical problem too

You tried 40 linux distributions?!? Oh my!

That's what i'm doing however I found out that after extracting the rollup2 package inside there are normal hotfixes that can be applied by hand. Some of them can be integrated but all the ones regarding MCE strangely won't install. The problem is that running that hotfix takes forever and also requires a reboot because IE won't show webpages unless windows is restarted.

I tried integrating some of the MCE 2005 hotfixes (especially rollup 2) but it looks like they don't get integrated correctly because MCE is installed after the hotfixes (so the patch won't work). Is it because nlite doesn't support them or am I doing something wrong?

WMP 6.4 is still present in XP because it is used by some websites and that's what the patch is for. I didn't get any integration error, the hotfix got integrated however WU still proposes me the patch. However I think the responsible is WMP11 that probably installs another version of 6.4. Are you integrating this patch before or after integrating WMP 11? Try doing so before WMP 11. I was integrating it before, now i've tried integrating it after wmp11 and the problem seems to have disappeared

WMP 6.4 is still present in XP because it is used by some websites and that's what the patch is for. I didn't get any integration error, the hotfix got integrated however WU still proposes me the patch. However I think the responsible is WMP11 that probably installs another version of 6.4.

Isn't it only for wmp 6.4? However i've tried redownloading the hotfix and remaking the windows cd and the problem is still there: on windows update I get no updates available (because all the other updates integrated well) except that one.

Oops the KB is KB923689.