technoid

Thanks guys. I will try to persuade them (DVDFab developers), but so far no real help at their forums. A couple of their users keep saying to upgrade my O/S, hehe (FYI, yes it does work on my XP). There is a new stable DVDFab released, 6.0.7.0. I do not see anything in "changelog" concerning 98SE issues. I have not downloaded it yet (I'm on dialup). Perhaps someone can test that too. 6.0.7.0 changes: This begs my next question... is there a free/share-ware DVD burner that someone highly recommends, for 98SE?

Well, it did not quite work. I renamed vso_hwe.dll in the 6.0.6.0 folder and then as you instructed, I copied over vso_hwe.dll from 5.2.2.2 into the 6.0.6.0 folder. The illegal op is gone and the program continues until you choose which function you want, e.g. DVD to DVD or free HD Decrypter, etc. Choose desired function and from there a pop up error occurs: "Encountered an improper". Press Ok and you get a weird screen, most of the program is invisible and your desktop/Start is messed up. You need to end DVDFab task to get back to normal, but you need to reboot anyway, because it's still messy. I will try in another 98SE box.

Someone might want to take a relook at this one. The latest stable DVDFab, version 6.0.6.0, is giving me an illegal operation error. I uninstalled RevolutionsPack9 and KernelEx, but it still crashes. DrWatson doesn't report anything else. The crash says: DVDFAB caused an invalid page fault in module <unknown> at 0000:00000001 I have also reported this recently at DVDFab's forums, but no answers yet. DVDFab still supposedly supports 98SE, as is stated on their site, but it's unknown if and when they will drop it... especially once they see this error of mine! Perhaps someone else here can try it out. The last DVDFab version that worked fine for me in 98SE was 5.2.2.2.

Yes, ancient computer virii hiding potentially in my old disks is not primarily, but equally, important (that classic Monkey virus comes to mind), since this box also surfs the internet and also attached to a network, so just in case some dude out there decides to make a new 98SE virus (and the virus database updated for it), I'd just want to have this malware caught in real time. I know some of you guys don't have an antivirus, but I'd like to be safer, than sorry(er). The box also has a software firewall, of course! Still, I'd like suggestions for a replacement antivirus that has active database updates to try other than Avast, if possible.

Official support for Avira AntiVir on Windows 9x ended June 30, 2007 According to this page: Starting July 2006, Microsoft discontinued the support for Windows 98/ME. As announced some time ago on Product lifecycle information page on www.avira.com, we do not offer new versions and updates for Windows 98/ME virus protection any longer. I'm guessing that the 'updates' part of their statement means just that... Thanks, that is unfortunate. Clamwin is ok, but it doesn't have a real time scanner, although I do have it installed on another 98SE box. Some Googling did provide some other results, but some of those other antivirus products have since dropped 98SE support as well. I realize there's not much virus infection that can happen to 98SE/Me, but I'd rather have a safety net, especially when I additionally have a bunch of old floppy disks that I have not looked at in ages that can (and have) harbored older viruses. Perhaps I will stick with Avast, unless someone has a recommendation.

I am thinking of switching to Avira, from Avast, for my 98SE box, but I am not sure what the update is on it in this thread. The link at Download.com goes to the latest free Avira AntiVir, which does not support 98SE/ME, not 7.06.00.268 (although you can find it somewhere else). The reason I would like to change antivirus is that Avast seems to bog down my 400mhz PC, so I am wondering if Avira is less of a load. But the bigger question is... can 7.06.00.268 still update its virus database to the latest from Avira's servers? If not, then I guess I will pass.

And if after all this, you want your Win 3.1 to look nearly like 9x, XP or Vista, then you may go try http://www.calmira.de , if you don't know about it. It's a nice shell and I used it a few years ago on a 3.11 system of mine, especially the XP version. However, the LFN version (long file names in 3.1) of Calmira didn't work for me, crashing everything on the harddrive and I had to reformat. I must have missed a step, but I couldn't be bothered to start all over again. I'm sure I can get another 3.1 system going one of these days.

Can you explain or list what these core ME features are that 'we don't want'? I had a friend who used ME without any problems nor complaints several years ago (~2002-2003). Btw, 98SE2ME works great for me (updated with Auto-patcher first and also RP9 and KernelX) on my Pentium III 1.0ghz box.

I reinstalled XP on my laptop (through restore disc). Then after setting up firewall & AV, I did a Windows Update online. I noticed that one of the updates is .NET 1.0.3705. I've never had this installed before. Usually I manually install .NET 1.1 and 2.0 (I need them both). So the question is ... is .NET 1.0 necessary? I just want to make sure so I don't bog down my fresh install with files that I may not need.

Yes, the drive detection is set to Auto in BIOS, and when you look on the harddisk page there, it shows the drive size as 137GB, not 160GB, which gives you an idea that it has the 137GB limitation. I tried reconfiguring the BIOS, but nothing worked. I looked for a BIOS update on the mfr's site and there is none. The laptop is at the latest BIOS rev. I contacted the mfr through their support page, and have not gotten reply since I wrote them about 3 weeks ago. And I wouldn't want to wait any longer. The laptop is a Fujitsu Lifebook C Series #C2240. The BIOS is at 1.05 and that is what Fujitsu has as the latest rev on their website. You can find specs and downloads at http://support.fujitsupc.com/CS/Portal/supportsearch.do Perhaps someone might find something there that I did not. I will probably have to break down and just redo everything (delete partition and start from scratch). But I will try the Partition Master first. I have until this weekend to finish this, heh.

Oh sorry, yes that is what I meant, the "x" in PIOx/UDMAx is just the speed level#, i.e. UDMA5, UDMA4, PIO3, etc. (and UDMA is Ultra DMA). Can't recall the drive brand/model right now, but it is 160GB, 5400 rpm. I did a ton of research, including Microsoft support and BIOS config, but no matter what I did, XP didn't recognize the fixes and just reverts back to PIO mode. According to Microsoft, if the drive reports CRC errors too many times, it reverts drive speed to PIO. So after all that, seems everything points to the 137GB limit. Laptop BIOS is set to drive UDMA. I checked transfer speeds using HDTune, PCWizard and a couple other benchmarkers and the drive runs around 3.5GB/sec currently, which is about 5-7 times slower than normal. Ouch!

I am working on a friend's laptop that has a newly installed 160GB harddrive (installed by another guy/service). The friend said the laptop felt slow since then, so he wanted me to look at it. I discovered the laptop has the 137GB BIOS limit, so even though the drive and laptop still working ok, the electronics has throttled down the drive's transfer speed from UDMAx to PIOx (due to handshake communication errors) and that is why he noticed the slowness. The drive currently runs around 3.5GB/second instead of around 25GB/second (normal). I am thinking in trying the freeware EASEUS Partition Master. I have never resized partitions before. The big question now is if Partition Master will be able to resize the partition (160GB) and split it into 2 partitions, say like, 120GB and 40GB, so that the laptop can run the drive back at normal speed? I am just wondering if PM will have a problem seeing the entire partition because the laptop has the BIOS limitiation. There is no laptop BIOS upgrade to overcome the 137GB limit. It would have been nice if the laptop didn't even boot with the big drive in it, but it seems that it worked and so it was a big oversight on the previous guy installing the drive and OS. I suppose he didn't notice the slowness. Installed OS is Windows XP SP3. The OS sees the full 160GB ok, but the laptop doesn't (BIOS sees it as 137GB). I checked with EASEUS and they said that it will probably not work, because the program needs both the BIOS and OS to see the correct drive size. If that's so, I am also wondering if there is another partitioning program that can do the job. I don't want to have to start over and repartition/reformat from scratch, if possible. Please move this to the correct subforum if this is the wrong place.

Thanks guys, I will try the Chkdsk repair then, but as mentioned, it will probably be hopeless (i.e. to make it boot normally again). I tried the SFC before (with the floppies, changing dir where SFC resides), but it didn't work. The harddisk seems to be ok electronically when I browsed inside it when it was temporarily converted into a USB external drive. Just as long as the Chkdsk will not frack up the rest of the drive and also as long as I will be able to get into my own profile (changing file/folder ownership) where my contents are, I'm ok with it. The reason I keep saying that is I once had a problematic hard drive on 98SE (FAT32), where doing a scandisk every time progressively kept messing up sectors, thus losing files and folders, so I stopped chkdsk'ing it and salvaged what was left. Anyway, cross my fingers, will Chkdsk tonight.

Ok, using a webcam recording, I was able to capture that 1-second BSOD screen during the boot, that I mentioned in my last post, before the PC restarts itself. It is a STOP error, 0x0000007B. It tells me that it could be a disk problem, whether as a hardware failure or a virus. I have downloaded the XP setup/boot floppies, but Microsoft stops the setup floppies at the XP SP2 version, not SP3. Of course, the system that crashed is SP3. So the big question now is... will using the SP2 setup floppies' CHKDSK /F (and-or CHKDSK /R) be a problem if my OS is at SP3? If not, there's really no way I have time to find a way to 'slipstream' XP3 components into those SP2 floppies. It is still uncertain whether this was a overheating or viral problem. I really need to get this notebook back up and running again as it will be needed for an event in the next week or so. I am starting to lose patience. I think HP did not design this notebook very well. The CPU can get very hot (Mobile Pentium 4) and the memory sticks (DDR) sit right above the DVD drive, making that drive hot and unstable. The only way I've been able to keep it more stable is using Notebook Hardware Control, supplemented with a notebook pad cooler, heh. Whatever the case, the personal contents of this drive are crucial as I have amassed a lot on it (I don't have USB storage at the moment), so I hope whatever repair I try to do will not mess up the rest of the drive (that is what I fear the most). I will be reformatting and reinstalling another drive while I try to fix this one (and then hopefully rescue my personal stuff off it).

Looks like you're correct. First I tried an XP boot disk and that didn't work, so I thought it must've been a deeper problem. I took the drive out of the laptop, converted it into an external usb drive and hooked it up to an older slower XP computer (with only usb 1.1 unfortunately). I was able to look around in the file structure and things seemed alright. However, I did a scandisk (took forever) and it found about 10 file record errors, ~20 index errors and corruption to volume and MBT. These got fixed by the scandisk eventually. I put it back into the laptop and it was able to boot a little bit further until it gets to some kind of BSOD that lasts a second on screen, so I'm going to have to film it with a camera so I can see the error. But it Looks like I'm gonna bite the bullet and reinstall XP on a different drive and keep this drive until I can backup whatever hasn't been corrupted. Hard to say what went wrong, but it's very most likely overheating. Then maybe a destructive virus, if not overheating. I'll be back with the conclusion!

If KB837009 is already in Auto-patcher, why doesn't WinUpdate recognize it? That update is dated 2004. Should I be concerned? I use Outlook Express. technoid, dude, why are you still persisting with Windows Update? MS hasn't touched it since July 2006, and AutoPatcher (and other update packs) install newer hotfixes that WU doesn't know about, and thus gets it wrong when saying you don't have stuff installed. Please DO NOT use Windows Update for Windows 98 se systems, its a waste of time. Cheers! Hehehe, ok, I know I can be stubborn at times. But does this mean that Microsoft did make a 98se-specific update to KB837009 and didn't put it up on the 98se windows update? Or are Outlook Express updates not OS-specific?

Sorry there is now power management section in there. HP notebook BIOSes are limited in features, at most. I played around with the keys of the notebook during the boot up to see if there were anything other than F8 that would access XP and one of them happened to show a little message: "TRAP 00000006 EXCEPTION". I did some net surfing and found that this message may be something about a corruption of the disk NTLDR. Looks like I'm going to probably need to boot floppies. Is it alright to make an XP boot disk off another XP/Home machine and use it on this laptop?

Hi folks, Ok this is a boot error I have never encountered before. The system is a 2.3GHz Pentium4 HP Pavilion ze5501US notebook, Windows XP/Home SP3. Everything was going alright today until suddenly the next time I turned it on (cold boot), it hangs right before anything else loads up, sometime before the boot logo. It's an empty black screen. I tried one of those Safe modes (and everything else on that list) and all I can see is it hangs right at ACPI.SYS. I did a little bit of research (not much) and some old posts say it may have something to do with the CD/DVD player. I played around in the BIOS, like rearranging boot devices, but to no avail. This is strange, I didn't install or change anything prior to this issue. I don't think it's a virus, but I can't be sure. I wasn't even connected to the Internet, unless it's one of those hibernating time-activated virii. Or it could be a hardware issue since my laptop can sometimes overheat, although I do use a laptop cooler. The only thing I could think of that has changed is that I was connected by LAN to my 98SE PC via a hub, but again no Internet anywhere on the network at the time. There were also some other ways I read on how to solve things, but it needs an XP CD, of which I unfortunately do not have. Everything comes on restore discs with this system. There is also something about XP boot disks from Microsoft that I've heard about and might try. How many disks is that and how big in bytes? I'm on dial-up right now, so I'm concerned how I might obtain it. Anyway I'm not much more knowledgeable on getting this fixed, so any help is appreciated, thanks.

Yes, I noticed that this AP thread was not sticky too, several weeks ago. Having the latest AP 2008 upgrade, I became curious and checked the Windows Update site again, today. In there, it said I did not have the following on my PC after it scanned it: If KB837009 is already in Auto-patcher, why doesn't WinUpdate recognize it? That update is dated 2004. Should I be concerned? I use Outlook Express.

Awesome! I will try to download and install this weekend. From what I understand above, I don't have to uninstall Uberskin first (but I probably will anyway). And No problem about nVidia, I have an old MGA Millenium card in use. By the way, does RP9 address transparent desktop icons in 98SE? With Uberskin, I used the slick registry workaround ("TransparentIcons"=DWORD:00000001, in hkey_current_user), but it does not refresh the desktop very well so you will sometimes see several icons with non transparent artifacting. Unless I've been doing it all wrong?!

If the slowness problem still persists and you haven't figured it out yet, I think you need to re-build this PC again so that you might be able to pinpoint the issue better, from the ground up, methodically. Take out all uneccesary addon cards, put in the most basic memory stick (64mb perhaps), default the BIOS and then reconfig it, and then install only 98SE (i.e. no autopatcher and 3rd party wares). No h/w drivers either until the O/S asks for it. If the slowness, such as the booting, is gone then you will have at least ruled out that your basic h/w configuration shouldn't be at fault. If the slowness is still there with the basic config, then something is indeed still wrong there. Are you sure the benchmarks say this is 500/550 mhz CPU? Also, has it always been this slow since your grandfolks bought it?

What is the history of this 30GB in the Gateway PC? Was it the original drive? Or did the guy put it in? Ok I could be way off, but maybe it could be a locked drive also, sort of like the drives inside XBox360's. With those drives, they need to be reflashed. I've only done that once. Just another alternative answer that you can look into.

I'm a newbie when it comes to relational databases. I will be using Access 97, because that's all I have and it's compatible with a lot of PC's I have that have Win 9x. So where is the best or better place to get help starting a database in Access? Can I start here in the msfn.org forums and ask questions or is there another forum/site for this? I am designing a medical chartnote database (for a physician) and I need to know if Access is the right tool for it. TIA.

Installing a cache controller, like Cacheman (outertech.com), wouldn't hurt either. You can set it to see how much ram is free (or used, etc) in the systray.

Sounds like a good idea, never heard or thought of that before, thank you. What I can probably do is put this corrupted drive into an external USB2 drive enclosure and run it off there from my other XP laptop, which uses the same login name and password. I'm going to have to get another external drive though as the working XP laptop doesn't have anymore space for backup. Will that work? Also, I need to clear up something... is USB2 faster than UDMA/IDE 100/133? My guess is yes.