FishBowl

There are several "index.dat" files in Win98(SE), that can't be accessed, too. All of those seem to belong to IE, somehow. Though, I did only notice this on MS Backup. Won't ever surf the web with a system component...

Bad idea, to use the same partition for both systems. Instead either add a second hard disk for XP or make available a second partition for it. Shrinking the C: drive is possible with several tools. But if you already have a D: (or even e:) partition, remove every '98 related stuff from there and then use that for XP. If being installed to D: or higher, XP won't interfere with C: except of installing it's boot files and boot manager there to. Would even add '98 to it's own boot manager as second option automatically. And you can edit the boot manager even from '98, via "boot.ini".

There were / are many OEM versions of Nero around, that were made for and limited to CD writers. Those won't be able to handle DVDs.

There may be several reasons for such a module to be recognized falsely: - mainboard chipset: for example, i44BX may have three slots, but the center one would not accept double sided architecture or the inner architecture of the chips requires to be handled as two banks, also not working on the inner slot, nor on one of the outer, with the inner occupied in any way - module chip layout; again, depending on chip's inner architecture, the mainboard may fail to work with 256 MB modules with only four or with 16 chips on it eight chips may then normally work - bad / old mainboard BIOS - another RAM module inside, that blocks resources try the 256 MB alone, first slot - badly programmed SPD EEPROM, try to disable auto detection in BIOS setup ... Don't take the single sided / double sided aspect to serious, as even if both sides of the module are equipped with chips, they may still be electronically arranged as single sided / one bank, and vice versa. In many cases, though not always, four chips or sixteen chips are double sided / two banks, eight are single then. Of course, only talking single data rate SDRAM here.

Try another USB controller. Like, if having problems on a front USB port, compare with one on the back. Quite often the cables of front ports are not shielded properly and this for behave far from reliable, specially for USB2. Or the internal connector does not sit properly. Also think about adding some extra PCI controller for USB2.

Don't really know why, but I can tell you how:Already uses the swap file at boot time... That's one great reason to add more RAM.

Norton Ghost 7.5, for fast image backups (commercial) XFDISK, for it's MBR boot manager (freeware) I will not place any links to software here.

Did not really expect to turn out to be that weird, as I've never ever used Lynx 26.23274%

Optical drives like this normally use separate lasers for DVDs and CDs. The one for CDs may be bad. Try again with an original audio CD. If this does not work either, that thing surely is dead. Still under warranty? Return a.s.a.p.

Do you have any index service running? Explorer may bring one, MS Office another one. Even WMP could act similar, if allowed to search for media files everywhere. Or by chance installed Norton Protection, for the 'Recycled' folder(s)? No idea, if that's already available for Vista. If so, disable for that drive, once attached.

This is about files and registry, not drives. And folders are not formatted anyway, only drives.

No, it just sums up files installed and registry settings made, that will be removed then. You should not find more remainings or possible conflicts than before...

No idea, but this normally comes with MS Office, as an optional plugin. Had it from Office 2000, as long as I've used it.

Preferrably FAT32.And size can be far above 32GB, if you are using a 3rd party tool for formatting. It's far easier to get started with a multi boot system, if you install Win9x first, onto a primary partition, as later it won't be able, to create boot routines from an NTFS partition. But modern Win do know the trick, to install their boot menue into a FAT32. Partitions for modern Windows versions don't have to be primary then, logical drives inside of an extended are OK..

No idea about add-ons. Except of that, Foxit Reader 2.2 works fine on Win98SE. Foxit Reader 2.3 has some memory related issues, leading to scrolling failure and freezing on a lot of documents. That's what also other people reported any why I downgraded to 2.2