loblo

Perhaps your 7600GT card has 512MB of RAM, in which case you probably need the RAM patch by Rudolf Loew (shareware, costs $20), AFAIK nVidia series 7 with 512MB require unnoficial 82.69 drivers + RAM patch. I use a 7950GT 512MB and the only issue I ever had were crashes in certain Java applications using OpenGL which I fixed by downgrading the file nvopengl.dll to the 81.98 version. AGP aperture size in the BIOS matters as well, (even with 82.69 + patch).

As you're probably aware, the name Metro has been ditched since a little while now because of some legal threats from a german retail giant of the same name it would seem. However I find that pic rather interesting as it's a good summary of the whole Windows 8 marketing campain, which seems to consists into piling up as many empty catchphrases and slogans as possible, which are in addition often completely meaningless, what the heck are in motion or authentic supposed to mean here. Pathetic really, as have been Balmer, Sinofsky and other MS reps performance on stage lately.

What's coming next, a yet easier to use keyboard with a clever combination of just two buttons?

Anything ATI up to the X850XT or anything nVidia up to the 6800 Ultra with last official drivers or the 7950 GT 256MB with the unofficial beta drivers. 1GB of RAM shouldn't be a problem for installing WinME. After that you can limit the RAM to 1995MB in system.ini (MaxPhysPage=7CB00 under [386Enh] section) and add another 1GB. If you want to use more RAM than that later and/or use a 512MB graphic card, you'll need the RAM patch by Rudolf Loew.

Latest MplayerWW (r35250) released yesterday also running fine: http://sourceforge.net/projects/mplayer-ww/files/MPlayer_Release/Revision%2035250/

I guess this would make a good splash screen for the installer but then I also guess it may frighten people to the point of not installing the SP altogether.

I've just downloaded 11.33 from FileHippo and, surprise, surprise, it seems to be be running fine (KernelEx in default mode mandatory) but unfortunately all those thread features (and others) aren't available, I guess they are only for NT OSes. It's indeed using dbghelp.dll and I tried it using version 5.1.2600.2180 and 6.2.13.1 of this dll btw.

Shae, I'm not sure what thread features are included in PE v10 or 11, but ATM is rather powerful with regards to threads if you're after an alternative. http://www.simtel.net/product/view/id/12339

I installed the non-portable version yesterday and tested it a bit and everything seems OK here.

I too can't run 10 or 11 properly. If I recall correctly 11 won't run at all and first run of v10 will not fully initialize, hanging in the process list without creating a window and not killable by another utility, launching a second instance of it will run normally however. Not trouble at all with v9. Probably some bad interaction with one or another always on background task I run on my system. There aren't any must have new features in 10 or 11 over 9 anyway if I am not mistaken.

Isn't deleting all the USB keys under HKLM\Enum, which can be done with a batch file using reg.exe or the silent import of a registry file with key deletion entries, enough? That should flush everything out, removing all the junk that accumulates there, and whatever USB device is still plugged on your machine should be redetected and reinstalled automatically on reboot, no?

Latest version (2.8.1) of the superb SoftPerfect Network Protocol Analyzer, which is freeware since recently, runs fine under stock Win98/ME unlike what is stated on their website. Grab it before an update make it actually incompatible like the rest of their utilities. http://www.softperfect.com/products/networksniffer/

Just a word also about online security. A 98/ME box never running IE or outlook is more secure online than any NT based OS up to 8 IMHO.

There is an unofficial 98FE service pack by Erpdude that should cater for all the hotfixes and a bit more, add to that IE6 SP1, DirectX 9c, WMP9 and MDAC 2.8 and you should be more or less set IMO.

You said Win7 is needed nowadays for doing usefull stuff such as browsing the web. Good post and interesting/useful topic apart from that.

Ah, I didn't know that, thanks!

Most of those tools use Microsoft's smartvsd.vxd to fetch smart data on IDE drives and smartvsd will load only if esdi506.pdr is used for handling IDE drives which means they won't work on systems who use the Intel or VIA IDE drivers. AFAIK, of all those tools there is only Astra, SmartUDM and Victoria as well as a russian only application called Dalas which will always work on IDE drives regardless of the IDE driver used but unfortunately even those won't work on any drives I have on my Promise controller (IDE or SATA) and Astra crashes on launch since I have 4GB of RAM.

SmartUDM http://www.sysinfolab.com/files/smartudm.zip Victoria: http://www.x-drivers.com/catalog/benchmarking/hdd_ssd_flash/companies/hdd-911/models/victoria/10903.html

If we drift into discussing alternatives to regedit I can only praise and recommend the awesome Regmagik with its jump to CLSID, jump to path in explorer and export of registry shortcuts, not to mention its excellent search tool, etc... Now shareware but the last free version (3.26.4), which is the one I use, can be found easily.

You can't export reg files from a backed up registry dat file with regedit AFAIK. RegExport is a great free tool and unique in its features. Besides letting you see differences between the live registry in ram with dat files or exporting from dat backups to selectively restore something you can use it to check out if you you've got a rootkit in the startup keys (run, runonce, etc...) for example. I am not aware of an other tool that lets you do that besides its big brother RegDat and I am nearly 100% sure that no other free tool lets you do any of that so it's definitively a must have IMO.

As I understand it in Win 9x/Me Regedit displays 6 top keys which are: HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT HKEY_CURRENT_USER HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE HKEY_USERS HKEY_CURRENT_CONFIG HKEY_DYN_DATA HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT is a virtual key merely duplicating data from HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\CLASSES for the sake of convenience. HKEY_CURRENT_USER is a virtual key duplicating data from HKEY_USERS for the currently logged in user. HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE includes everything that is in the system.dat file (9x) or everything that is in the file system.dat apart from the HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\CLASSES key which is in the file classes.dat (Me). HKEY_USERS includes everything that is in the file user.dat. HKEY_CURRENT_CONFIG is a virtual key duplicating data from a HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Config subkey HKEY_DYN_DATA is a completely volatile key which exist only in RAM during the time of the session and is not duplicated from any other key. And btw, aside from Regdat, Henry Ulbrich also wrote RegExport which is freeware and is a must have utility IMO.

AFAIK the structure/format of the registry database files on disk is different between 9x and NT OSes which is why offline registry editor apps for NT can't open 9x .dat files. One utility which can apparently edit 9x registry dat files is the registered version of Regdat 1.3, however its website has disappeared and I am not sure whether it can be bought anymore and I don't know if it's better, besides being much more user friendly, than this russian editor running in a console which for editing is as limited as an hex editor. Windows ME uses three files for the registry btw.

Joe, if you google WPF you'll find out that 90% of the top results are about the Windows Presentation Foundation graphical subsystem introduced with dotnet 3.0. As for system.core.dll it's a dotnet 3.5 file and you can find it at the following location (navigating the installer with 7-Zip): dotnetfx35SP1.exe\wcu\.\.\.\.\.\dotNetFramework\dotNetFX35\x86\netfx35_x86.exe\vs_setup.cab\FL_System_Core_dll_Gac_24763_x86_ln.3643236F_FC70_11D3_A536_0090278A1BB8

Opera 12.02 (build 1555) running great with plugins here as well (flash, sumatrapdf and cortona vrml tested), thanks for the heads up guys.

Hey, that's great news, loblo. Are you able to give a little more details on the process? Joe. I am not sure what more details I can give about that however I can say that the difficulty lies in determining whether a dotnet app which doesn't start has missing dependencies and which ones as the usual tool, dependency walker isn't useful and that's why I mentioned the Remotesoft .NET Explorer (which runs as a standalone program) as it allows to determine that, although not as straightforwardly as dependency walker does for non dotnet apps.