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technoid

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Posts posted by technoid

  1. Thanks guys.   I haven't done anything yet.  This will be a sad day indeed if this is indeed a hardware failure.   I worked a lot just to get it set up as a home theater PC those years ago, with DVI to projector to get that 1:1 sharp image quality, rather than VGA or component video which are blurrier, as well as surround sound, putting it together as cheaply as possible.  I had thought of backing this boot drive up years ago but never did.   I have to wonder though if this is a drive failure internally (heads, platters etc) & not the drive PCB.  There is a 2nd harddrive inside that is actually the same make & model, i.e. both are same-model Maxtor IDE 40gb drives.   Yes, I guess I will first try moving the drive into a USB external enclosure & will connect it to my Windows 7 laptop & see if it will find anything.  I had already checked the cables & the home theater PC can recognize both drives at startup, so I guess that means both Maxtor drive board electronics are still working.  But I may try swapping the drive board out using the drive board from the 2nd drive, as maybe the next plan, just to be sure, if the usb converter does not work.  I did not think that letting the PC stay on overnight could have possibly done this as I guess the thermal damage just accelerated the wear & tear on these older hard disks, even when there was an internal fan blowing towards the disks.  The disks unfortunately were in a metal support box housing that probably kept the wind from moving over the entire drives, but I never had issues with it before, the fan actually probably did some good anyway over the years.  I will probably check the 2nd drive first & put that in the usb converter enclosure & back that up if it's still good, even if the stuff on the boot drive was more important.   Oy vey.   

  2. Hi all,

    A couple nights ago, I turned on one of my older Pentium III PC's with Win2k-sp4 to tinker with, that I rarely turn on nowadays, probably been over a year. It's worked fine for 15 years prior, I've used it a lot as a home theater setup.  So I let this computer stay on overnight, maybe over 6 hours. Then I decided to do a checkdisk on it (error-checking tool) & so after a couple minutes or so, it hung, stopped & said it couldn't find operating system.  Did several reboots & checked bios, but still same thing, no operating system found.  If this thing is hosed, I hope I can retrieve the stuff on it.  How would I first go about starting research & repair on this?   Should I put the boot harddrive (IDE) into an external ide usb drive enclosure & see if I can peek inside? Would that affect boot on this if it got repaired?  Or should I first try to do a recovery console with the 2k CD?   I have never done that before with 2k, so I'm not totally sure what the commands are.  I've done it before with XP, I think, but even then it's been years & I don't remember any details.  I think because I let it on overnight, this might be due to the harddrive getting a bit hot, as it did not have any auto-sleep or some other eco mode enabled.  I did have a fan internally blowing towards the harddrives, but I guess that did not help, but the harddrives were somewhat stacked too close to each other (I would have to show a photo to understand that situation).  This has never happened before in all those 15 years. Now I have to find my copy of the 2k install CD, heh.   Please let me know if you need more details, thanks. 

  3. Thanks,  I actually did change it to 1440 yesterday & I noticed a nice little improvement when it came to watching video streams, such as Youtube.  Before, watching Youtube at 480p would freeze maybe every 5 to 10 seconds because my slow connection from a weak reception was trying to keep up.  I would then always have to step down to 360p or 240p.   Now at 1440, it's much smoother at 480p.   I would not see short freezes for maybe until 30 seconds, or a minute or 2, or more, later.  I would need more testing, but at the moment, I think I don't really have to, the eyeball results tell me something better is working at 1440.  I believe the usb tether & wifi hotspot are throttled anyways by the phone service , so every little thing like adjusting the MTU can help it along the way.  If I needed faster Internet, I would have to shell out even more money per month to the company, but my service is grandfathered from nearly 15 years ago, when we had slider phones, back when most of our service was 2G.  But a couple years ago the phone company gave us a free offer & increased our Internet speed to 4G at no additional monthly cost.  I think this meets our needs nicely in the middle, i.e. good usable highspeed internet at low monthly cost.  My next attempt is to try to add more gain to the signal reception.  I'm thinking either modifying the antenna in the smartphone, perhaps into some sort of biquad shape, or maybe build some some of cellphone inductive cradle booster, idk. 

  4. Hi, not sure which category to post this in...

    I use USB tethering between my Motorola smartphone & laptop (Windows 7) for Internet.   I am wondering if I could help optimize & speed up downloads/uploads by changing the MTU.  I have 3 devices in Networking Connection on the laptop.   I checked the current MTU of all 3 devices & they were all at 1500.  I tested my highest MTU without fragmenting using PING & it would be 1440 with 0% loss.  So I just changed one device to 1440 with TCP Optimizer (TCPO) & then rebooted & TCPO works, but I changed it on a device that is not connected.  Before that, I tried using NETSH but it kept saying my syntax was invalid so I downloaded latest TCPO to change MTU.   The device that seems to be the Tethering is currently called "Local Area Connection 2" under "Remote NDIS based Internet Sharing Device".  The MTU for this is 1500.  However, I am afraid to change that to 1440 yet as I am unfamiliar with any changes to the network parameters of tethering.  Does anyone know if it's ok to change the MTU of this NDIS from 1500 to 1440?  And if so, will it optimize the speed?  Right now, tethering looks good, but my cell reception is not really good, so just wanting to see if mtu can help it just a little more if possible.

  5. Yeah, nah, that looks risky.

    It's puzzling why people would not like this feature. It would be nice if Microsoft had left it in. If you don't like it, click on Disable. If it looks like it's useable, Enable it.  I'm sure it will work smoothly if you just keep getting the bugs out, just like the rest of the debugging with the rest of the operating system.

  6. I had asked the same question at the Ars forum (practically copied & pasted my original post from here) and got a couple of responses:

    https://arstechnica.com/civis/viewtopic.php?f=15&t=1413465

    So, it looks like there really is nothing that can be done until Microsoft perhaps changes some of the Windows code.

     

    As I referenced in my first post above, the app TouchMousePointer is going to be the next closest thing, though I still haven't installed yet, because it's still not quite what I am looking for.  It might be worth checking out eventually, but again I just know it's not exactly as functionally elegant and simple as what I've described originally.

    http://www.lovesummertrue.com/touchmousepointer/en-us/index.html

     

  7. Hey... would like to know when using a touchscreen (in Win10 or earlier versions) that the mouse pointer stays on all the time and visible. When I touch the screen with my finger/stylus, I would prefer the mouse pointer onscreen stays and shows right underneath my finger (no matter how fat your fingers are).  And when I drag my finger on the screen, the mouse pointer should move along with it.  The mousepointer is only visible when I move an attached mouse or when I use the touchpad.  

    I looked in the Mouse/touchpad/touchscreen & Ease of access menus, but could not find anything about it. Am I looking in the wrong place or does it not exist?  There is a 3rd party program I found called Touchmousepointer & this seems to be in the right direction of what I am looking for but I have not tried it yet.  If any of you use those video rental kiosks, especially Redbox (in the USA), then you know what I am talking about when/where the mouse pointer on their touchscreen appears at the point where you touch the screen.  Thanks.

    My specs:

    Nextbook Flexx 11A hybrid tablet-laptop (Atom x64 cpu)

    Windows 10  32-bit

  8. I too still use Opera 12.x, as I was on 12.16 for the longest time, until the 12.18 build came out last year.  At least thankfully the Opera guys were still messing with 12.x to give us a new (and probably the last, finally) build of 12.18 when they were working on new Opera versions in parallel.     So yes, there is "irony" at MSFN when this forum can't even be seen on all "old" browser versions when the majority of the forum content is about "old" Windows versions.

  9. Yes, I suppose workgroups. Yes, I assume it's the same as "ad hoc", but "peer to peer" (or P2P) seems like the older original naming for it.

    The IP address (at least in IPv4) across all computers are set up as the same except for the last part: 1.2.3.x. The subnet should be the same for all.

    Then in file explorer, you just map the drives so you can see a PC's drive contents (files/folders) from another PC, and so forth, as well as use the printers directly connected to another PC off another PC in the network.

    I recall doing a P2P network on XP with 9X a few years ago, but there was like some other things that I've forgotten (something about a logon with password crap, etc) that had to be done to get it to work, so that's why I'm asking if anyone's knows that there might be similar issues/hindrances with 7.

  10. How hard or easy would it be to configure a Win 7 (or 8 or 10) box into a peer to peer network so as to communicate with PC's that are Win 95 and/or 98(SE) that are also set up as P2P?  I have an old (mid 1990's) 32-bit networked database program I use in 9x and wondering if that program can be installed on Win 7 and then used via P2P between all these PC's.   I have not attempted anything yet as I don't want to mess anything up in Win 7.  Or forget the database program for now, I will also be ok if I can just get P2P between 7 and 9x.

  11. Thanks I will try DeChk and TrID. I was being philosophical about whether to delete or convert to file the scandisk repair, because either way, I'm hosed. There is some urgency in trying to get this operating system back to normal as this is a PC that is used frequently. The question is whether I should proceed with the Scandisk repair and save the CHK file and then peruse it with DeChk and TrID. Will I find anything useful? While the operating system is working, I know it is going to freeze or hang or say something about a corrupted registry again, because of the parts on disk that are corrupted. When it freezes, there is this thin light green horizontal line below the active title bar. Hard to explain, you would have to see it.

    Scandisk shows that it "found 1261568 bytes in 3 lost file fragments". That is where I have stopped and the PC is turned off for now. Yes, the desktop is working, but as I said, once the O/S needs to run a particular file that is already corrupted, it will freeze. Or a small window will pop up at any time saying it found a corrupt registry and it needs to restart.

    I wish the O/S knew what system files are bad. There have been a couple times in the past where I've seen 98SE (and also in XP) where it tells you that it found bad system file and it overwrites the bad file with a good copy from some backup folder or something. Anyone know what I'm talking about? That would be one surgical skill needed in this scenario.

  12. Ok, I got my desktop back. Here is what I did...

    1. Booted to command prompt (from 98 startup menu).
    2. Backed up the registry cab files in win\sysbckup (as stated in my previous posts).
    3. Renamed rb000.cab to rb000.bak (even tho I won't use Registry Checker).
    4. Instead, I used Scanreg/restore .
    5. Picked "rb005" cab in the list, which looked like the best cab as discussed earlier.
    6. Rebooted, hoped, & prayed.
    7. It booted all the way into Win 98SE desktop. Yay.

    But I'm not quite off the hook yet. I did a Scandisk (Windows version) & it found abount 1 megabyte of corruption. That might not seem like a lot, but this is 98se & this is only an 8 gb harddrive, so 1 mb could be any thing(s) important. I checked win\sysbckup and a new RB000.cab was created by Windows.

    I have not proceeded with the fix in Scandisk yet, so I ignored it for now and continued. Eventually I will have to either Delete it or Convert to file. WHICH ONE?

    Next, I will have to find (or buy) another hard drive and back (or clone?) this drive up, before things may head in the wrong direction (most likely due to the fix inside Scandisk). Anyone recommend a nice backup and/or cloning drive-to-drive software?

    Thanks to rloew for the help!

  13. Oh, looks like you posted a new reply (above) while I was editing my last post above.  As my edit shows (last sentence), I just wanted to be sure whether I type SCANREG/RESTORE, or just SCANREG.  I assume it is SCANREG/RESTORE as that goes directly to the restoration, while SCANREG itself will perform a regsitry scan, which is what we don't want.  Again, just being anal-retentively careful and precise. 

    Also, if the restoration is successful but  I get a popup in Windows soon after saying to reboot to perform the registry checker, does that mean some other file(s) is messed up?
     

  14. 2 hours ago, rloew said:

    RBBAD is the saved bad registry, if you wanted to undo the Restore. It is not used. It's size suggests that the Registry was seriously corrupted. You may have other damaged files.

    That sucks!

     

    Quote

    I would not trust RB000.CAB. RB005.CAB probably is OK if the system was running OK Yesterday Afternoon. If you haven't made any changes in the last few days you could remove it also.

    To be safe, rename them with a different extension such as RB000.BAK rather than deleting them. You can put one or both back if you need to.

    Ok I will rename RB000 first for now.  I have copied all the contents of \sysbckup to a folder on drive D:, i.e. D:\sysbckup as further backup.  As far as I recall, I started opening up the PC a few hours after 1:04pm as the RB005 timestamp shows.

     

    Quote

    Let SCANREG restore the Registry. If SCANREG doesn't run, you can force it to run by renaming or deleting WINDOWS\SYSTEM.DAT. It is hidden and read-only so you will have to unprotect and unhide it.

    I am confused on which one you want me to do.  In your first post you said to let the Checker do its work (after renaming the cab(s) and then cold rebooting).  Here, you want me to use SCANREG.  I have tested SCANREG/RESTORE and it runs and I do see those cabs listed, however I hit the cancel button instead of proceeding, as I am a scaredy cat, and rightfully so.  I have no full backup of this harddisk. :)  So with all that added commentary, please let me know again if I should use Scanreg/restore now instead of your original suggestion of the Registry Checker.  I'm just really being careful here.  :)

    Oh and if you want me to use SCANREG, do I specifically use SCANREG/RESTORE ? Or just SCANREG?  I rarely use it  so I don't know all what it does.

  15. Hi rloew,

    Here are the cabs listed in \sysbckup (including bytes, date, time):

    RBBAD.CAB        8829941        10-24-17    3:30P
    RB000.CAB        2341188        10-24-17    1:22A
    RB005.CAB        2341156        10-23-17    1:04P
    RB003.CAB        2341154        10-21-17    5:28A
    RB004.CAB        2341354        10-20-17    6:01P

    Primary disk has 860 mb free left.

    The PC has been on for several hours now (in command prompt mode) so I'm hoping it's not a stability/CPU issue... although I'm also hoping I did not mess up the drive a little bit because maybe this K6-III 450 could not handle 75 mhz fsb for some reason.  It has been on 75mhz for 4 years with the K6-II.  I also had a K6-III 400 before that, which means I had it at 66fsb x2.  The reason I switched to K6-II 500 was because the K6-III 400 will not handle overclock to 450.  Thus I had the K6-II 500 underclocked to 450.  Now I have this opportunity to switch to the K6-III 450 so as to take advantage of the internal L2 cache again (K6-II does not), and at 450 not 400, but now all this crap happened. Also, this motherboard will not handle K6+ CPUs as that would mean core voltages under 2.5V which this old PC's BIOS does not have. I'm already gambling with the K6-III core 2.4V to work at 2.5V (which is ok, to overvolt just +0.1V).

    The biggest mistake I made was a few years ago was when I put the AX5's fsb to 83mhz (to get to 500mhz) and that messed up the hard drive that already had 98se established on it. The AX5 could only max out to 83 fsb.  It messed up parts of the hard drive, so I had to make a new drive with 98se on it. I assume the overclocked PCI was part of the problem. That messed up hard drive is now the secondary drive on this PC so I can pick intact files off it. It has been stable since I backed off from 83 and down to 75 fsb.

    I have not done a chkdsk or scandisk, as I might further disrupt something.  

    Also, what about manually doing a SCANREG/RESTORE?

    What is that RBBAD?  Is the Registry Checker actually loading from that too?  

    It's 10-24-17 here in my timezone.  Around midnight of 10-24 was when hell broke loose.  So it's a toss up if RB000 AND RB005 are good or bad.  This leads me to assume that RB003 and RB004 are good ones, as those are dated 2-3 days before all this hoopla.  I will await another reply from you (or anyone else) before I start with your instructions in your first post. Thanks.

  16. Hi folks, long time no see.  Today, one of my older 98se socket 7 boxes is acting up. At bootup, it keeps going into the blue-colored screen, Microsoft Registry Checker. It supposedly loads up a new registry and tells me to Restart. However, it doesn't work.  It will keep going into the Checker, then loading, then rebooting.  However, at the first times it acted up, it was able to load up a good registry and get me into the desktop normally, but now never more.   Going into Safe Mode at boot does not help either, it will still go to the Checker.  But I can go into either of the Command Prompts (98 Startup Menu).  The disk contents there seem ok and intact.  It has been at least 20 times since this has gone/looped through the Checker and reboots.
    This all started last night.  I replaced the motherboard 3V coin battery and I changed out the AMD K6-II CPU to a K6-III CPU, at same frequency.  I would think changing the battery would have no issue, i.e. the BIOS kept losing its configuration. That problem solved.  So my only guess is the CPU changeout. 

    Specs:

    Abit AX5 Pentium motherboard (circa 1997-98).

    AMD K6-III 450 (AHX) - Configured via SoftBios to 75mhz fsb at x2 = 450.   The K6-II 500 was setup exactly the same for years with no issues. Also, I/O at 3.3V, Core at 2.5V.

    256MB memory (max)

    2 hard drives

    The only difference between the K6-II and III is that the III would not accept "System bios cacheable enabled" in bios, so I have that disabled. Otherwise it would hang at startup (the K6-II will work with it enabled).

    Everything was working ok last night after the CPU replacement, but not today.  It has been awhile since I've tackled with Windows 98se registry issues, and I don't remember any of the tricks, so any help is appreciated.  Or how  far am I hosed with this?  I would like to save my desktop and not have to start over with a virgin registry.  :)

     

  17. Update:  Ok, so finally, got this all finished up last weekend. I was in no hurry, but 3 months downtime makes me wish I could've hurried a little more, heh. Purchased a new 500gb drive and drive enclosure (with eSATA III & USB 3), for a total of just under $45, as external backup device a couple weeks before. I used the eSATA mode since that is the fastest method of my 6 year old laptop. I used DMDE shareware, as was recommended above, and put it on a USB stick. Never used file recovery tools before so it was at first confusing but was able to figure out the basics.  I found out what they meant by "directory recovery is only with paid editions".  In freeware mode, which is what I used, only per-file recovery is available. You cannot just click on a folder you want to recover. So what I did was manually add the necessary folders (and any nested folders) on the backup drive and then recovered the files into their designated directory. Then recovered files in next nested directory, etc.

    Unfortunately I was only able to recover 70gb instead of the 80gb I lost, because I recalled I did do some file activity that I forgot about, approximately 5gb's worth, right after I lost the 80gb, so that's probably why I couldn't find 10gb of it in dmde's file recovery windows.  The recovered files were in mostly good condition. However, a few of the files are actually backup copies of DVD movies and when I recovered entire movie folders and then run them as usual, it didn't work, but most of the VOB's seem to run fine by themselves. I can always recopy the movies. Or I can always try re-authoring, which is something I've never done before, so this looks like an opportunity to learn that skill.  I also keep a changelog on all my computers, for hardware and software changes, so luckily I was able to read my records and trace what other possible files of the 10gb that are lost forever that were not seen in the file recovery window.

    Anyway, thanks all for the help.

  18. Thanks for the replies so far guys...

    Ok so DMDE looks like a good candidate, it's only about 1 mb and can be used on usb. However, the description says the freeware version has some kind of recovery limitation, but not sure exactly what it's saying:

    "DMDE has a number of freeware features such as disk editor, simple partition manager (e.g. allows partition undeleting), a tool to create disk images and clones, RAID constructor, file recovery from the current panel. Paid editions support file and directory recovery without the restriction, DMDE Professional Edition has additional features to recover data for clients (compare editions)."

    What restriction??  
     

  19. Hello,

    Last weekend, I accidentally permanently-deleted (shift+del) about 80gb of files and folders. Of course, would like them ALL back, or most, if it can't be helped.  I don't know what happened, I only wanted to delete a subfolder's worth of files, but instead deleted a bunch of other folders with files. Perhaps my mouse button got stuck or something and drag-highlighted them, who knows.  But I knew something was wrong as when it was in the process of deleting, it was taking longer than expected and the popup delete window listed "hundreds" of gigabytes rather than only a few gigs. After a few seconds I quickly canceled, but by that time I already lost ~80gb. Better than the hundreds of gigs though that it was about to kill.  It has been probably 10-15 years since I've done anything like this and obviously was not on Win 7 (probably 98SE or XP, can't recall), so I need some refreshing. Or if Win 7 has an undelete of its own?

    This is on a Win 7 laptop.  I've googled for freeware undelete apps, but not sure which one is the best. Yes, I would prefer freeware if possible. I only saved one file on purpose that was only a few kilobytes long so don't know if it saved over one of the lost files.  Before the delete, the drive only had about 1.5gb.  After losing the 80gb, the capacity went up to ~81.5gb.  I have not touched the laptop in about a week.  Also, once an undelete software is chosen, how do you install it on the drive without it potentially overwriting these deleted files? Or can it be run on a memory stick or burned cd?

    Anyway, need your help on this delicate matter, thanks.

  20. On one of our 98SE PC's, we have been using OE6 for close to 20 years now.  It's not perfect, there have been some times there have been issues that couldn't be (and have been) solved, but it's easy to use and has been of good convenience and we don't intend to stop using it, at least once it's hopefully fixed/perfect again. In the past year though, my dad has friends that keep sending tons of mails with large megabyte attachments, mostly unprocessed photos from their smartphones (they aren't computer nerds, so they know nothing about jpeg compression). Some of these attachments were in the order of 5MB to 10MB or more. After looking at them, he/we usually then delete the email(s). However, as most know, the megabytes increase the filesize of the Inbox db.  The filessize stays the same even after you trash the emails, until you then have to compact it.  Well, we neglected to compact the Inbox for a while now, so the size bloomed to almost 900MB.  When I recently (a few days ago) attempted to compact, it said something (I didn't jot it down) to the effect of "msimn caused invalid page fault in directdb.dll."  I looked this up and it said to replace the corrupt folder db.  When I tried that it pretty much erased (or reset) everything in the Inbox.  We don't want that to happen, because we still have tons of mail in there we do not want to get erased. Luckily I made a backup of the Inbox db, so I recopied that back in the appropriate folder (under \Identities folder).

     

    So what are our options? 

     

    Here are some of my ideas of which I haven't tried anything yet >

     

    - First idea:  Make a new folder, say "Inbox_temp", then move all the email from the corrupt Inbox db to this one, then rename it back to Inbox, while the previous Inbox is first renamed to something else.  However, the question is, when I start/click the "Mail Sending/Receiving" button, will it start receiving from the last point forward, or will it start receiving from the very first email on the server?  

     

    Note, we only have 56k dialup, and there is about 1.5 GB of mail on the email server, so if this new Inbox happened to start at the very beginning, it would takes days to complete.  We don't want it to start from the very first email on the server. 

     

    - Second idea:  Rename this corrupt Inbox to something else, like "Inbox_Old", then let OE6 automatically make a new empty Inbox.  However, will this new Inbox also start receiving mail from the first and oldest email from the server or will it start from the last time the receive button was pushed?  I assume it will start from the very beginning which is what we don't want. 

     

    I am thinking the first idea has some promise, but not really sure. We don't want to continue receiving new mail into this corrupt Inbox, but if we get a new (or possibly repaired) Inbox, we want to start receiving mail at the last point it left off (which would be about a couple weeks ago, iirc). 

     

    Any other ideas?  This PC's specs are:  Win 98SE (with Soporific autopatcher),  Pentium-based mobo with 256MB memory (max) at 75Hz frontside bus, 450MHz AMD K6-III, and about 750MB harddisk free. Yeah, it's an old machine, heh. Because of the low overhead of the CPU and memory and the bloated 900MB Inbox, Outlook Express will sometimes say low memory and will not show the Inbox unless I recover as much memory as possible as well as a fresh reboot.  However, I know it will run perfectly and quickly once the Inbox is properly optimized.

     

    Anyway, we need your input, thanks.

     

     

     

  21. Ok thanks I checked that printersetup.pdf and it helped, only just a little. What I discovered was I was entering the decimal codes wrong.

    As for example from my first post, I wanted to enter the code for "compressed printing" (i.e. 15 or 17 cpi). I mentioned it was Esc + 15 decimal. This is the usual code in practically all Epson FX emulated impact printers. So then in the generic printdriver (for W98SE), I press the escape key which enters as ESC with the angle bracket in the blank line. Then I use the Alt key to enter subsequent numbers. I enter "Alt 15". This all comes on the line as ...

    <ESC><164>
    Nope, this doesn't work.

    I read the PDF and discovered you need 3 decimal numbers to enter, so the 15 for compressed should be keyed in as Alt 015, not Alt 15. So what it should have been was Esc + 015. This comes out on the line as

    <ESC>^O
    i.e. the latter part for 015 shows up as the caret symbol and the letter O. I ran it and it works!

    Then I remembered that in general that's how you enter in Ascii practically anywhere else in Windows, i.e. you need 3 numbers after pressing the Alt key.

    There's still some more tinkering around, but at least I was able to get other codes to work with the Alt key for those numbers that don't have symbol on the keyboard. Unfortunately in the printersetup.pdf, when it starts to talk about enter font codes, it doesn't, because it wasn't necessary for the machine it was using it for, so they kept the font commands blank.

    And still need to know how to add several generic printer drivers to my printer list if possible, etc. :)

  22. Sorry I'm late to the table here...  I still use XP on my main "oldish" laptop.  However, because I had to get rid of my broadband a few years ago, I stopped downloading/installing XP updates around 2012.  I'm mainly on modem dial-up (even as I post this) and it would've been painful downloading the updates on that.  

     

    So the question is, is there a patch that can get my XP as updated as possible?  I have heard of Harkaz's unofficial SP4 and there is also the POSready, but are those the only two?  Obviously with POSready, I cannot do that with live uploading with my dialup, so I could probably scratch that off my list, for now.  Is the Harkaz patch only for XP Pro, or can it be used on my XP Home version?  Are there any other XP autopatchers?  And would I need to backup my current laptop drive in case something goes bad with a patcher?

     

    I see there really aren't any threads Pinned up top about this matter, which I thought would be important to keep up there. 

     

    My laptop specs:  Pentium 4 (2.0-2.3GHz) with 1.0GB max DDR, specifically a model HP Pavilion ze5001US.    

     

    O/S:  Windows XP Home Edition with SP3, stopped doing automatic updates somewhere in 2012 as I mentioned above. 

     

    Would love to see your recommendations, thanks.

  23. Hey all... 

    Haven't been here in awhile. Wow has it been almost 2 years since I last wrote at these boards?

     

    Anyway, does anyone know how to "fully" use the 'Generic / Text only" printer driver in Windows?;  Specifically in Win 9x (95/98), but would also like info for XP and 7.

     

    I have several 9 and 24-pin impact dotmatrix printers I would like to use.  I've set up the Generic driver, but at default settings, i.e. the printer command & font selection folders in the driver are blank.  

     

    Ok, so it Works nice at default, my printers print at a default with printer's native Pica font (10 cpi). And much faster than the Windows print driver because the Generic driver prints directly with the printers text commands, not graphically as with the Win driver.  However, I don't quite know how to use the font selection, etc. and how to fully enter the control codes.  I have been able to change to the Elite setting (12cpi) by entering "<ESC>M", but what if I need compressed 17cpi?  For compressed font, one of my printers has a control code sequence of hex 27 and 15.  But I tried <ESC><15> and it didn't seem to work. With Elite I was able to type in the M after ESC, but with hex 15, there is no symbol for that.  I checked the info in the balloons (help info using rightclick mouse) and it says to enter codes in decimal, but it didn't give any examples.

     

    The Font selection folder under Generic's properties has lines to select 10cpi, 12cpi, etc.  How do I use this?  If I enter the control sequence for 10cpi as <ESC>P and also simultaneously enter the sequence for 12cpi as <ESC>M, how does it know which one to print with if you have both cpi's filled in?

     

    Another question is, how can I add several generic drivers to my printer list for the different printers (different settings for same printer) that I have?  When I add more than one Generic driver, they all seem to copy each other's commands.  For example, I add 2 generic drivers, call them Generic 1 and Generic 2.  The first is for one model dotmatrix printer, say a Panasonic, the 2nd one is for say, my Epson.  But if I enter control codes in Generic 1 and then look in Generic 2's properties, the same control codes from 1 get copied there.  And when I erase them in 2, they also get erased in 1!   What am I doing wrong?

     

    In the print command folder there is also another place to add different, I forget the name, it' a dropdown selection, but the same thing happens, it gets copied to the other generic driver. 

     

    I did try this in XP, i.e. added 2 generic printers in my list, and it looks like the control codes don't get copied to each other.  So it looks like each Generic printer is unique. However, I never tested them to see if they worked with my printers.  

     

    In summary...

     

    1. What format do I enter in control code sequences?

    2. How can I add more than one generic driver to my 95/98SE printer list with each driver unique for different model printers and doesn't copy each other's codes?

    3. As in #2, how can I add generic drivers for the same model printer so that e.g. one driver is to print in Pica and another driver on the list (for same printer model) will print in Elite with Bold and Underline settings?  

     

    I found more info about the generic print driver at www.frogmorecs.com/arts/using-the-generic-driver/ , but it was very scarce info at best and didn't really do anything for me at all.  I did some further Googling and surprisingly there really are no other places I can find any complete guides for this. 

     

    Anyway, need help and hope I haven't confused anyone, thanks.

  24. Did anyone ever come out with a CPU/bus clock divider program that can mess around with the chipset overriding the BIOS so as to change bus clock ratios?

    I am currently upgrading an "old" (late 1990's) Pentium socket 7 motherboard, an ABIT AX5, specifically. Fastest FSB in BIOS is 83 MHz. There are no clock divider features in its BIOS. I would love to increase CPU freq to 83 (from 66), however, doing so can risk the PCI clock, because it would be at 41.5 (half of 83) instead of the normal 33 MHz. I already tried this and one of my hard drives got messed up. I have read that some peripherals cannot handle that high of a PCI speed. I also had to change the soundcard, because the current one kept locking up due to 83.

    At 83 FSB, the divider to keep PCI stable would have to be something divisible by 2.5 if there ever was such a thing. Dividing by 3 would underclock the PCI and of course dividing by 2 would still overclock it to 41.5 as I said above.

    I've looked at programs like SetFSB, SoftFSB, WPCredit, etc, but I am not really seeing anything in there about changing FSB to affect PCI and such unless I haven't looked close enough.

    For now, I have been keeping the FSB to 75 instead, which ideally keeps the PCI (and ISA) clocks within normal range. CPU is an AMD K6-2 550MHz. So at 75 FSB and a CPU multiplier of x6, I would get 450MHz. But it would be nice to use 83 FSB so I could get 500MHz on the CPU without de-stabilizing everything else. Last resort would probably be to find a 3rd party BIOS maker. Otherwise keep FSB at 75, if nothing else.

    Oh yeah, Windows 98SE compatibility would be nice too.

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