Sl@y3D for my n@me

Oh well, my post vanished during the great forum switcheroo of '13. I'll post again. Nice one guys. I'm just wondering, do any of you have high speed connections? My old Netgear adapter seemed to choke when my cable connection got upgraded to 10Mb, and it's now at 30Mb. Since one of the suggestions is indeed a Netgear, I'd just like to make sure. I know this is off-topic (although I doubt I would begrudge myself for hijacking my own thread), but I do have a second query. Is there a particular Sound Blaster card that would be ideal for this system? I know there are a million or so different drivers, with differing compatibility. The dedicated thread shows as much. I'd like a Sound Blaster that plays well with DOS, but a little EAX support for Windows wouldn't go amiss. I have my eye on a Sound Blaster Live! on eBay, but drivers are a concern.

I am trying to resurrect my old PC to play some old games and all that kind of jazz, and being far, far away from the router, I'd like to have a wireless card to connect it to the Internet. I did have a read of that list of compatible hardware thread, but the one card it recommended didn't seem to have any Windows 98 drivers. I might have missed it, but still. As for the chipset, I don't know who sells cards with that chipset. My question to you, therefore, is what wireless adapter would be the best buy for this legacy machine? I have a Netgear WG111T, but it's crap. No matter what OS you run it under, it'll crash. Especially 98.

Shameless plug follows. But yeah, if you really want to play Counter-Strike with A3D, the above is an option for you.

If you intend to run Windows 98 on that machine to play Counter-Strike online, keep in mind that you won't be able to play Counter-Strike 1.6 on Steam. You'll have to use the older, pre-Steam version, CS 1.5.

I honestly can't understand why you think so harshly of Windows 7 when the problem lies in the drivers, and your particular configuration. I personally hate it when people say "oh well, I've had no problems with it, so it's perfect and the rest is your fault!", but even so, it seems you just cut and run too quickly. I will add that no matter what you look up, several thousand people will have had problems with it. You'll probably find the same sort of reports about xp. I had blue screen problems with Windows XP which were related to the drivers. If you genuinely have spent money on Windows 7, I would really recommend doing more research into this particular problem. There is no point in wasting your money and depriving yourself of the stuff Windows 7 has to offer.

Question: Are these just the Vista cursors, which don't contain high DPI cursors, or are they the actual fixed Windows 7 cursors as seen here?

Looks like he has 2GB of RAM. Windows 7 and Vista use RAM more efficiently, in that they follow the principle of free RAM being wasted RAM. The memory usage you see is due to Windows putting commonly used apps and files into RAM so that they launch faster. When you launch a game, Windows will reduce memory usage by these apps and files, so that's nothing to worry about. I have 3GBs of RAM, and Windows is taking up 1.5GBs of it. Nothing to worry about. I don't believe this is related to your games problem though. Could be drivers? Try updating them.

As a newbie to the world of programming I'm not familiar with the terminology, so please bear with me. I have been developing an application using Visual Studio 2005, coding in Visual Basic. For several reasons, I have had to use a rendering engine that is not Trident. I selected Webkit for this purpose. Now, on my Windows 7 install, the application works fine. Put it on my XP Mode installation, and I get errors about being unable to find the Flash plugin. From what I can tell there are two different Flash installers, one for IE, and one for everything else. This implies that the files for other browsers are installed somewhere on the local machine. My question is - can I distribute the Flash plugin with my application somehow, in the same way that Webkit is distributed with it? Are there any files I need to bundle with it? Thanks in advance.

That isn't a valid comparison - all your start menu items are in the exact same place they were before. What forces you to search for things? They are still in the same place as they were before, you don't have to search for something that you know is there. I don't have to search for anything if I don't want to. You still have the icons, you still have the labels. I fail to see the difference. Once you get into all programs, the menus are the same, besides one being confined into a much neater menu. But if you want it to be bigger, I would suggest adding some buttons to the right of the start menu, this makes the start menu bigger. It was present in Vista, and Windows Mobile and Windows NT are not related in any way. Besides being completely different concepts and completely different markets, the teams hardly talk to each other. PAID BY MICROSOFT? I feel insulted by this statement. Do you think that just because we like a Microsoft product or feature, we are PAID by them? Of course you have the right to choose a different start menu - go download a different shell since you don't seem to like explorer. Or download Linux. Or hell, DON'T upgrade to Windows 7. But DON'T even think of considering all the people who enjoy this functionality Microsoft employees. That is a ridiculous claim. Who is forcing you to use Windows 7? You can still get downgrades to Windows XP and Windows Vista on some machines, and you don't have to upgrade your present machine. I don't understand. And if you already have Windows 7, that app will bring back the classic start menu. It just sounds like a lot of people are resistant to change to me, but I will respect your opinion that the classic start menu is better, because everyone works in a different way.

I believe XP Mode requires Remote Desktop. That might be your problem.

A while ago, I had the same problem you have, but with a different streaming TV service. It only seemed to happen with higher bitrates, at which point the video would be jumpy, and end up not playing video (or maybe a frame or two every so often). This leads me to believe that if your computer is not up to the job, you'll experience those problems.

Don't bother with XP Mode. In my experiences, it's horribly inconvenient and slow, even for old Office apps. A quick Google search tells me that this file is not part of Office 2000, but a part of a printer driver. Do you have a printer attached? You might want to update its drivers, or check if that is functioning properly. I could be wrong though, this is just what a quick Google search told me. However, I know for sure that Office 2000 works great in Vista, so it should do so in 7 as well.

AFAIK, NT4 is very specific with its driver support; if it was designed for NT4, it'll work, if not, it won't. I do know that NT4 does NOT support the WDM driver model used by 98/2000, but if my memory serves, WDM was based on NT4's. Still, I don't believe the two standards are compatible.

I'm guessing that if your game is free (i.e. Half-Life 2 mods) then you can integrate Steamworks functionality, put it on Steam, have it updated and so forth. When you start charging for it (i.e. Garry's Mod, Modern Warfare 2), you have to give Valve a cut of the money.

This is excellent news. Now I can be sure that my cat really WAS stealing food from my desk all along. Sarcasm aside, Vista takes more resources than 7 or xp, for better or for worse is debatable. There is no denying that. Besides which, it has been replaced and there is very little reason to choose it. Your options are xp pro, or Windows 7 pro. I notice that your graphics card and processor are very outdated, which may cause 7 to slow down a bit, but on second thoughts, I doubt it would make much of an impact on your experience. I'd recommend 7 pro.

Do you use a browser other than Internet Explorer for normal browsing? Perhaps Flash player has not been installed for Internet Explorer, but only your alternate browser. Try updating Flash in IE.

That is normal. My old 98 machine used to do the same thing. As does my desktop, running either Windows XP Home Edition or Windows 7. All computers I have come across do the same thing. I might suggest unplugging the hard drive indicator light - I can see why that would be annoying. Remember that you would still be able to hear the HDD if you needed to find out when it's reading/writing.

Uninstalling XPize will not cause any side-effects that I know of. However, there is no reason to install xpize on Windows 7 because, as the name suggests, xpize makes Windows XP more like Windows XP. You might be interested in the Vize project though, I'm not sure if it supports 7 yet, but it probably will do in the future. Although 7 does a good job of getting rid of those ugly pre-2000 era graphics and such. On the other hand, to be honest, there isn't much reason to uninstall XPize in the first place. The files that XPize replaces are Windows XP specific, and are replaced by Windows 7 files. Better safe than sorry though, it might be worth uninstalling, I just don't think its fully necessary. Good luck with your upgrade!

In the majority of cases, you require two different licenses for the two operating systems. You will not be able to activate both. At least, that's how I think it works. Then again, it might easily be "one license per computer", but I don't recall the specifics. If you are in doubt, read the EULA that came with your copy of Windows.

The ones that come with Windows are. The Windows Update drivers are the real drivers that NVIDIA issue. I'd suggest using the Windows Update drivers if it offers them. Good to see your problem is cleared up!

Whoa, that graphics card is a tad hot. My 9600GT gets nowhere near that hot, idle or playing games on the highest settings. I don't like the look of that. Just to make sure though, I'd recommend a system restore. Restore to before you had the FPS drop. If that doesn't fix it, my bet is on the graphics card.

That's interesting. IE8 x64 on my laptop is slower than FF3.5 at all times. However, IE8 is far faster than IE7, as you said. Welcome to the second browser wars, speed is everything these days. I don't suppose it might be due to addons you have installed? Compare again with all addons disabled and see how it runs.

I'd just like to ask, how do you know the PSU is about to go? I'd just like to know, it might help us all find out what's up. Now, Zenskas asked a very good question which you didn't really answer. Has ANYTHING, anything at all on your computer changed since the FPS drop? It doesn't matter how small it is, anything different, modified, installed, whatever. Any Windows Updates? Any other side effects? Has anything changed in the game? How are all your other games performing? How about your hardware? I'd like to know if the hard drive activity light is on much during gameplay (or generally in Windows). You could also check your system temperatures while you're at it, using an app like SpeedFan. To be honest, it could be anything. Good luck!

In my experience, with those missing DLL errors, you can just Google the DLL file and it'll come up. From there it is as easy as dropping the file into C:\WINDOWS\SYSTEM. Can't say I have ever used that app, but I have doubts about its effectiveness, just because these kinds of apps don't seem to do very much (and what they do do is not always positive). Plus, they don't seem to be aware of whether it is compatible with the 9x series or not, not a good sign.

Apart from uninstalling MDAC 2.8? There really isn't much else you can do. I don't see why you would need it to be honest, but if you do, you'll have to live with it. Sorry.