jaclaz

NO need of having Internet Explorer (or any other particular program) open. As long as the PC is ON, there is a working internet connection and Automatic Updates are set correctly the updates will be downloaded alright. There is also no need of being logged in. Consider how a number of automatically delivered updates when installed may need to reboot the PC, so it is - generically speaking - not advisable to leave open programs as they may /they shoudl not, but they still may) either prevent the shutdown and reboot or lose unsaved data. jaclaz

Good , then leave that d@mn ship cruising alone, the sea, the wind or some deity will decide on its destiny. ... but he completely failed at it, more or less openly calling them all a bunch of brainless/mindless jerks. Seemingly not that much "calm and reasonable". IMHO a given amount of bickering (as we - Noel and myself - often manage to put up ) may well be OK, since by now we know each other and there is (I hope reciprocal ) respect, and in a friendly place/environment like MSFN, it can even be - besides fun - constructive but being "aggressive" as you suggest with those guys over there seems like being leading to nowhere anyway. jaclaz

Well, I would rather attempt "cracking" the Macro password (if possible) and see what is in the actual macro. If it is a "simple", "default" password protection, the good ol' DPB= to DPx= hexedit/replacement: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/272503/how-do-i-remove-the-password-from-a-vba-project http://superuser.com/questions/807926/how-to-bypass-the-vba-project-password-from-excel works for both Excel and Word VBA projects. jaclaz

What I find fascinating is understanding WHY (the heck) you actually want to talk to them and/or trying to convince them of anything, or rather WHY you insist so much on this. At the end of the day you appear as an anti-fan-boy with the same obstinacy and insistence the fan-boys show. I mean, I understand attempting to explain to them the truth once , it's OK twice , but from the third time onwards it seems to me like bordering obsessiveness. After all they have their own (wrong, but thanks to freedom legitimate) opinions, they gather in their own club and talk their nonsense between them, what is the reason why you go there and try over and over to gatecrash their little parties? And why do you come back here posting links to the discussions there where you exercised your increased by exercise rhetoric skills? You cannot help an alcoholic untill he/she actually wants to be helped, and in the case of the good guys at Channel9 it is by now evident that they don't want to be helped. jaclaz

That could be a nice explanation of the data Trip gathered, but that would mean that on a same machine (with SSE2 as hardware) a "same" Chrome browser Flash engine (as an example) makes a request to the OS and depending on the OS the same "call" is routed/translated to a set of SSE2 instructions in 8.1 and later and is routed/translated to more conventional instructions on Windows 7? It may well be but it sounds "queer" to me. Of course much more experimental data are needed to have anything of real value, I would have expected that more recent/better optimized drivers/sybsystems could have transferred some more work to the GPU relieving the CPU of some calculations, thus making the GPU slightly hotter and the CPU slightly less hot or viceversa, i.e. the "sum" of the heat produced to be more or less the same. jaclaz

In my experience Terabyte Image is a good program, and more generally the good Terabyte programs know where their towel is. The 8.3 Gb partition is the recovery partition, and it will never change "automatically", it corresponds loosely to the install CD/DVD that you were NOT given. Besides making an image of it (once) if the specific OEM provided a way to create some form of bootable recovery/install media you could create it. That recovery partition - depending on the OEM and the mechanism used - may when used lead to a "clean, standard" install or to a "factory restore" but in any case it's contents are more or less "carved in stone". The Partition 2 is what the good MS guys, contrary to logic and to everyone else call "system" partition (which contains "boot files"). The contents will also never change, with the exception of the \boot\BCD (which is the boot configuration files), all the rest in it are files that may be updated when (say) a Service Pack of a MS patch is applied to the System, but that can normally be recreated fine by running the BCDBOOT program, and you can always boot your system, even without that partition or with that partition wiped by using a "Vista boot floppy", i.e. basically a bootable device containing just the BOOTMGR and the \boot\BCD (which can be created on a USB stick or CD/DVD), which could be a good idea to create and keep just in case. Usually in Windows 7 that partition is 100 Mb in size, so it is possible that it contains additionally a WinRE.wim that would be the Windows Recovery Environment, a small WinPE that may be useful in some cases. Even if a WinRE is present, it won't ever be changed if not manually by you. So a logical backup strategy is: make an image (better 2) of Partition 1, store it/them safely and you will never need to backup it again make an image (better 2) of Partition 2, store it/them safely and you will never need to backup it again UNLESS you change your boot settings (using BCDEDIT or a similar BCD editing tool), in which case you will better have an updated backup make regularly an image (or backup) of partition 3 jaclaz

Hmmm. The reduction in temperature of Windows 8.1 and 10 (CPU) are impressive while the video GPU seems like the same or too little to be meaningful... jaclaz

Well, we actually trust you , no real need of those senselessly large images to provide the actual data: jaclaz

Yep, on the other hand another couple questions is more preoccupying to me: Has MIcrosoft in any way shown such a high reliability in the last few years of automagical patches to justify its adoption - no questions asked - by IT managers? Does the vast majority of IT managers actually trust and fully rely on MS automagical patches mechanisms? Please consider that those same IT managers are likely to be the same ones that manage documents related to your money, identity, SSN, properties, taxes and what not. This is really scary. jaclaz

Well, NO, you seemingly have learned nothing (or at least nothing of the advice that I gave, which BTW you are perfectly free to completely ignore). If you create the partition in Windows 7 (or in the WinPE which is the "thing" used in the setup on the Install DVD) UNLESS you correct alignment values in the Registry you will have a NON VALID partitioning scheme for Windows 98 (which does not mean that it won't work, only that it is NOT what was suggested, and that it is likely, before or later, to cause issues). Windows 98 should be installed on a partition that is PROPERLY CHS aligned. Making a Windows 98 System partition 127 Gb in size, while doable, is NOT smart. https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/kb/192322 a cluster size of 32 Kb is "huge", and slack on a system volume is likely to be 20% or more: http://www.pcguide.com/ref/hdd/file/partFAT32-c.html http://www.pcguide.com/ref/hdd/file/partSlack-c.html jaclaz

Yep , but that would be still "logical" ("wrong" but understandable or "consequential"), here the point is "most don't use it, so we'll continue doing it as before BUT make it available only to a lesser number of people". I would say that the cost (and trouble) is in putting together these info, not in distributing them, and the "trend" is preoccupying, as said before we risk to go into a "democratic" design of the OS, and (also because of the lack on transparency in the process) as an example we don't actually know if (as I personally believe) the whole "feedback" on the technical preview is a huge fake and the good MS guys will do whatever they see fit disregarding each and every report, opinion or suggestion or actually the vast majority are demented users that nowadays only use the PC on a touch enabled device for sending and receiving (lousy) e-mails, a little internet browsing, and some Twitter and Facebook nonsense. jaclaz

OT, but not much, read here: http://blogs.technet.com/b/msrc/archive/2015/01/08/evolving-advance-notification-service-ans-in-2015.aspx I would understand if they decided to stop ANS altogether (that would be coherent with the "evil plan") but continuing producing the information, only distributing it to less people (speaking of electronic documents) makes really really little sense. However the news are that set apart the end customers that are moving to Cloud (and continuous update) it is the lazyness of large corporation IT managers that "wait for Update Tuesday, or take no action, allowing updates to occur automatically" that is to be blamed for this nonsensical change, see also: http://www.zdnet.com/article/microsofts-advance-security-notification-service-no-longer-publicly-available/ No more Patch Tuesday, no more a way to know in advance what will be continuously delivered.... jaclaz

What you report seems like an issue in the "engine" than in the "database", however you can try (I am presuming that this would work on 8.1 as well) to format/re-initialize the database: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/kb/230738 jaclaz

Ok, I think I will bite . #1 there is not one reason in the world to use a third party bootmanager (unless one needs/wants a multiboot system) #2 particularly there is NO REASON and it is actually STRONGLY DISCOURAGED to use third party, non-standard "hacks" to have more than 4 primary partitions #3 as a matter of fact you can multiboot *any* MS OS (and BTW *any* Linux) with just one, single, primary partition and everything else on logical volumes inside extended #4 Remember that Windows 98 is limited to FAT32 and that it is NOT REASONABLE to have large clusters when using an OS that uses a large number of small files, a more than adequate partition size for the system volume of a Windows 9x install is within the 8 Gb size or if you prefer within the 4 Kb cluster size, 8 Kb or 16 Kb are still acceptable, but anything larger makes little sense (while it may be OK for "storage" volumes) #5 When using "retro OS", unless you really know where your towel is, you should ALWAYS use ONLY the tools that were available at the time and setup the OS within the limits it had at the time, as you never know what a "crazy" install will result in when you use some of the OS built-in commands. jaclaz

I cannot remember if there is any incompatibility between the standard FDISK of Win98 and large disk drives. If I get this right, when you boot from CD the only hard disk connected is the 250 Gb one, correct? If this is the case, at the A: prompt type: FDISK /STATUS and then try: FDISK /FPRMT (this latter should "jump over" Step 2). Do you have a USB stick that you can use as bootable device? Or can you burn another CD? The way out could be to create a UBCD, boot from it and then use from it either Ranish Partition Manager or the FreeDOS FDISK: https://www.ultimatebootcd.com/ jaclaz

The FDISK may well (for any reason) not work from the CD, but it is simply impossible that you cannot create under a normally running OS a suitable partition. What you probably fell into is that Windows 7 by default will create partitions with Megabyte alignment whilst Windows 98 will most probably need Cylinder/Head aligned ones. Though it is possible to "force" Windows 7 diskpart to create partiton(s) with the right offset, see here: http://www.911cd.net/forums//index.php?showtopic=21186 it is better to understand why FDISK from the Windows CD does not work for you. What do you mean by "does not work"? What (exactly) happens when you attempt using FDISK from the booted CD? What differences you have from these: http://www.wikihow.com/Use-the-Fdisk-Tool-and-the-Format-Tool-to-Partition-a-Hard-Drive Personally I wouldn't even THINK of installing a Windows 9x on a partition crossing the LBA28 limit (roughly 128 Gb), though I doubt that it may be part of the source of the other issues you reported. jaclaz

I would be interested to know what exactly it may help for. The OP has posted a (seemingly extremely complex ) non working VBS script, with a very vague description of the intended goal, but that seemingly has nothing connected with geolocalization. It seems more like a lookup table (involving an Access database ) to use a specific route through a given firewall/connection, while the referenced Javascript is a (poor) script to show the provenance of the visitor on a web page, making use of a third-party resource that needs registration of the domain making use of the (now obsolete) service: http://dev.maxmind.com/geoip/legacy/javascript/ @cldaha01 Your posts miss the "Standard Litany": http://homepage.ntlworld.com/jonathan.deboynepollard/FGA/problem-report-standard-litany.html and - maybe - you are risking to slip on a chocolate covered banana: http://homepage.ntlworld.com/jonathan.deboynepollard/FGA/put-down-the-chocolate-covered-banana.html Please post a description of your environment, what is your actual GOAL, etc., etc. this way willing helping member are more likely to suggest a valid solution or at least point you in the right direction. jaclaz

I wouldn't be so sure to attribute the success to Windows 98 alone, but rather to NOT opening that file with some version of MS Word. The Wordpad ".doc converter" most likely strips off anything that is not text and its formatting. If you prefer, if you open that .doc file on a NT family OS with - say - OpenOffice, LibreOffice or Atlantis, very likely the whatever is in them won't be triggered as well, as it is seemingly a WORD macro: https://www.microsoft.com/security/portal/threat/encyclopedia/Entry.aspx?Name=TrojanDownloader:W97M/Adnel#tab=2 It is entirely possible that even when opened by Word the macro won't run on 9x systems, but from what you report the macro has never been executed, it simply crashed the converter. jaclaz

A WinPE is NOT a "replacement for a full OS" and has not "users". You are System. That's all. BTW WinPE means *nothing* today, depending on the "source OS" (or WAIK/ADK) you have a given version of WinPE: https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dn293271.aspx jaclaz

This should not happen. If you run CMD.EXE, no matter how you launch it, it should remain an open command prompt/window. jaclaz

Yep , the Geforce 210 is certainly not a "fast" card, but often these kind of issues are withing the driver, though if the OP cannot afford the time to do the "right thing" , surely proposing him to loose HOURS (and I mean it) to try several sets of older (or newer) drivers is not an option. jaclaz

http://plugable.com/drivers/renesas jaclaz

Ideally the good MS guys could adopt the acronym (paying a fee to me for its use of course ) changing the meaning of it from the original Nameless Crappy Interface to (say): New Custom Interface <- two lies as it is not new nor custom oriented or customizable or Naturally Confusing Interface <- more correct, but maybe counterproductive or possibly Neoteric Cloud-oriented Ideal[1] and get rid of the senseless naming or misnaming.... jaclaz [1] Ideal in the perverted minds of the MS executives that pushed and push for it, Nadella's Clear Inadequacy would also come to mind...

You are welcome . The good MS guys have a long tradition of keeping previous OS specific settings without documenting them and use deceiving error messages, and on the other hand the good guys that write programs often use some settings without really knowing all the consequences (mainly because the good MS guys never documented them properly), since this behaviour appears to be a not-so-common one my bet is on some third party tool setting those keys, possibly in order to increase the security of the PC. jaclaz

Hmmm I am not so sure that this can be correlated to "efficiency", in the sense that a given hardware and OS may be more efficient through being able to do more (or more complex) operations in a given time which would lead to increased produced heat. All in all the proposed test is IMHO a nice one but maybe linking it's results to "efficiency" directly is not entirely accurate. jaclaz