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SeeAScot

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  1. I have been using a similar procedure for years - going back to win 3.1. However, rather than creating an image file, I merely use two HDDs, and copy the partition I am working on to the second HDD for backup, repeating as necessary at each waypoint in the install, (ie installed Windows and add drivers- backup, few more programs - works so far, recopy partition to the backup drive, etc etc.) I started with Partition Magic and then went to Partition Commander when it first came out. I will admit to cheating a bit, all my drives are SCSI, and my systems always have two drives, so I can put the swap file on the second one for greater speed (putting a swap file on a different partition of the SAME drive will probably slow things down), plus a third in a removable cartridge. As the SCSI ID numbers are changeable from the front of the cartridge, I can swap a drive between drive 0 and drive 2, just by changing the SCSI ID number with a switch. This means I can work on installing a new OS from scratch on a different drive from that of the OS(s) I am currently using is on, change the SCSI ID number, and be back on the drive with my working OS. 'Sides 15k rpm SCSI beasts make the SATA Raptors look SLOW! Tip. Many of us have drives which were replaced because they were too small to hold our OSs and all the data we have as well. While these drives are too small for daily use, they can be used to install a new OS. After the new OS has been installed and is working satisfactorily, you can then copy the partition to the main HDD in your computer, allowing the install of a new OS while not disturbing your working OS. Of course to do either of these, you have to have organized your HDD into at least two partitions, one for your OS and applications and one for everything else, or you have to have two HDDs so organized. A side advantage is that after you have copied the partition and it has become your working OS, you can merely put the small drive which has a copy of the finalized version of the OS on the shelf. Then should you get some sort of virus or have other ugly things happen which trash your OS, you can merely recopy the partition from the drive which is on the shelf - and viruses aren't real good at traversing a six foot or better air gap Total time necessary to repair a completely trashed C: drive, < a half hour!
  2. I've always just download the redistributable and installed it over whatever version of DirectX I had. The last version of DirectX which worked on Windows 98 and ME is directx_dec2005_redist.exe which is actually the Dec 2006 version. Because of the way I Install things I do not remember if it extracts to a folder which creates a cab folder as well or if it just installs without any indication of a cab folder.
  3. SeeAScot

    98lite

    You ONLY need a copy of Windows 95 if you ar going to install the "MICRO" version of 98Lite, you do not need it for the Sleek, Chubby and Bloated versions (I always used the Chubby version as even the "Sleek" version seemed a bit to minimalist for me), and you only need Windows ME if you want to replace Win98SE dlls with ME dlls, or are planning on using 98SE2ME. Therefore you only need to have a licensed copy of Windows 98SE and a license for Windows ME OR Windows 95, as trying to use the Windows 95 shell to slim down Windows 98 AND using 98SE2ME seems to me to be trying to go in two opposite directions at the same time.
  4. I have noticed several people requesting support for specific camera models. Tip: My sister and I are both published photographers, and at present, have eight cameras between us which we use on occasion, plus a few others on the shelf we no longer use, but used at one time. As the more drivers you have the larger your reg file, I have never installed camera specific drivers, but just used a card reader to move the images from the camera to the computer. Even folks who have only one camera, will be likely to have a different one at some time in the future, necessitating ANOTHER driver be installed - If you just use a card reader, you will not have to install anything, no matter what camera you, or your friend, took the picture with. In addition, if you carry a card reader with your camera, you can generally transfer pictures to almost any computer using anything later than 98SE, OR 98SE if the person who owns the computer has installed this excellent package.
  5. Addendium I just remembered HOW I got an SD card to format as Fat16. I put it in my camera and used the camera's format function to format the SD card, then I put it in the USB SD adapter. Most cameras can't read Fat32 if they don't have the capacity for the newer HD HC cards. IIRC, even if they DO have the capacity to read the HD HC cards, they will still format SD cards <2Gb as Fat16 for backwards compatibility with older cameras.
  6. Is IE 6.0sp1 required just during the install? Will it work after I have installed all the upgrades/patches and then used 98Lite to remove IE and WMP?
  7. I use a SD card adapter which acts as a flash drive and is not much larger than the usual flash drives. I have been able to format < 2Gb drives as Fat16. I have two flavors of this device, a USB 1.1 standard device for which I have 98SE drivers and a USB 2.0 device which will also take the new SD HC format which allows over 2Gb cards. Unfortunately, there were no 98SE drivers issued for it. Of course > 2Gb flash drives HAVE to be formatted Fat32. FYI, the Flash manufacturers were making > 2Gb SD cards before the HC standard was implemented. If you can find a > 2Gb SD card which is NOT HC compliant, you may be able to get it to work in some devices which were only designed to take flash cards made to the original SD specs, allowing you to use a 4Gb card in them. IIRC there were no SD cards larger than 4Gb made to the non-HC specs. These are gradually disappearing from the supply chain, and even a couple months ago, I had to work to find some. The main reason I upgraded to XP was to achieve better compatibility with current USB devices, especially drives. The main reason I am downgrading as many of my computers as possible to 98SE is XP is truly Windows EXtra Problems.
  8. thydreamwalker Thanks for the heads up regarding possible file corruption between 98SE and XP. I have been moving files back and forth between both systems since I first installed XP in mid 2006, and have had no problem, but I expect that is because when I am installing drivers and patches and such from a USB drive, it is a USB drive onto which I have copied my "upgrade" partition, a 20Gb partition which holds all the drivers and patches I have downloaded for everything I have ever had since the days of DOS and Win3.1 - a driver for a Number Nine Imagine ISA card? I still have such! Never erase anything! The other method I use is to create an extended partition on a clean drive and then copy the "upgrade" partition into it Consequently, since the problem appears to only occur when files are moved individually, instead of moving the whole folder or copying the whole drive with Partition Commander, I appear to have unknowingly avoided the problem! I recently added a removable 2.5" IDE cartridge drive to my desktop so I can copy the desktop partitions to my notebook drives. Funny, but it is the first IDE drive I have ever had in a desktop - went straight from the old XT/AT MFM drives to SCSI - Still got a 5 1/4" 80Mb SCSI around on the shelf somewhere - don't know what I'd use it for as I don't own any boats!
  9. Logging in 30+ Times???? Whenever I create a new instillation of an OS, I download all the necessary updates and patches to my HDD using another system and then copy them to the HDD on the system I am installing the new OS on - or to a flash drive connected to the system I am installing the New OS on. The notebook only connects to the internet IF I have a catatastrophic failure of my desktop machine (one which I can't fix in 24 hours or less) or we get hit with another hurricane or two like we did in '04, and I loose power for a few days. Take into account that I have a spare MB, CPU, Memory, Power supply, video and audio cards, SCSI card, and a complete HDD with a backup of my currently OS already on it as it is currently being used, checked out and ready to either copied (Catastrophic failure was caused by a major problem with the OS installation) or replaced (Catastrophic failure was caused by HDD locking up solid), effectively a complete backup computer minus the case, a catastrophic failure I can't fix in less then 24 hours has to be pretty obscure! As we did not get the full size notebooks (we only had the sub-notebooks) until 2005, the notebook I am installing a fresh copy of 98SE on has never been allowed to talk to the internet. Is this internet connection only required for WUPG98en or does AP require an internet connection also Do you have to install MDIE6CU to fix security problems in other areas of 98SE not related to IE, WMP, or Outlook? Having to install upgrades to IE to fix things in other areas of 98SE, before being able to removing IE would be aggravating. I never have let a computer connect to the internet until I had used 98Lite to remove IE.
  10. Help! I discovered MGDx's awesome page back in 2006, and investigated installing 98SE2ME, but in investigating the requirement to install all the necessary patches first I got lost in the sheer volume of information and, got no further than purchasing a copy of Windows ME towards perfermoring the installation. I had been reading threads mentioning autopatcher, and thought it was some sort of thing which contracted mMicrosoft and automagically performed updates. Fortunately, this appears to be a wrong impression. I still have the original problem though. Microsoft has so completely integrated things like IE, WMP, etc into windows I cannot determine what fixeses I need and which I should avoid. I normally install 98SE (without Outlook), then I install any software which requires the existance of IE to install, and then I use 98Lite to remove IE, WMP, (as I have just finished a major install of XP and have not worked with installing a fresh installation of 98SE, I am not sure which of the following which I have to remove in XP, I merely have to not install in 98SE - Windows Update, .NET framework, ActiveX, Net Meeting) but I have none of them in 98SE. I certainly have no DRM, if something requires DRM, I don't find a need to view/play it bad enough to install such a monstrocity! I certainly will not install Movie Maker and if I saw such running around on one of my computers I would probably treat it with three rounds of .45. According to MGDx WMP9 should be installed to cure security issues even if you use another Media Player, but is this true if you have REMOVED WMP? Does AP automatically patch things like IE, WMP etc which have been removed? Should I Install 98SE, SP2.1 (or 3.0 Beta 3, if it is stable enough), and then install AP before removing IE and WMP with 98 Lite? I am running a A22M Thinkpad as a dual boot machine, but will be installing 98SE on a blank, freshly partitioned HDD with nothing else on it. Once I get it stable, and add the rest of the software, the final installation will be backed up on a third HDD. A fourth HDD will have the backup of the currently used "C:" partition, but I will always have the original 98SE installe with no software, and the 98SE installed the way it was fresh, which enables me to reinstall Windows with all the applications in about 15 min to a half hour. You have to do a fresh install of Windows about every year or year and a half, just to get rid of all the garbage it collects.
  11. I wouldn't call a drive partitioning program "rarely used"! Although I use Partition Commander instead of Partition Magic, I would be totally lost with neither of them, for I back up my "C;/" drive by merely copying the "C:" partition to another drive. As I only back up the C drive when I have changed something significant, this is something which is not necessary to do very often. I DO use Partition Commander much more frequently to do major backups of my data drives. All my and my sister's computers are essentially duplicates of each other except for the "C:" drives, and even those are close to duplicates in regards to types, IE the desktops are identical machines, the notebooks are identical machines, the sub-notebooks are identical machines, and there are back-up machines of each type as well. How frequently I copy the data partitions depends on how much data I have added to the drives in a given period of time. All my data is also on USB HDD drives, some of them have copies of the computer partitions, and some are merely one big single partition. While I do the major backups of the data partitions by using Partition Commander, more frequent backups are made on the USB HDDs by syncing the already copied partition with the main drive using a program called freeCommander which is a portable windows Explorer alternative. http://www.freecommander.com/ It runs on both 98SE and XP. FreeCommander is a member of a new class of software which I discovered a couple years ago called Portable Applications. These are applications do not need to be installed and can be run from a thumb drive or even a CD. I use the type of thumb drives which are merely a holder for SD Flash cards, since if I am traveling and run out of space on the camera, I can merely remove the SD card from the thumb drive and use it in the camera. As all these programs are backed up elsewhere, the only disadvantage to wiping the card is that I will be unable to get my e-mail or use any of the other software in a foreign computer for the remainder of the trip. The programs are placed on the SD card in the thumb drive so that I have all my essential software on a drive where I can use it in any computer I come across, for instance, I can browse the web or get my e-mail on any computer I have access to without leaving any traces of this activity on the computer I am using. Links to Portable Applications: PortableApps - http://portableapps.com/apps The Portable Freeware Collection - http://www.portablefreeware.com/ and the article 100 Portable Apps for your USB stick at http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/portable-software-usb/ If it is the software I bought the PC for it would be AutoCAD, the existence of which caused me to buy my first IBM PC XT Clone in 1986. Blindingly fast it ran at all of 4.77MHz! This is software I use so frequently and consider so essential it is on the flash drives as well. All this software runs on both Windows 98SE and Windows XP, as I try to avoid software which does not run on both OS. These are also the main programs I use on the desktop and notebook computers for these purposes. PlanMaker Office 2006 (before I found this I was using the Portable version of OpenOffice) Portable Firefox Portable Thunderbird EditPad Lite - A NotePad alternative which allows multiple files to be opened in tabs. http://www.editpadpro.com/editpadlite.html progeCAD LT 2006 - an AutoCAD clone which can read and write AutoCAD files up through AutoCAD 2004. I believe this is the last version of progeCAD which runs on Windows 98SE. Personal Ancestral File (paf) allows me to read all the genealogical data my sister has collected over the past 40 years FastStone Image Viewer at http://www.faststone.org It has enough photo editing features to make most people happy, although I am a published photographer and use more extensive stand alone photo editors for photo editing. They also have a screen capture program which I have on my computers but which I do not consider essential enough to put on the Flash drives. PhotoBrush from MediaChance at http://www.mediachance.com/ is my main Photo Editor. IMHO it is the best stand alone (no Photo Album features) Photo Editor I have come across. It is relatively small at 30Mb but will still do things like compensate for the curvature (pincusion and barrel distortion) innate to the more extreme wide angle and telephoto lenses as well as MUCH other esoteric stuff. It has more common features as well, like red-eye removal, color correction and exposure adjustment. Runs on both 98SE and XP. It is also fairly easy to use. In regard to Photo Album or photo organizing software - I do NOT use it! Reason - if you use image organizing software you are then tied to a organizing file format specific to that program. What happens if ten years from now that software is discontinued? You will probably not be able to convert the format to the format used by a different Photo Album program, and will have to convert it manually, if you can do it at all. Photographers and software people are entirely opposite in viewpoint. Software folks tend to think of something being 'obsolete' in a half decade or so, photographers tend to think in terms of images which will last 100 years or better. I had a partial database of my library which contained several hundred books, which I could not convert from the database format used by the Commodore 64 to the database formats used in the PC. Having to manually re-enter the information for several hundred books, from the title pages, make a lasting impression sufficient to guarantee that one will never use computers in a manner where this will happen again! Instead of using Photo Album software, I use the normal Windows folders and file system. I create a folder with the year preceded by either my or my sisters first initial (example X2008) under that folder I make additional folders as necessary with the folder starting with the date in YYYYMMDD format, padding the month and days with preceding zeros to make two character fields. This is followed by a underline and a keyword denoting the event, for instance a SiFi Convention which took place on the day after Thanksgiving might have it's base folder 20081128_SiFi Under that folder is another folder for the original files from the camera. These files are NEVER modified in any manner, not even by renaming. Any editing is done on files copied into the next higher level folder, ie a photo in \20081128_SiFi\Neg would be copied to \20081128_SiFi\ before doing any editing I can find any of the approximately 25,000 photos we have taken in the past five years or so using this method, and I could still do so if I was running a similar program under Linux or even some operating system which does not exist now but is being used in 2030 or such. I wish I could find older photos taken on film cameras so easily! The remainder of the 2 or 4 Gb SD card is filled with all my data - except for the photos as they take up about 40Gb. I have a USB Portable Media player with a large HDD for these. This can be plugged into a foreign computer along with the USB Flash drive, and is small enough to carry in a large pocket. As I do not do video and have an MP3 player, I do consider it necessary to put those types of applications on the Flash drive, but I am told a good Portable video player is VLC Media Player, I have it on all the computers, but rarely use it. Audacity is a good portable audio editor. It will probably end up on the flash drive eventually when I get through this cycle of more important things and have time to go back to doing music things.
  12. Office software: Microsoft Office 2000. Reason: Does not require authentication upon installation. I have Office 2K Full Premium SR1 installed on all my win-98 systems. Isn't that implying violation of EULAs? Office XP's activation is no problem if you use the software within the EULA, and if you want to all-out pirate, there's ways around it. I have serious problems with product activation! In fact when Microsoft originally started talking about tying the OS to the HDD I remember thinking "What id*** would tie software to the most often replaced piece of hardware in a computer?" I swap HDDs in and out like most people use flash drives. All our (myself and my sister's) desktop machines have at least one removable HDD which can mechanically be turned on or off, one has two although in that machine the second one is a 2.5" IDE drive so I can copy partitions between the desktop and the notebooks. With the SCSI drives, I can change the boot drive from one the main one in the computer to the one in the removable cartridge merely by switching the SCSI ID number using a switch on the front of the cartridge. This is the only method I know of which allows you to make sure your the backup of your OS will work. Every other method requires some sort of restore function, which wipes out the original installation to use the backup, so you cannot have both a working installation and a backup which has been run to ensure it is working. I have also found that a HDD sitting on the shelf will not become infested with viruses or spyware, as it seems that most cannot traverse a 6 foot or better air gap. I back up my system by coping the drives onto another drive and putting it on the shelf. I have had CR-Rs which were unreadable in 3 months, or unreadable on a different CD-R drive and tape is a joke. All this Microsoft ET Phone home technology which tries to tie itself to a specific HDD doesn't like HDDs being used like that. In fact, if you have a machine with two HDDs and you swap them making the original drive 0 drive 1 and vice versa, XP considers it as having installed two new hDDs! For our two desktop machines, I have a spare CPU, MB, memory, video card, sound card, modem, and power supply. If you do not do this and need a new motherboard or etc., you will have to reinstall windows, as you will never be able to find two or three year old hardware without a lot of effort. Then a major hardware failure becomes a several day problem instead of a couple hour problem. Windows Product activation doesn't like this. In fact, if your MB dies and you don't have a backup, you will have to buy a new MB, which will mean a new CPU and new memory, which will probably make Microsoft consider it a new machine and require a new copy of Windows! I do not know, as I have taken careful pains to avoid being in a situation where I would find out, if XP considered a card moved from one PCI slot to a different one to be a "new" device. I upgraded to XP when Windows Vista came out, for I never upgrade to a version of a Microsoft OS until the last version of it is available - Who can forget Windows Me or DOS 4.0, which was so bad that what should have been DOS 4.1 was released as DOS 5.0? I needed 4 copies. I purchased the enterprise edition which did not have Product Activation. The minimum purchase was five seats, so I bought one more copy of XP than I needed. It is still unused, but I effectively paid an extra $200 for a copy I did not need to AVOID product activation. I will not buy anything which ties itself to a specific piece of hardware, user name, e-mail address, real address, or anything else which might change unexpectedly. I do not trust Microsoft enough to believe that if they can cause users OSs to become disfunctional, they will not choose to arbitrarily do this. What happens when the support cycle for windows XP ends, will they disable the product activation or disable the OS so you have to by a more recent version? More than half of the computers I have are running no longer supported OSs, and my PIM has not been supported for over a decade. If you look at how product activation is supposed to work, you will realize that Microsoft cannot tell if a copy of Windows is legitimate, as they claim that the product key is not transmitted to them, but hashed with other numbers from the hardware. The numbers pertaining to hardware, with the exception of OEM versions preinstalled on a machine, have nothing to do with the validity of a copy of Windows. Since you can easily find a pirated version of almost any software merely by Googling the name of the software and adding a couple keywords, sometimes even being able to get a pirated version before the legitimate version is released, it does not eliminate piracy or even slow it down real much. Piracy is defined as using software without paying for it. Is it not just as much piracy to pay for something and then be unable to use it? If software was sold, rather than licensed so that you do not have the legal protections you have regarding things you own, Microsoft would have been out of business long ago, found guilty of multiple counts of fraud! Microsoft's earlier policy of licensing their OS by the number of computers delivered rather than the number of computers delivered with a Microsoft OS on them effectively forced people who wanted a different OS to pay for a copy of the Microsoft OS without ever receiving it - reverse piracy anyone? What does product activation actually do? Well in 2000 or 2001, Microsoft prohibited OEMs from including a copy of Windows with new PCs, so if you had a HDD failure you had to buy a new copy of Windows. Product activation is merely a more elegant method of accomplishing the same thing. You can buy an new low end computer with Windows Vista installed for $199.95. If your hard drive then crashes you will have to buy a copy of Windows Vista retail for $199.95 plus a new hard drive. This is more than the original computer costs, so an intelligent person will just buy a new computer and trash the old one. As only folks living in major metropolitan areas have access to means of recycling electronics devices, and there is little market for a used computer with no hard drive and no OS, it will probably become landfill. So the Microsoft ET phone home technology does little to prevent piracy but is good at increasing landfill. Friends don't let friends use computers which automatically talk to Microsoft!
  13. There is a version of SoftMaker Office, Softmaker Office 2006 which is available as freeware. It only includes a word processor (TextMaker 2006) and a spreadsheet (PlanMaker 2006). It is only 40Mb total and blindingly fast to load. I also have OpenOffice 2.4, in case I need to use other office applications, but it is huge, 270Mb and the only thing I need it for generally is to run PowerPoint files.
  14. The HP Laserjet 6P works with everything from DOS to XP. Been running a refurb one since 1998 or 1999 The HP Laserjet 1012 works with 98SE and XP. Replaced my sisters 1012 with a older refurbished 6P as the 6P is more durable and will handle card stock. The HP Photosmart 2610 All-In-One works with 98SE and XP The HP Photosmart 375 (370 series) 4" x 6" printer works with 98SE and XP The HP Photosmart 475 (470 series) 5" x 7" printer works with 98SE and XP The Photosmart 2610, 375 & 475 all use the same series of ink cartridges. The Epson Stylus Photo 785EPX works with 98SEand XP The Epson Stylus Photo R260 works with 98SE and XP The Epson Stylus Photo R1800 13" x 19" printer works with 98SE and XP I believe the Stylus Photo R260 and R1800 are the last Epson photo printers with drivers for 98SE The UMax Asrtra 2200 Scanner works with 98SE and has both USB and SCSI connections. The Plustek OpticPro64+ Scanner works with 98SE and XP The Plustek OpticFilm 7200 Scanner for 35mm slides works with 98SE and XP
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