JustinStacey.x

My Antivirus is Common Sense Personal Edition - I wrote it myself, and it's available for $9.99 via mail order.

Microsoft Word 5.5 for DOS - the EXE is hosted on Microsoft's servers free for the taking. Get it now before it's no longer available! http://www.downloadsquad.com/2005/11/25/free-file/ Runs in a Windows NTVDM Command Prompt.

Thanks you two for clarifying. I believe you now. What is with that resolution though, BenoitRen? How do you get any work done?

-smh-

They did that for a reason... I can't remember what it was but if they were telling the truth it was a rather fundamental reason.

I also had the same 'discussion' with BenoitRen in another thread about removing the CD-ROM and it allegedly not installing IE 4. I have heard very different; that IE 4 is silently installed *during* setup and that the Explorer interface in 95C is the one that comes bundled with IE 4. BenoitRen may well be right, but I've never seen any proof of what he says about the removing the CD so I remain skeptical.

If I were going to do this on the laptop that I mentioned, I'd just wipe the disk and put a small DOS partition on first and then XP on the NTFS or FAT32 partition. Since the DOS partition would be at the beginning of the disk and wouldn't see the other partition I reckon it would be fine... there is nothing on the computer at the moment anyway except a rail simulator which can be easily backed up. My 486 did have a hard drive, 502MB one I think, but it's knackered now, sitting with two other hard drives in the corner of the room. If the HD worked I would seriously consider keeping this project to the 486 given it has 16MB of RAM as well. The only downer is it has no sound card, so that PC Speaker driver is all I'd have. I doubt it's fast enough to run Quake or Duke Nukem either, and I think even DooM pushes it right to the top end. It's a decent machine but nothing like the old 486 I had years ago as a kid which was probably very expensive and considered an 'ultimate gaming machine' or the like. It had sound, a PC card modem, good video, trackpad, interchangeable CD-ROM drive and it ran Duke Nukem and Quake beautifully. I ended up fiddling with it too much in the end though and totally broke its capabilities and when I got a newer one my minimalist parents wouldn't let me keep the 486... unfortunately. They'd die with their leg up if they saw how many computers I keep under my roof now

Thanks folks. I think I will try this tonight on my project laptop, an old Medion which has seen Windows XP, Linux, Windows 2000 and Windows 98. I am not *that* bothered if I don't have sound but it would have been nice. Couple of questions: It has 256MB of RAM, this will be fine won't it - not too much? Also it has a 160GB hard drive - practically new. I was thinking of partitioning it into a small 500MB partition for DOs/Windows 3.1 and then leave the rest in NTFS for XP and my railway simulator. I might actually put Fred Vorck's Windows 2000 on there instead of XP. Who knows; looks like a project to keep me busy for the next few days at least anyway. I wouldn't mind doing this on my 486, but it has no hard drive and only a floppy, so doing things would be a pain in the proverbial.

I highly doubt a new 7-zip would suddenly drop support for Windows 95 and 98. It runs on 95 and 98 now and since it's a free product there's no gain by locking out older OSes. I am sure he'd have it run on Windows 3.1 and older if he could except that would require a lot more work for obvious reasons.

Hello all I have two old computers in my house which are at the moment, sitting as footrests. Neither of them are knackered, and are more than fast enough to run Windows 3.1 (hopefully not too fast though) my only worry is getting the drivers, I would like to have sound and at least 256 colour display. One of the machines is an old AMD 900MHz, I think it's a Duron or a Sempron. It has bagloads of RAM, I could remove some before I put DOS and Windows on there. The other one, a 1500MHz Pentium 4 with 128MB of RAMBUS RAM, again I could remove some. The AMD machine has a SiS chipset and an AC97 audio card, I believe. The Pentium 4 has a similar sound card, an nVidia graphics and the chipset type eludes me. Are there any generic drivers for Windows 3.1 that can give me 256 colours (or higher) and sound? I know this isn't technically the right section to post this in but we don't seem to have any Windows 3.1 forums so excuse me. Thanks in advance.

I do like this thread but it has to be said: You cannot secure an operating system which at its lowest level, the kernel, is inherently insecure. It's bad practise adding piles of addons on top of an insecure foundation and it is one which doesn't really result in computer security but an illusion of such (in actual fact, computer INsecurity). The only Windows OSes which could be considered even partly secure are the NT based ones with a kernel that has security built in, instead of a single user kernel with no perception of ACLs or access control security of any kind - the 9x kernel. Good security can only be built on top of a good, secure kernel; if the kernel is not secure, the system can never be secure. Windows 98 just cannot be realistically secured, it's turd polish, and while I *love* Windows 95 (or 98 with IE ripped out and the 95 shell on top) I won't ever lie and say that it can be made as secure as an NT, 2000, XP or Vista box, because it can't.

Much like the rest of Windows 7 - Vista for idiots - the new taskbar is complete horsecrap, yes.

When you join a network, your computer is assigned an internal private ip address, such as 192.168.0.5. All it takes is someone else on that network (could be the owner of the network or any other troglodyte who has also gained access to the unsecured network) to enter your IP in their Run dialogue box in the form of a UNC Command and they can browse through your computer, on the provision that you have not locked it down which I'm guessing you haven't. And no, 101 anti-hacker and antivirus utilities will NOT protect you against this kind of thing. Have fun broadcasting the contents of your hard drive to the world.

I have Firefox, Opera and Internet Explorer 8 all installed. I like Internet Explorer 8's new address bar feature. Type in a few letters of a URL you've visited before and then press Shift+Enter to go to it. Even better than pressing the down button on the keyboard and then pressing return. The private browsing feature is one that's been in Safari for years, and other browsers are now just ripping off.

I would generally agree with this statement, and maybe more so your whole point about jumping off the "I must get new parts now" bandwagon. I don't think many folks need 3+Ghz QuadCore, 16GB of ram, a terabyte of storage and so on... The only problem is usually the price of new over the price of slightly legacy parts. I had an old 486 that I wanted to use again and the extra 512MB of ram I installed cost more than 2GB of faster ram for my primary pc. Let's not forget about availability of parts as well. Unlike say the hobby car industry where you can get a starter or a pair of custom heads for your 67 Chevy bigblock, the computing industry is figuring out how to force us to buy a complete system when all you may need is a new video card but you can't find a card that will work in your old motherboard. With the advent of the internet you may find old parts that will work but what about the quality, is the old 486 mobo that Joe's Old Parts is selling one that was stable (worked with your cpu) or caused frequent reboots - who knows. I upgrade usually when I don't need to, but I wait for a major price fall before I do and I never bother with the latest and greatest while it is the latest and greatest - I wait until it is good - LOL. Mike You installed 512MB of RAM, in a 486?

It is indeed no secret that Adobe Reader is an enormously bloated program. That's why I opt for leaner alternatives such as Foxit Reader. I have noticed going by your posts that you seem to have a remarkable number of problems using your computer -- have you considered doing a complete rebuild and at the same time perhaps reviewing your computing habits?

WLM will cease to function without IE or any of its related DLL/registry crap.

Downloading an XP ISO from a torrent or anywhere is not illegal; provided you have a valid, unused license key for that type of media. It's the license key and the right to use it you pay for, not the installation media.

Is this an FDV version of Windows 2000 or an nLited one? nLited versions of Windows don't really properly remove IE... they leave a ton of crap in the registry to try and minimize software breakage. FDV's fileset just goes ahead and rips near **** everything out regardless. Personally I haven't used help files in years, the service is disabled on my computer and the option hidden off the Start Menu Edit: Ahh shucks, that's XP isn't it. So how did you remove IE?

Bugger... I'm slipping. Thanks for that Jaclaz.

You're doing what?!

You can't. What you are asking to do is to turn a multi-user system with integrated security right down to the kernel, into a single user system with no security whatsoever. It just can't be done; and attempting to do it will either render your system unusable or so insecure that it won't even be worth connecting it to the Internet. And even then, you won't be able to alter the behaviour of the kernel itself to behave in a manner that you are after. What I'm really curious to know, is why you would want to do this.

Well, I can see you lot were just as miffed as I was. I fixed it by telling Outlook to always prompt me for a username and password. I have to keep this enabled because when I disable it, Outlook goes back to automatically authenticating as my colleague, for whatever weird reason.

you could try disabling the shell hardware detection service, however I have a feeling that will stop autoplay altogether.

Having thought about it, it probably doesn't do very much if anything to increase security... I just don't see any point in it being there, much like the fact that I have IE set to empty its cache on exit, not to cache encrypted pages at all, and have similar settings in other browsers. I only allow Opera to have a memory cache. I am not sure if I made this clear in my post but I was advocating disabling the above if there are no other machines in the equation. If any untrusted machines found their way into the network then having this service off means they won't be able to browse your machine. If inside a workgroup or a domain, passwording the guest account will allow only those with the password to browse the machine, also. This is one of the great weaknesses of trust relationships between networked computers; and Windows default settings - anyone who can find their way into the internal network can gain that trust unless each machine is secured; trust is bad for security. See above. Obviously, if on a LAN/workgroup, sharing functionalities are needed. If not, and they are unneeded, they should be disabled, as should any other unneeded service. If it's unneeded, ditch it. Principle of least privilege.