Multibooter

I didn't know that, but multibooting is a very difficult subject matter. I have been using System Commander for the past 15 years, and System Commander has protected me from all these intricacies.The choice of a boot manager is probably the least reversable computer decision. LoneCrusader probably will not change his working setup with System Commander; jaclaz will probably not change his boot manager, except for a newer version, maybe. It's also nearly impossible to try out boot manager Y if you have already a working setup with boot manager X. In 1997, when I had System Commander v3.05 installed, I dared to test-install another boot manager, I believe it was from Paragon, at that time still software from Russia. As a result, the laptop became completely corrupted. When I selected one operating system selection, it came up fine, but after rebooting, that previously selected operating system had disappeared from the OS selection menu. Every time I changed the operating system, the OS selection menu became smaller, one OS after the other was gone. I eventually did recover. This experience was no incentive to try out other boot managers.

@dencorso, [off topic]I had built myself a similar device a year and a half ago, as an "eMule download station", using a multi-card reader cum hub + 3 SDHC cards. I had used it for about 6 months, then rejected it, because eMule took about 10 minutes to start up and 10 minutes to shut down with it, my download list had between 1000-1500 files, my SDHC cards were just slow (fine during download, even at 200kB/s, but slow during startup and shut down of eMule). A 2nd HDD in the right-bay module of my laptop is much superior, also the regular internal HDD.[/off topic]BTW, not that far away offtopic, since files damaged by tenga on the USB HDD were on such a device. In the back of my mind I have been pondering whether tenga may have been planted recently onto eMule, to destroy extracted downloads. Some people may have been loading eMule with malware, about 90% of the downloads are now infected, especially shareware stuff, maybe intentionally as a malguided defensive measure.

Vulnerable to old viruses like Tenga, but Win98 has probably a very low vulnerability to new malware.I am still puzzled on how I got this Tenga infection. It's quite unlikely that such an old virus still exists in the wild. The last WildList if have seen which mentions Tenga.a is of March 2007 http://www.wildlist.org/WildList/200703.htm , with a stated date of Feb-2006. I have been fiddling around during the past year with my old software archives, stuff from many years ago. Maybe I got the infection from old stuff in my archives, maybe some Jurassic-Park-type self-inflicted pain. Maybe I was not aware of the danger lurking in old software archives. In any case this tenga infection shows that an old virus can still be a pain years later. I wonder whether Tenga runs under Vista/Win7. Because of its ability to infect USB HDDs and across operating systems it's still a very dangerous little program. This will take a lot of time, and may be good on a system to which few new applications are added. My Win98 may eventually become such a system, but currently I am still installing a lot of new stuff under Win98.I have budgeted about 5% of my time on the computer for virus-checking and virus-problems, so I view the Tenga infection just as an eventual use of previously budgeted time, and as an interesting intellectual exercise. The time lost getting the laptop back up again was not serious, in contrast to the time lost recovering data on the infected USB HDD. I am not yet sure how my experience with Tenga will change my precautionary measures against future malware infections; maybe I'll just have to make more frequent backups of new, not-yet-processed downloads stored on my USB HDDs.

I just don't know under which operating system I got infected. I am switching quite frequently between operating systems, but 90% of the time I am using Win98, 10% WinXP. I can definitely exclude that I got the tenga virus via a network under WinXP since I am currently outside of the US and have changed IP settings, passwords, etc only under Win98, not under WinXP; I have currently no network/internet access under WinXP. I have not installed any new software under WinXP since I made the last clean backup and in general don't test-install software under WinXP, only under a special test-Win98. So everything points in the direction of Win98 as the first infected operating system .Also, a 2nd WinXP on an NTFS partition did not get infected at all, which is kind of a puzzle, maybe because I use this specific operating system selection only very rarely, or because the infection started under Win98 and tenga.a could not see the NTFS partition under Win98, or because I detected the infection early on, before the infected WinXP on the FAT32 partition could infect the not-yet infected WinXP on the NTFS partition. This tenga.a seems to be an interesting little program. If you want to investigate whether or how Tenga.a infects under Win98, send me a PM, I have enough copies. I did have, and still have, Kaspersky AV v6 with a current signature on Win98. Tenga.a was specifically detected when I ran under Win98 an on-demand scan with Kaspersky of the whole computer (except for the WinXP on the NTFS partition, invisible under Win98).Unfortunately I initially selected maybe the first 30 infected files to be deleted, instead of having them disinfected or skipping them, so the original culprit may have been deleted. After I got aware of the extent of the infection I selected disinfection, and after a while I just stopped. When I tried to reboot, none of my Win9x/Win2k/WinXP operating system selections worked anymore, too many critical .exe files had been deleted/disinfected, only the NTFS-based WinXP still worked. I still have the infected internal HDD, now completely disinfected by Kaspersky, and the still-infected external USB HDD (1TB), where I did not let Kaspersky delete or disinfect files. It is very easy to know, without Kaspersky, which files on the external USB HDD are infected, by just looking at the modification date: all .exe files with a modification date between Feb-28 and Mar-3 on the USB HDD are infected with tenga. There must be more than a thousand infected .exe files on the infected internal HDD and on the infected USB HDD, so it's quite time consuming to find out which .exe file got infected first. What alo complicates matters is that when Kaspersky AV identifies an instance of tenga.a, it changes the modification date of the infected .exe to the current date, even if I selected "skip".It was very easy to identify with Beyond Compare which .exe files were infected, they all had modification dates between Feb-28 and Mar-3 (Mar-3 was the last time I ran Kasperksy on the infected internal HDD and the external USB HDD, Feb-28 was probably the date of infection). In order to repair the infected installation sources on the USB HDD I first made a copy of them, then replaced on the copy the infected .exe files, as identified with their modification date, with the corresponding .exes from other backups/rars/isos. For about 90% of the infected installation sources I had on the USB HDD also an untainted .rar file containing the whole good installation source rared up as a 2nd instance, so recreating a good installation source from the rars was not a problem. About 10% of the infected installation sources, where I had no 2nd .rar instance, I had to download again from the Internet. This was relatively fast with FlashGet because I usually document the exact download URL (not just the html download page) of files downloaded. Maybe 10 installation sources, however, did not exist anymore under their original download URL, including software purchased from Digital River, and were lost for good, unless I can find backups when I am back in the US. BTW, I was very careful and did not get re-infected when I worked with the clean restored internal HDD on the attached infected USB HDD and on the infected internal HDD inserted into the right-bay HDD module of my laptop. Since tenga.a is an old virus, I would assume that all AV packages detect it. When was Tenga detected for the first time? In 2003 or in 2005? I don't know. I usually only double-click on an unknown file after having checked it with Kaspersky, and only in a test-win98 which then gets wiped out + restored from a clean backup. I never use any MS patches, my gut feeling is that the cure is worse than the disease.I remember having manually deleted a file dl.exe from \Win98\, possibly days before I noticed the tenga infection, because I hadn't seen it before in \Win98\. dl.exe is actually a part of tenga.a. Could it be that tenga.a contains a timer which starts to activate at the end of the month (Feb-28 = end of month), and that the actual infection occurred much earlier? The infected laptop was connected via a peer-to-peer Win98 wireless network to another identical laptop running eMule under Win98. The eMule laptop was not infected, so the infection could not have come from the WLAN network or the eMule computer. I am using the Tiny Personal Firewall v2.0.14 on both laptops, and Tiny did not inform of any calling out from the infected laptop. I checked with Beyond Compare Hex Viewer, Tenga also makes minor changes in the initial part of the file. Kaspersky can disinfect a tenga-infected file, but the disinfected files always differed somewhere from the original uninfected files.Usually the infected files were about 3kb bigger, with stuff mainly added at the end. Some infected .exe files, however, were really damaged (e.g. reduced from 2MB to 30kb), a few infected files were even a little smaller than the original uninfected file.

If your computer doesn't boot, boot from a DOS 6 or DOS 7 floppy, then run Setup.exe in the Win9x folder. If you computer can boot without a boot floppy, it already contains an operating system.

Getting all operating systems back to work as before took about 5 hours, from a 4-week-old backup. I am away from the US currently, so I will be able to know for sure whether I lost data on the 1 TB USB HDD when I am back in the US in June. I may have made a backup of the 192GB work partition there, before my trip, but I am not sure, I usually make backups before leaving/entering the US, there are horror stories about confiscated laptops etc. Yes, a forensic .gho image would be excellent, but storing it onto a USB HDD might be good enough, viruses probably don't infect .gho image files on re-writable media. The tenga.a virus did not infect .iso, .rar, only executable 32-bit .exe files. I have a good .gho image of my desktop in the US, but unfortunately not of my old Inspiron laptop, which got infected, so restoring the internal HDD took quite some time. Creating a .gho image of the recovered laptop is on the top of my list now. I have up-to-date Kaspersky AVP v6.0.2.621 under both Win98 and WinXP, but I only scan new downloads. The infection happened very quickly, maybe 5 hours before I noticed it and ran Kaspersky, so a daily scan might not have been timely enough. Also, it was a 5-year-old virus, so a current virus signature update was not needed to detect tenga.a. I just don't know how I got tenga.a, and I suspect that only a continuously running virus-scanner could have prevented the infection .Kaspersky is actually able to disinfect tenga-infected files. Unfortunately, the disinfected files are not identical to the original files. Some .exe files are completely destroyed by tenga, e.g. reduced from 2MB to 30kB, so the disinfected file is of no use. Other disinfected .exe files/archives differ from the original .exe, but extract the identical files as the original .exe. Yes. I had a 2nd identical Inspiron laptop with me, but only with a HDD which had older software on it, of about 2 years ago. I recovered the infected laptop with the help of this 2nd laptop: I partitioning a blank HDD in a USB enclosure connected to laptop #2, inserted the freshly partitioned HDD into laptop #1, installed DOS from a boot floppy, put the HDD back into the USB enclosure, extracted .rar partition backups (from the infected USB HDD, but the .rars were not infected!) onto the HDD, put the HDD back into laptop #1, re-installed System Commander (from a CD burnt on laptop #2 from a .iso on the infected USB HDD!) Without the 2nd laptop recovery of laptop #1 would have been much more difficult.

If you installed WinXP to the G: FAT32 partition, you probably don't have to worry about your drive letters. Simply split the 105GB partition into e.g. an 80 GB FAT32 partition and a 25GB NTFS partition for huge data files. WinXP installed under FAT32 can handle huge files on the NTFS partition.I prefer WinXP under FAT32. But I have a more complicated setup, with 2 instances of WinXP installed, one on a FAT32 partition, the other on an NTFS partition. By having 2 instances of WinXP, I can easily delete and restore the other WinXP by simply extracting a backup .rar file. BTW, I am using System Commander, like LoneCrusader, and am quite happy with it; jaclaz prefers another boot manager. P.S.: I am not sure whether splitting the 105GB partition will work, because of the limitation of 4 primary partitions per HDD. I had assumed C: was primary and D-G were logical.

About 3 weeks ago my laptop got the worst virus infection ever, with the tenga.a virus http://forum.kaspersky.com/lofiversion/index.php/t7172.html and http://www.f-secure.com/v-descs/tenga_a.shtml It was much worse than the infection I had 14 years ago with One-Half, which slowly but steadily encrypted cylinders of my HDD. The tenga.a infection has shattered my mistaken belief that Win98 is not vulnerable to infection anymore, in 2010. Tenga.a came out around 2005 http://www.viruslist.com/en/weblog/167434325/Classical_viruses_ITW_never_say_die Tenga.a infects most .exe files it can find. It has infected all FAT32-based Win98/2k/XP operating systems on my multi-booting laptop. Only one operating system/partition, an NTFS-WinXP rarely accessed, was not infected. The most serious damage was the infection of one 192GB partition of an external 1TB USB HDD, which contained about 100GB of software downloads + installable programs, many not backed up because it was a work disk. I became aware of the tenga.a infection maybe after 5 hours, when I noticed that the disk access light kept showing activity, even when I was doing nothing on the laptop. But then it was too late, the infection had spread across operating systems/partitions, also to the attached USB HDD. I still have no idea how I got the virus, with maybe a thousand .exe files infected. Maybe it was my bad habit of double-clicking even on suspicious files in a special test windows, and then restoring a clean test windows. Double-clicking on an infected file may have initiated the infection of a .exe on another partition, of another operating system, and started in this way an infection across operating systems. Getting the laptop clean again was relatively easy, I had to restore all partitions/operating systems/directories from backup onto a clean virgin HDD. The major problem was to recover the infected installation sources on the USB HDD; some of them may have been lost for good. Here some lessons I learnt from this infection: 1) Virus infection is still a real danger under Windows 98 2) The only defense against viruses like Tenga.a, if using only occasional on-demand scanning, is a very good backup and recovery procedure. 3) Don't rely on USB HDDs as a backup storage media of software because of their vulnerability to virus infections 4) Backing up installation sources onto write-once media (CD-R, DVD-R) is still an absolute must 5) Installation sources should always be backed up also into an additional .rar or .iso file, which are not as easily infected as .exe 6) It is very important to document the actual download locations of software, in case it has to be downloaded again 7) About 10% of my time with the computer is spent creating, archiving and deleting backups. This is time well spent and has saved my neck already a couple of times. 8) A spare blank HDD, of the same size as in the computer, also comes very handy if a complete HDD has to be restored from backup 9) Maybe I should look again into UDF-formatted HDDs, as supplementary backup devices which can be set to read-only and are therefore not vulnerable to virus infection.

I tend to express myself in a more hedged way, similar to an investment banker who makes an earnings forecast of a company and who does not want to risk getting sued. In this sense I would not have nailed down myself that much, my style would rather be:"AFAIK, it may be possible that anything heavier than air may not be able to fly"

Very good link. The Total Commander plugin mbox 1.10 seems interesting, although I am not sure whether it would help with your current problem. "Empfohlen in [=recommended by] c't" sounds good, c't is the top technically-oriented computer magazine in Germany, although my personal top choice is the more popular "PC Praxis" by Data Becker. German computer magazines are the best in any language, at least during the past 5 years. I would just ignore the attachments to make matters simple and keep them in a separate searchable folder. If an archived message is of interest lateron and contained an attachment, you might make a 2nd search for the attachment in the separate archived attachment folder. This would be a quick-and-dirty approach to archiving personal emails. One of my main objectives for archiving personal emails would be to create a clean archive free of viruses and trojans. Combining the archiving of messages and attachments might get complicated when for example an important message is clean, but its attachment is infected, or vice versa. Not sure, perhaps information and dates in the original email header might get lost with this approach.

I only saw box2fox "Tool, konvertiert Netscape Mailboxen zu FoxMail-Mailboxen", i.e. it converts from Netscape to Foxmail, which is probably not what you need. Very interesting find, actually Aid4Mail v1.994 http://www.aid4mail.com/specifications.php It seems to be able to read Foxmail email. As output, however, it apparently can only create .EML message files, which contain embedded attachments http://filext.com/faq/decode_eml_files.php The RFC-822 files I got from my Eudora mailboxes with Emailchemy were plain .txt, without embedded attachments.You might have to get yourself Aid4Mail to convert your Foxmail emails to a more standard format, and Emailchemy to create a searchable folder with .txt message files. For me, the main advantage of using a searchable folder of .txt message files would be the absence of a learning curve with Win98 Find or WinXP Search. BTW, TweakUI can get rid of the annoying dog with the wagging tail in WinXP Search.

Which one is that?Here 2 notes about Emailchemy: 1) I view Emailchemy as a program comparable to Winzip or WinRAR, but Emailchemy handles containers of email messages, while Winzip or WinRAR handle containers of files. The various .mbx email containers created by my old Eudora v3.05 are uncompressed, just a concatenation of many tiny messages. One of my .mbx files, for example, is 7.1MB and contains 1190 concatenated email messages. The 1190 message files extracted as .txt take up 20.1 MB (FAT32, 16kB cluster size). The 1190 extracted .txt message files put into a .rar file with normal compression use 2.6 MB. That single 7.1 MB .mbx file, compressed into a .rar file, uses only 392kB. If you plan to use WinXP to search your database of extracted message files, it might be preferrable to create a .zip file from the extracted .txt message files, not a .rar file, since WinXP Search, in contrast to Win98 Find, can search inside .zip files. 2) I have not yet checked whether Emailchemy handles PGP-encrypted messages correctly. Also, I have used Emailchemy only to extract individual .mbx files, not all 50+ .mbx mailbox files plus attachments in a single step; extracting a single mailbox causes a warning by Emailchemy about possible errors (maybe because of references to attachments which can't be found???), but the output of Emailchemy looked fine.

Re: topic title "[9x/Me] Email Archiving". Emailchemy is Java-based and works apparently under many operating systems, e.g. Linux, not just 9x/Me. But maybe this topic should stay under Win9x since Emailchemy might be a useful tool to access, under Linux, old emails created with old Win9x software.

Hi Jake,Emailchemy http://www.weirdkid.com/products/emailchemy/index.html might help you. 1) I had used Emailchemy v1.5.9.1 under Win98SE to convert emails from old Netscape Communicator v4.8 to old Eudora v3.05 (of 1997). Older Emailchemy v1.5.9.1 works fine on my 10-year-old Inspiron laptop with 512MB RAM; for the latest version the author's website recommends a minimum of 1GB of RAM. 2) Just recently I have used Emailchemy to disinfect old virus-infected Eudora email .mbx files; Kaspersky Anti-Virus is not able to disinfect individual emails in a .mbx container, you can only delete the whole mailbox containing thousands of emails. Emailchemy can convert an .mbx mailbox file into "RFC-822 message folders" (actually .txt files), one .txt file for each email message. To clean up an infected mail box, I: - converted the .mbx file with Emailchemy to about 4000 individual RFC-822 message .txt files - checked with Kaspersky the extracted 4000 .txt files (some viruses/trojans already got deleted during the conversion) - opened the infected .txt message files with TextPad (Notepad doesn't work; WordPad doesn't work either, it reacts to embedded MS stuff) and either manually deleted trailing junk in the .txt file (i.e. the trojan), or I just deleted the infected .txt file - after all infected stuff was removed, I converted with Emailchemy the 4000 message files (.txt) back into a Eudora .mbx file. The basic approach is: email container (e.g. Eudora .mbx) ==> convert to many individual .txt message files ==> fiddle around with the individual .txt message file ==> convert back to email container BTW, the email container re-created from individual .txt message files is about 20-30% bigger than the original email container, but it works. Infected messages are a major problem when archiving emails, virus scanners are just not up-to-date. For example, a couple of years ago, Kaspersky didn't find anything bad in an old .mbx mail box. Now, with the current virus signature update, Kaspersky detects some infected messages, which it didn't find earlier. For easy future disinfection of email messages containing currently not yet detected trojans/viruses it may be preferrable to archive emails as individual RFC-822 .txt message files and put them into a .rar file. I don't want to archive infected stuff. 3) Emailchemy has also helped me repair corrupt Eudora mailbox files (old Eudora v3.05 would just become "not responding" with them), by letting me extract the messages of a mailbox as .txt files. I could then edit with TextPad the individual .txt files. All my corrupt .mbx Eudora mailbox files were caused when old Eudora v3.05 somehow created inside of the .mbx file a corrupt email message containing many email messages, instead of a single message. The mailbox corruption was cleaned up after I: - extracted with Emailchemy the bad message file as a .txt file - manually split it up in TextPad into many files with only a single email message - saved the split up .txt files under any name (e.g. msg001.txt etc) - converted the split up files plus all the other good RFC-822 message files back into a single .mbx file. 4) You could create a searchable database of your emails by converting your emails with Emailchemy into thousands of little RFC-822 .txt files, and then simply use Win98 Find. You are using Foxmail v5.8, which is not on the list of email file formats which Emailchemy can read; you may have to export your email files in a format which Emailchemy can read. Emailchemy assigns the date (YearMonthDay-Time) as the initial part of the file name of each RFC-822 .txt file, e.g. "20030629-1355 eBay Item Purchase Titan Notebook Cooler Item 1234567890.txt". Message .txt files, which don't contain the date (e.g. .txt files manually repaired/extracted from a corrupt Eudora .mbx mailbox file where the date was somehow missing) are assigned the current date by Emailchemy.5) One of my long, ongoing projects is to archive old stuff, like old floppies, old CDs/DVDs, old photos, old LPs. So archiving old emails could become also part of this archiving effort, although there is no time-pressure to archive old emails. Unlike old floppies, old CDs, old photos or old LPs, old emails don't decay.

Thanks a LOT risk_reversal. Looks like a very useful card. Are there any Win98/Vista/Linux compatible WLAN cards, with detachable antenna AND the a-frequencies? That would be an ideal WLAN card. Edimax apparently has no a/b/g dual-band WLAN cards.

Yes. It's very important to look at firmware revisions when buying add-ons for Win98. Very often manufacturers change chips, but keep the old packaging and model number. I assume D-Link sold 4 completely different beasts under the same model number, and for version D there is no manufacturer-provided Win98 driver. Unfortunately the firmware revision is often not visible on the box, only inside, on the sticker of the device.

Nice that you give your computers a name, like Jerry Pournelle many years ago. Interesting, but I understand very little about video cards, I am not into games, I even had to look up some info in http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-aliasing I am using a bfg 7800 GS video card http://www.bfgtech.com/bfgr78256gsoc.aspx , which software would run (better) with your old card? Having a modern Win98 computer is a little luxury. My guess is that you'll have to budget $500 for it. The box and the power supply may prove to be the only useful free components of your Win98 system. Eventually I'll get an X6800 CPU for my Win98 system, but they still sell for around $200. I guess your objective is to build yourself a computer which works with your old video card. The only advice I would dare to give you is to get a newer motherboard fully compatible with Win98 AND newer operating systems, like the excellent Asus P5PE-VM (dual-core support for multi-booting, AGP, max 2GB RAM, only 1 floppy drive, only 3 PCI slots, onboard Gigabit Ethernet controller). You'll save yourself a lot of time and hassles, like looking for drivers. I would still consider an inconvenient long ethernet cable. On my Win98 computer I can watch nicely foreign TV via the internet when my Win98 machine is connected vie Ethernet cable. When connected via slow g-speed WLAN, movies don't display properly. I haven't tried brand-specific super-g yet, since devices of different brands (PCI-cards, router, Nintendo, PS3, Win98/WinXP computers, Asus netbook) connect to the home WLAN. WLAN with g speed is no problem under Win98, just get a PCI WLAN card which has a Win98 driver. I am happy with the D-Link DWL-AG530, firmware revisions A3 and A4, an external antenna can be screwed on. Netgear has removed all their Win98 drivers from their website, but D-Link drivers are still available, albeit hidden: ftp://ftp.dlink.com/Wireless/dwlag530/Drivers/ It is difficult, however, to find WLAN cards which have drivers for Win9x/XP/Vista AND Linux, anybody has some suggestions?

It's the volume of downloads. My eMule computer has been up and downloading now for 5 days 14 hours, under Win98, without crashing. Since I have several operating systems on my computer, I can scan under Win98 the WinXP partition (FAT32), and under WinXP the Win98 partition, which should be just as effective as removing the HDD, but more convenient. Basically no, because most of the stuff is infected anyway Different content. Bittorrent has mainly new stuff, the Mule has also a lot of new stuff, but about 100 times more older and rare/hard to find stuff than Bittorrent. The Mule uses ed2k and Kademlia; ed2k accounts for only about 20% of the titles, Kad for about 80%.BTW, the emule software has been downloaded 500 million times, with the last version 0.49c alone 32 million times http://sourceforge.net/projects/emule/files/ At this very moment there are 1.2 million people connected to the 4 eMule servers in my pruned server list. It may be that the Mule is past its peak, v0.49b had 48 million downloads. http://sourceforge.net/?=PHPB8B5F2A0-3C92-11d3-A3A9-4C7B08C10000

I only use an anti-virus for checking stuff downloaded with eMule under Win98. I have a dedicated eMule computer, running continuously (current uptime: 4 days, 15 hrs). The incoming downloads are processed on another computer, so the virus-check could indeed be done there under WinXP. Running a virus-check under Win9x may eventually become just as unnecessary as running a virus-check under DOS. I haven't run a complete virus-check under Win98 for about a year, with no ill effects.Nevertheless it's re-assuring to know that I could run a virus checker under Win98. Kaspersky currently detects in 100 software files downloaded with eMule about 60 infected files. When Kaspersky is run a month later again, on the ??clean?? 40 files, it will detect another 5-10 infected files which it didn't detect a month earlier. Anti-virus software is indeed far behind in their detection of new malware.The infection rate of eMule software downloads has jumped from about 20% to currently about 60-70% over the last 6 months. 6 months ago the largest eMule server had links to about 25 million files, today it links to 83 million different files. This sudden jump by about 60 million files corresponds to the jump in the infection rate. Perhaps some organization has been trying to poison the eMule network by pumping 60 million different infected files into it.

The error seems to be a nasty one, perhaps it has something to do with installing software in a network/via the internet. Perhaps it's an installer error msg, when Avast tries to install a newer software component which might not work under Win9x anymore, but that's just a wild guess. Ancient Kaspersky Anti-Virus v4.5 died on me during an update with an incompatible component, about a year and a half ago, I had to upgrade to v6.Maybe this helps: http://forums.kustompcs.co.uk/showthread.php?t=33805 I use Kaspersky Anti-Virus 6, not Avast, so my comment here may not apply. In the Kaspersky update settings I have de-selected the option "Update application modules", to make sure that Kaspersky doesn't try to install a newer software component which might not be Win98-compatible. If Kaspersky AV gives me a cryptic error msg, I uninstall it, then re-install it. Since I know how to back up the license key generated during activation, re-installation is risk-free for me. Make sure you don't lose your license key during the fiddling around.

10-20% of Google search results, produced with "site:msfn.org" in the search string, currently display the default page "http://www.msfn.org/board/index.php?" instead of the content one is looking for. By selecting "Cache" the correct page gets displayed. What has been the impact of the upgrade to v3.0.5 on the visibility (search engine positioning) of msfn.org (Google and Bing)?

You're between a hard place and a rock. A low backward compatibility is the hallmark of buggy and mediocre software: Compatible only with other software with large market share, saving support$. And when the backlog of bugs to be fixed gets too big and too difficult to solve, a new version is released, together with an end-of-life announcement of the old can of worms.A high degree of backward compatibility is the characteristic of top products. When a hardware or software product, for example, has listed both Win98 and Vista/Win7 compatibility, you can buy it nearly blind out of the box, it's most likely an excellent product. Beyond Compare, for example, is an excellent program, and v2.5.3 works with Win95 thru Win7x64; they are even supporting v1 for Win3.1. And you can have both v2 and v3 installed at the same time. The lack of backward compatibility of IP Board would raise a red flag with me; over the intermediate term I would look at alternatives. I would even venture to predict that v3 will prove to be more buggy than v2. This may confirm my comments aboveDon't get discouraged by the difficulties and keep up the good work!

I am using Opera v9.64 and Firefox 2.0.0.20 under Win98SE on my 10-year-old Inspiron 7500 laptop, 700MHz, 512MB RAM. Firefox on this old laptop has no problems with scripts at msfn.org, even when 11 other websites are open in other tabs. The fan, however, is continuously on, and CPUIdle shows heavy CPU usage.I don't like the new appearance of the forums of msfn.org either, there is too much spacing between the lines. Somehow the readability of the forum pages has decreased substantially.

No. IsoBuster v2.5.5.1 of 8-Jul-2009 and another v2.5.5.1 of 16-Jul-2009 install Ok under Win98SE, but when you try to run them under Win98SE you get the following err msg: "Error Starting Program. The ISOBUSTER.EXE file links to missing export KERNEL32.DLL:GetFileSizeEx". The same for IsoBuster v2.5.5.0 Beta of 26-Jun-2009. No, I am using only plain-vanilla Win98SE, so I don't know whether IsoBuster v2.5.5.1 or higher work under KernelExv2.5.0.0 is definitely the last version which works under Win98SE. There are 2 different releases of v2.5.0.0, one of 19-Dec-2008, the other of 23-Dec-2008, both digitally signed, their only difference is possibly only an updated blacklist table. IsoBuster is the best protected shareware I have seen . The PRO functionality of the registered v2.5.0.0 (e.g. extracting files from an InCD CD-RW) works fine under Win98SE. IsoBuster http://www.isobuster.com has a lot of advanced special uses. It is very useful as an InCD reader under Win98 in my current project to archive old CD-RWs. I had gotten rid of Nero InCD v4.3.20.1 under Win98 years ago, with a special Nero InCD-CleanTool, because Nero InCD made my Win98 system unstable, and was left with no capability to access InCD CD-RWs under Win98. IsoBuster does not make Win98 unstable.

The current v2.7.0.0 of IsoBuster http://www.isobuster.com/ does NOT install under Win98 anymore. What's the last version/build of IsoBuster which still works Ok under Win98?