Sl@y3D for my n@me

I don't see MY excuse either; testing sites for compatibility.

What you're saying here is quite logical. I'm not overly sure why the W3C would choose a longer tag. Perhaps there is a reason though. However, your next statement is horribly inaccurate. This statement goes against the experiences of millions of web developers across the world. I know of people who would go about for hours in order to fix their site to work in IE6, and these hacks would then go and cause another browser to break, although they all worked perfectly before the hacks were implemented. These aren't complex, massive websites I'm talking about. The designs were, by and large, simple. they just wouldn't render right in that one particular browser. Hell, the majority of phpBB themes seem to break IE6 support, complex or otherwise. The rest use hacks. The majority of sites work in IE6, yes. Why is that? Because most of them were designed with IE6 in mind. They still are, it's one of the most popular browsers in the world. Imagine all that time lost to make it so, having to work around the lack of PNG transparency, the lack of native SVG support which means that sites cannot use one resizeable graphic in the place of lots of jpgs. Transparency is a big deal, because it tends to make sites look far more elegant and easy to customise. Its use is now becoming widespread. You seem to not notice that the web is moving in a different direction to what you may wish it was. While some people may be happy to use tables, bold tags and all that old stuff, perhaps for backwards compatibility or simplicity, the big sites and people with ambition want to squeeze more out of that web browser. Embedded videos, embedded audio, shadows, transparency, SVG support, a ton of CSS options and so many ways to manipulate that text, interact with that content and guide you through that page. The web is becoming focussed on interactivity. IE6 holds back the web with its broken rendering and lack of features. Then again, IE 5.01 SP4 (as included in Windows 2000 SP4) is still supported, so should we be building websites for that? God no. I can't stress enough how small sites with home pages and simple navigation, without database functionality or any fancy stuff, are so very outdated. They're going away already. IE6 is fine for that. It's not fine for anything bigger, because IE6 was a 2001 product, and this is 2009. Please, PLEASE don't tell people that any site works in IE6. They're built to accommodate it.

It sounds to me like you really don't like CSS for some reason. To be honest, I can't see a use for plain old HTML when CSS can do it smarter, faster (if you have multiple web pages) and just generally have a higher level of consistency across pages. If you keep all your CSS in a separate file, you can easily make changes to one file that will automatically change all of your HTML pages. That can be useful if you have a large amount of HTML files, but want to give them all a consistent style without using some PHP solution or whatever. Not being a web designer, I'm not hugely sure on the specifics, but one thing I do know is that just because IE6 has broken support for it, that doesn't mean it sucks. And to be honest, I have never seen a modern, well put together, HTML-only page. This thread went off-topic rather quickly, didn't it?

Processor will definitely be the problem for youtube then. Graphics card, processor and RAM are equally responsible for poor gaming performance and any kind of lag. No offence or anything, but isn't it a bit obvious why your system is running slowly?

Check the thread title. I'd like to ask the original topic poster to post his system specs, such as RAM, processor (and speed) and video card.

Modern graphics card leads me to believe that the video drivers are at fault here. What card do you have?

Personally, I believe it would be a great shame to archive the forums so that nobody would be able to continue to contribute to the old operating system. Those projects have given the 9x series a whole new lease of life. I am astounded at how much they have accomplished. The minimum posts idea would benefit the 9x forums greatly, in my opinion. At least that service pack plus guy wouldn't go on a spamming trip every other day.

A lagging PC could be caused by many things. If it tends to lag when you go on youtube or play games, my bet is on the processor. They are both rather processor-intensive activities.

That is without a doubt a PowerPC Mac. I'm not too sure, but you might be able to use QEMU or something to run 98. It would be incredibly slow however.

This reminds me of the PC vs Mac wars. I've heard the same thing from all of them. "XP sucks, it's got no security". "Vista sucks, it's got DRM, its bloated and it's got no security!". I'm so very sorry to even utter those words, but it's true. This is what it sounds like. This has definitely gone off the topic of why you still use 9x and become "why the hell do you old folks still use such an outdated piece of crap?", as all of the NT users suddenly pop onto this part of the forums to express their hatred of 9x. That doesn't apply to all of you, and some are making legitimate arguments. These folks, I commend. But can I humbly ask that we get back on topic and stop persuading 9x folk that their operating system is a steaming pile of crap. Don't get around it by saying you're just posting it's flaws, because by doing so and telling people that NT is so much better, you are immediately trying to convince 9x users to upgrade. You don't have to spell it out for them. It's all about choice, if they want to use their legacy operating systems, don't stop them and certainly don't bash them. I'm sorry to have to post this, but I'd feel pretty insulted if someone came knocking telling me that XP was a steaming pile of crap. I guess someone from the NT crowd has to stick up for the 9x users.

I agree. All I see here is a bunch of NT users claiming that NT is far better than 9x, and that all 9x users use that because they are stubborn, misinformed or delusional about how well their OS works. I used 98SE from 1999 to around 2007, and I can say with conviction that I had no problems with it, at all. I certainly didn't get hacked, I didn't have viruses. What are these random 3 hour reboots you talk about? I certainly didn't have them, and the primary function of my PC was gaming. I did see the blue screen of death, but very rarely, perhaps once a month at most. Same as my experiences with XP and Vista. One fundamental problem I see here in this thread is that a lot of people are talking about NT and 9x from a techys point of view. What kind of average user would know how to lock down their systems? Let's not take someone dumb, who would install anything from anywhere, but someone who knows a little about internet security and phishing, all that good stuff. If I asked him about group policy, what would he say? What about local security policy? No? Firewall, he probably would understand, but wouldn't know how to install one. Windows NT systems have been made infamous for their remote security breaches. The release of Windows 2000 was plagued by things like Code Red, countless other malwares all targeting 2000. XP could be hacked in, what, a few minutes at one point, with SP1. Now, I must admit that they have cleaned up their acts nicely with SP2, with new security technologies and a basic firewall built-in. What is my point? 9x wasn't susceptible to these online threats. Before anyone complains about security through obscurity, 98 was the dominant operating system of the day. Now, 9x continues on today with no widely publicised remote hacking attempts, without requiring a Service Pack 2. Yes, I understand that Outlook Express and Internet Explorer have been subject to many security issues, but they required running executable code or opening an e-mail, or some such activity. I won't justify those apps, they're horrible. Now understand that I am not bashing NT security today. With proper configuration and patching, NT systems can be just as secure as any 9x system out there. Quite equally, 9x systems have the potential to get hacked -- just not by default. NT systems have a larger, professional set of internet features. It's a tradeoff between security and functionality. And yes, I am very well aware how easy it is to double click an executable on 9x and have your computer teeming with crap. With admin access, you could do that to any version of Windows. That's how it works, easy third party application support. Thank you for reading, and NT users, please don't take this as me bashing you. If it's misinformed, do inform me.

It does work, I have used it before successfully. However, barely any drivers are actually on the Windows Update site, and the ones that are have an unusual ability to break your PC. For example, some SiS drivers that could be installed with that wizard broke my drivers. My modem installed perfectly from there though.

Upon installing 95C, a box will pop up at the end informing you that "Windows needs more information to continue setting up your computer". Simply cancelling this wizard will stop it (and a load more unnecessary junk, Realplayer anyone?) from installing.

I'll have to go with what a lot of people seem to be saying, "Chrome OS" sounds very much like a cloud OS. We have all heard in the tech news how people envision the future of computing. A lot of the time, the subject of "the cloud" comes up. Now, Google are a huge internet presence, if anybody has the potential (or the will) to create an entirely internet based OS, then it's them. They already have cloud applications such as Google Apps gaining momentum in the market. Now, what if these apps became tied to the OS, just as we have heard in the news? No longer would you need massive hard drives to store your data, because it is all stored online at Google's servers. You wouldn't need a particularly fast processor, not a huge amount of RAM, just an internet connection. Low power machines, heard that before? Netbooks. Linux, as we know, is well capable of running on a netbook. Linux is modular, highly customisable, and has some form of compatibility with certain machines, netbooks in particular. Linux is a fine internet OS (sometimes, don't get me started on wireless support), well suited for the job. It is freely distributed. But I find it really hard to speak positively about a cloud OS, so I shall have to stop there. I'd still rather use Windows XP Home on a netbook any day, I think a lot of people might agree.

Don't tempt me to reply to that statement and cause a Windows vs Linux flamewar! To be honest, I very much doubt that any new operating system that doesn't come bundled with a popular PC will become popular. That is where Windows has the advantage over its competition, with the possible exception of the Mac OS. I'll write more when I have the time...

That would have been accurate several years ago IMO (XP's era). However, I see loads of people even in their 50's and 60's who do much more than that with their computers. Like converting videos to DVDs, editing photos (who doesn't have a digital camera yet?), using GPS tools, sync'ing their iPods and so on. Also, half the tasks you mentioned are only somewhat doable on a P3 if you're willing to use software several versions out of date which most people don't really want to do. As long as the PC has a free PCI slot, it should be able to convert VHS to DVD. Editing photos is a good point which I forgot, but this is still very possible on a P3 for simple (basic, IMO) jobs like rotating, cropping, removing red eye and so on. I had a really early digital camera that came with software to do that. Ooh boy, memories. AA batteries, lost its memory when they ran out or when you switched it off. God they were primitive. Syncing iPods? Another very common thing that I missed. But I have to disagree that you'll have to use outdated software. The latest iTunes does work with xp, as do nearly all legacy machines. I believe there is an older version for 98 that might work with some iPods, but I don't want to go into the Windows 98 area. For photo editing, Windows Live Photo Gallery should do, or manufacturer specific software. GPS software... do you mean Google Earth and that sort of thing? I remember using that on an old 400mhz Celeron running xp but probably was bundled with 98. It was slow, but not unusable. That's not to say I would actually be prepared to use one of these old machines as my primary computer, not any more. What I want to say is that while computers are certainly far faster, and have a ton more functionality, a lot of this functionality is either not very well accepted yet, is unheard of, or is only useful to enthusiasts or people who have a fair bit of money to spend. A lot of this technology is certainly up and coming. Technology has not stagnated, it is not and will not stand still. You can find innovations everywhere. It's just that the PC has matured, and such improvements and features take their time to make headway in the mainstream market.

It will work only on the version of Windows NT that it was built for. Very basically, it IS Windows NT. 9x and prior have their own kernel. Because it is the kernel, it will not run as a user-mode app.

The NTOSKRNL is the very core that runs Windows Vista. It cannot be run from Windows, that's what the message means. There is no way to force it to run, because it is NOT an application. To recreate a blue screen, follow this guide: http://www.lockergnome.com/oztech/2007/12/...to-blue-screen/ I do not recommend this, as this could cause data loss and/or other problems. Use at your own risk.

Your definition of basic stuff and someone else's obviously differs quite a bit... All this says is that you don't do much with your PC, don't care about things taking a while, and don't mind doing it with software several versions out of date. Honestly, it just sounds like you're stuck in another decade, and are somehow trying to convince yourself that barely anything's changed since then. I have to disagree with this point. I define basic stuff as word processing, casual gaming (solitaire, flash games), web browsing (youtube, facebook, and general viewing), instant messaging and downloading files. All of this can be done with a Pentium 3 running an older OS such as Windows 98 without difficulty. All this can and is done regularly with new dual core machines running Vista. In fact, they are the primary uses of a desktop system. Anything more extreme than that is NOT general use IMO. I agree with most of your other points though. The biggest selling point of the new wave of processors is not how many cores they have or clock speed, it is other new developments.

XP has a native DOS Prompt too. It's pretty compatible. Have you ever tried it? What what what? I really must ask where you got that information from. All the DOS apps that worked perfectly for me in Windows 98 and Me and, of course, pure DOS, never work in XP and beyond. Except for edit.com, I suppose. I don't see how you can say that. The commands are certainly the same, but it still doesn't make the DOS apps (probably what the original poster is getting at) work. If you mean the command prompt then yes, I suppose it is. But that isn't DOS, it's the NT command prompt. I also agree that we shouldn't have operating systems that take up the whole of your hard drive. They're excessively big these days. 98 and Me don't seem to have that problem.

Personally, I have always gone for NVIDIA for graphics. The performance is excellent and although ATI make better hardware, they don't seem to make better drivers yet which tends to show. (although they may have improved lately, I have heard) I have a GeForce 9600GT and I can say that it is an excellent card, well worth the money I paid for it. However, as the poster above has said, your memory is a bottleneck. Even playing games like Half-Life 2 can get fairly laggy with such little RAM. Also, may I suggest you upgrade to XP service pack 3, I have noticed great speed improvements with it. If you can't for whatever reason, it doesn't matter too much though.

I believe Windows 95 did not have support for the WDM driver standard (which your drivers most likely use). May I suggest using 98lite to remove IE and the IE shell from Windows 98, so that you can continue using your drivers. Should speed up boot times significantly.

Can I just quickly ask, do you have an external hard drive or some other form of removable storage plugged in on boot? I have found that vista freezes up for about 30 seconds on boot when I have mine plugged in. You can usually hit the power button and turn off the external HDD, or simply pull the USB cable out.

That's the problem with OEMs, they pack their computers full of junk half of the time. I got a Toshiba laptop a while back with Norton Antivirus 2003, and more unknown software than you could shake a stick at. What does the Toshiba Zooming Utility do? Please tell me. I'd recommend that you start with Programs and Features (type that in the search box in the start menu). That's the new name for Add/Remove Programs. Have a poke around and see what you do and don't need. Also, use msconfig (again, type it in the search box in the start menu) to remove unnecessary startup applications. Perhaps you could post a list of what msconfig has in the startup tab, and I can see what can and can't be removed. Removing Windows Vista features? Might want to try "Turn Windows features on or off" in Programs and Features, but I can't promise much there.

What you see there is AVG. The browser is quite irrelevant, I have checked it and I see the same message, and I have asked multiple people, all with different browsers and configurations. Google really is broken. The most amusing is typing "Google" into Google. But then again, as the IT crowd teaches us, typing Google into Google will break the internet.