SlugFiller

"Compare"? When it's years apart, you can't even begin calling it a comparison. I'm not talking about driver and software versions, or whatever changes you may have made to your hardware. I am talking about something far more basic: Your memory. Your perceived relative stability of the two systems is clouded by the fact that you can't actually gauge how they both actually work, you simply think you remember this or that crashing and stick with that. I have both systems running now. Currently. At the same time. I can clearly state "the XP crashed now, and the 98 didn't". This is a comparison. An "I fairly remember the 98 crashing more" is just an anecdote. At the very least, you should consider time collapse: If you're thinking of all of the crashes your 98 ever experienced, with utter disregard to the amount of time you've been using it, then it will certainly seem more frequent (100 crashes for 1 second of reminiscing) than the fact that, at this current second, your XP is not crashed. That is a claim. Facts are what you should use to back it up, but I doubt you have any of those at your disposal. A fact looks something like this: Last weekend my brother's XP crashed over 10 times in a single day. He didn't do much, just start up a program. Pretty much invalidates your claim, no? Please don't re-spread those same old common myths without actual evidence to support your claims. "Common sense is the collection of prejudices acquired by age eighteen." -Albert Einstein How much physical memory do you have, now and then? What other programs did you have running on your 98? How is your virtual memory configured, now and then? Most importantly: How many patches did Ultima Online run through since then up to today? (After all, a MMORPG's updates aren't optional) At any rate, 10 instances of any application is fairly crappy, if you ask me. Suffice to say, my harddrive never thrashed. That's your theory. But the fact is that it happened twice, not once, and in both cases it was on an XP system. In fact, it wasn't that long after an upgrade from 2000, though I'll admit it's wrong of me to try to gauge that time duration so far after the fact. Provided you have a bootable disk, and the BIOS to support it. Though taking DOS out doesn't qualify as "newer technology" (It's not as if DOS-less systems did not predate DOS itself), you are right that it requires newer solutions. Such as start-up in root provided by the average linux installation as a default grub option (Not perfect, since it still forces full initialization of the PCI bus, but at least you can fix WSOD from there). The fact is, XP doesn't have such a solution, at all. While I had far less direct comparison there, 2000 did demonstrate practically crash-less solidity for as long as I've seen it run, and far less bloatiness than the XPs I've seen. I won't argue about your support history, but you do sound like one of those "tech experts" that think formatting the drive and installing XP is the solution to any problem, even if it's actually a hardware problem. You might not be, but I've seen enough of that kind to have the right to be skeptic. Optimistic much? MS stock beg to differ. I think their business model will continue to work until a completely free, easy to install, and highly application-compatible OS will be made. This may never happen, though. There simply aren't enough people who'd be willing to participate in the creation of such.

Runtime's software GetDataBack did that trick for me. It has separate versions for FAT32 and NTFS. It's not free, though, so test the free solutions first. Needless to say: Install nothing on the formatted partition. If possible, install nothing on the same harddrive. Not that it would necessarily prevent file recovery, but better safe than sorry, if at all possible.

That sounds quite impressive (read: commendable). Over here it's, as far as I know, MS .doc format. At least it seems to be the most commonly used. Still, I always opt for PDF. I can have that done in OO, but having associated .tex with pdflatex.exe, I simply find the latter solution far more comfortable. And, AFAIK, PDF is still globally recognized. As for people who need their WYSIWYG fix, with the latest support for GTK in KEx, LyX may soon be a viable option on 98 (If it is not so already).

No it isn't. Business-wise it makes perfect sense. Their profits have probably never been higher. It's also a form of "conspiracy" with hardware companies - bigger software that needs bigger hardware that needs bigger software. The perfect business model to make progressive sales of newer products without worrying about whether people actually want or need to upgrade - simply by leaving them with no choice. Sure, this sucks royally for the end-user, but they're not aiming for customer satisfaction, only for high profit. That's business for you. It's too bad the main non-business oriented competition is quite nearly the exact opposite of user-friendly. It has quite the potential, but ends up trying to hard and falling far short. Us end-users end up having only 98 as the middle-ground.

Compare what, the 98 you no longer have with the XP you now do? Like I said, I can compare them as they run concurrently, and more than once I was able to say "Hah, my 98 wouldn't crash when doing that", and demonstrate to that extent. The impact a DOS back-end has on the memory is insignificant compared to the sheer amount of running services and unwarranted extra memory use by the GUI itself generated by XP. Consider this: Under the most extreme circumstances, the DOS back-end can take up 640k of memory. The average XP background service (RPC, firewall, etc) usually takes a minimum of 10MB. Well, congratulations on your hard-drive not failing, as I've seen XP do twice. Not to mention the relative difficulty of bringing up a failed XP system (for whatever reason), compared to doing the same with 98. I'm not talking speculatively here. Like I've said, I've seen quite a few systems perform, and I know their crash-frequency. People who talk academically are simply spreading myth and falsehood. I'll admit to this much: Win2000 is a solid platform, and is far less likely to crash than 98, perhaps even coming close to linux in that regard. XP, on the other hand, is not, and I have personally seen it go down quite a few times. In fact, if it wouldn't have hogged this thread beyond what it should, I would have described my brother's odyssey trying to install a PixelView PCI video capture card on his XP. The short version is: People shouldn't be so quick to point 98's driver availability as its shortcoming to its successors. Well, people are free to use whatever they like. In the case of Linux, I may actually recommend it, depending on your experience (installing is a bit of a b*tch) and what you're using it for (wine doesn't exactly work as advertised). I do resent people who spread myths to justify using one over the other. Having actual experience with most of the most-commonly used OSs, I find some of the arguments people throw around to be the exact opposite of the empirical facts.

OO is such bloatware, rivaled only by the real office. I see no more reason to want it to support 98 than I do to simply upgrade to XP (thus making the discussion academic). Just use LaTeX. It's better, smaller, faster, and free for all OSs (even DOS).

There are around 7 or so computers in this house. Aside from my 98SE and a couple of linux boxes, most use XP. So far, the XPs have dominated the top spots in crash frequency. The thought that XP is stable is quite simply a myth. XP is to 2000 what ME is to 98 - an unstable downgrade. That being said, XP tends to run through the memory alot faster than 98 does. I can tell you this from empirical evidence. My 98 has had better up-times than most of the would-be stronger XPs. Not as much as the linux boxes, but hey, you can't win 'em all... I've been fully using 1GB on my 98SE without any special configuration since it's latest installation. No issues. According to certain threads, 98 can natively handle up to 1.2 or 1.5, so I don't know where you're getting that silly 512MB figure. With patching it can easily go up to 3 or 4. I have a SATA HD. Did have problems with it at first, until I dug up an older version of the via driver and, voila, it works like a charm. The real issue there wasn't 98, but via's fullish insistence that the new NT drivers could work on 98 (according to their web-site). Performance wise, it works just as good as when I've used a linux live-CD, so no complaints there. Don't think I have unofficial SP2, my USB2 worked and is still working with the original vendor drivers. Win98, even out of the box, is much better than what most people seem to credit it for. If you treat it right and don't randomly install odd drivers or run rampant with the system configuration, it can easily be more stable and better performing than the so-called "modern" versions. You should really give it more credit, it definitely has its flaws, but it is, still, quite reasonable. And, on a final note: KEx makes short work of that. Hopefully, it will make short work of most other software compatibility issues soon enough. And, needless to say, those same games seem to get quite a boost from running on the OS they aren't meant to support.

An OS should be a thin layer between the software and the hardware. The thinner, the better. 98 isn't what I would consider the best OS possible. Not by a long shot. To me, it is the lesser of all evils. Next is Linux, Win2000, OS X, and all other OSs trail somewhere behind that. Personally, I have a pretty concrete image of what the perfect OS would be like, down to the threading model. Unfortunately, it would probably take me years to make it alone. In the mean time, I'm doing my best to get my 98SE to do everything I need it to. Still, what I like most about 98SE, is that it is the most modern OS that doesn't do what I don't want it to. It's a shame all the newer OSs have decided to take the user out of the equation.

Ooh, looks like you screwed up your ASPI layer. That happens alot. Now, let see, there's a compatibility ASPI layer from Adaptec linked somewhere on this forum... Oh yes, it's in this thread. The download link is here.

For the lack of support for 95, I'm not sure, but I think it has lesser capabilities with VfW and/or DirectShow, the thing VirtualDub requires the most. You have to consider that VirtualDub isn't some archive manager or 3D modeller or other computational program, as some of the programs that mysteriously dropped 9x support are, it's main feature is video capture, a process that is hardware-oriented and requires proper OS support.

Sounds nice.

Doesn't this qualify as a limit? When I say "without limiting" I mean that you'd actually be able to open a program allocating 2GB of RAM or more, without resorting to swap-memory (e.g. with virtual memory disabled). A RAM limitation patch won't do that... I would think a solution that would do that would at least require patching himem.sys or something... (sorry for the abuse of "would")

You know, I'm not sure it technically count as running with more than 1GB memory, if you're actually limiting the memory and not using it. I'm not sure if it's possible to actually get more than 1GB memory used by 9x, I'm not even sure which file you'd have to patch (probably a vxd), but it would be pretty cool if someone ever found out.

AFAIK the one I'm currently using is 4.90.3000 from ME, and I can testify scandisk works fine on my 250GB partition ever since it was installed. Unforunately, the need to replace dskmaint.dll is not well documented, so you can imagine my glee and surprise when scandisk suddenly started working on my large drive.

I've just installed KernelEx0.3.4 and installed the old libcairo-2.dll from Inkscape and it no longer worked. I then repatched the dll and it started up again, but with all texts absent. Seems like UberKern is still needed... Edit: Okay, you guys really need to document your obscure settings better. I've set inkscape.exe=1 under AdvancedGDI in kexver.ini (why does this need to be optional?), so now Inkscape runs without the patched cairo, but there's still no text in any of the menus, buttons, etc, similar to what NoNameNeeded gets for FireFox. I'm crossing my fingers for this being fixed, because it's the only thing standing between me and the latest Inkscape.

Incidentally I'm also building an HTPC currently. I'm using Ubuntu Linux. Don't get me wrong: I've made very long posts about why Linux could never replace my 98SE for my desktop computer, but an HTPC isn't a desktop computer, it's a dedicated system, so a dedicated OS is a good idea. As for making a comfortable PVR, MythTV comes to mind. Much simpler than trying to rig something up in Windows. As for myself, I have special needs, so I'll probably code up a little something myself based on VideoJack.

What you need isn't scandisk, but rather dskmaint.dll. The former is simply a front-end for the latter. Updating the latter with the ME version would do the trick.

Why upgrade the CPU and not the motherboard (and memory)? If anything, I've often found upgrading the whole thing usually costs less than looking for legacy hardware. You may even try to opt for a combo AGP-PCIe board to leave things open for future upgrades (although I'm not sure how 98 fairs with PCIe at this point).

The problem may be with the website. It happens (yes, even in big websites). It's much more common than you think. In any way, you can try with different browsers (e.g. Opera, FireFox, etc). If the problem persists, it's probably the website.

Hmm... Inkscape 0.45.1 starts up fine, but most of the controls don't display any text. Well, obviously it would be nice to have UberKern's compatibility already built into KernelEx, but only if that's actually going to happen, and be properly maintained. Have you contacted Xeno86 on this matter? Has he agreed to merge UberKern code into KernelEx? Will you now be actively working on KernelEx? I would certainly appreciate if you at least figure out this Inkscape thing before closing the project.

You might get better luck if you post this in the KernelEx thread.

Umm... "Ping"? Sorry to be annoying, but how often is this updated? I (really really really ad infinitum) like the potential in this, but am forced to patiently wait for the next version... Patiently waiting...

It might be a problem with the SATA controller driver. Do you happen to know which controller you're using? A good way to test if this is the case is to look at the last line in bootlog.txt and bootlog.prv (from DOS or safe mode, naturally) to see where it stops loading up. If you see the driver file for your SATA controller, that's a sure-fire indication. Another indication is that it runs fine in safe mode (as you have already mentioned). From my experience, the latest SATA controller drivers don't work on 98, even if they claim support for it. You might get better luck with drivers form 2002 or earlier, back when this sort of thing was actually tested. If your driver provider doesn't keep drivers that old in its archive, you might try the WayBack Machine. If you can't get the driver, you can still get your system to hack-work by forcing your drive to work as if it was in safe mode - reduced performance, but at least it works. Here are a few methods: 1. Start up in safe mode. Right click "My computer" and click "Properties", then click on the "Performance" tab, and then on the "File System..." button. Go to the "Troubleshooting" tab and check "Disable all 32-bit protected-mode disk drivers". Important note: This will affect all drives, including your PATA HDD and your CD drives. 2. Start up in safe mode. Click "Start" then "Run...", input "msconfig" and hit "OK". Click on "Advanced..." and check "Force Compatibility mode disk access". Has the same effect as #1. 3. In safe mode, right click "My computer" and click "Properties". Go to "Device Manager" and locate your SATA controller (will usually be in SCSI). Click on it, the click on "Properties", then on "Driver", and on "Update driver...". From there, select "Display a list of all..." then "Show all hardware". Pick something random which you're relatively sure will not be compatible. This will cause the random-picked driver to fail to load, causing your drive to load in compatibility mode. Unlike the above options, this will only affect the SATA drive. Be aware, that if you pick a compatible or even semi-compatible driver, it will have no effect. 4. In DOS mode, locate and delete/rename the driver file. This should cause the driver to fail to load, but there's a chance it will still try and still freeze. In other words, this might not always work. Be aware that all of the above solutions will leave your SATA in compatibility mode, meaning it will run slower, and consume more CPU resources. The only real solution is to locate an older driver, and install it.

No it isn't. As linked above, ffdshow pretty much takes care of it completely. Okay, maybe you'll need filters for wrappers (mkv, ogm, etc) or Real alternatives. I find a minimal wrapper-only install of a generic pack like Ace usually takes care of those.

Number 1 thing I do when configuring a Windows system, even before setting "show hidden files" in explorer, is to place a copy of "My computer" on the taskbar, setting it to have no title or texts, and resizing it to just contain the drives. The ability to open any drive without needing access to the desktop is invaluable when I'm working simultaneously with many programs taking up most of the screen real-estate. Getting the control panel as a popup-menu rather than an explorer window certainly doesn't hurt either. It makes navigation, regardless of my desktop's current state, so much easier and more convenient, I can't understand how people can tolerate taking the "long route" to their files.