Tommy

I think I've posted about this board before, but I'm not quite sure. But nonetheless, this thing, yeah, thing...is absolutely crazy. It's the ECS NFORCE 570 SLOT-A and it basically does what it wants to. Here's my really big beef with it. Sometimes it boots, other times it doesn't. It turns on, and doesn't do anything at all except spin everything up. This especially happens if I try to put a battery in it. If I have a battery in the board, then basically forget it, it will never actually start to post. I literally have to kill all the power and drain it so that it totally forgets everything in order for it to start up again. And no, even just clearing CMOS with the jumper doesn't work either. The thing has to be drained or else. I've been told before that ECS wasn't the greatest board to go with but now I have it, in fact I've had it for quite a while now. The USB ports don't seem to work because you go to plug in a mouse and nothing happens. You can actually see the little laser try to light up, but that's it. So I think those are shot. Not a big problem since I have an addon USB card I can use. But the booting thing...has anyone ever experienced something like this before?

Its not to late iv bought nothing I haven't really had time to look around much. I could check with my elementary school there slowly fading out xp machines for 7. The school I'm at now is mostly mac(im not a mac fan) with the few windows being laptops. there's an ocasional desktop but from what I see its all built on stuff. We have a bunch of anthalin 2 machines in the wood room getting ruined that were the old enginering pcs. Id live one of those but I don't think they take a student asking for one good. You're lucky. See, my school district switched from PC to Apple Laptops...so most of their PCs are all gone. What they did with them, I don't know. :/

It's probably a bit late now but I'd ask places like schools around in your area if they're getting rid of older computers. Sometimes you're able to harvest some good parts like network cards. I was able to get some decent parts so in case I needed them like if drivers weren't available for what OS I wanted to use or if the board didn't have them integrated at all, then there you go. I don't even have Gigabit Ethernet so if I come across a 10/100, that's good enough for me. Seems like I can come across a lot of those old 3Com Parallel Tasking ones quite easily.

AMD Athlon 64 X2/Intel Core2 Duo are 64-Bit processors and they run Windows 98 just fine.

Plus I would like to change the loading bar on the server version so it's dark grey as well. It seems to me that there was a number inside of NTOSKRNL that dictated which color to use for the loading bar. I thought that blue was 1, but I could be wrong. I know for a fact I saw documentation on it somewhere but I'll be darned if I can remember where. But that's what I can remember is there was a number inside that told it what color to use. Maybe blackwingcat could tell us if he happens to see this thread.

Since this was actually resurrected from the dead, I'm curious on a few things. Are you still using this splash screen to this day? I'd sort of like to make a few tweaks to my splash screen. Did you use Reshack and just use DOS to place NTOSKRNL into system32? Were you able to change the color of the loading bar? BWC changed it to gray on the Pro version but I'd actually like to get the blue one back to be honest and since I don't update it anymore, I'd never lose it. Do you remember how you did these things?

Sorry I didn't choose a motherboard yet. I will try to narrow it down to a few by the end of today. Ill let you know my choices when I decide. My suggestion, go with a board that uses Award BIOS. (Most Gigabytes before UEFI use Award) I've heard that AMI doesn't play nice with Windows 98 and it's not my favorite either. So that's my personal suggestion to you.

I'm not quite sure how 8GBs of RAM would work out. It would probably go as unused at best. Rloew's RAM patch will let you use up to 4GBs and his patch is the bomb, but I need to do a little testing with it and Outlook 2002 which I still haven't had time to do actually ^^; But if you want to use a great quantity of RAM reliably, I'd really invest in his patch. It's only $20 and it's great. I didn't regret purchasing it. But as Submix said/asked...what are the other specs of your hardware? What brand/model video card? Motherboard specs itself? And I agree, virtualization is for *expletive*...using real hardware, especially newer hardware, now that's fun and usually quite rewarding.

Not to embarrass the OP or anything like that, but I think it's just that people like the sound of "Ultimate". Most people don't need "Ultimate" and it includes things that really aren't necessary for the home user but has home and pro things combined plus a few extras as well. It's kind of like buying a Lamborghini to go 3 blocks to work everyday and back. If you wanted Windows 7, I'd save your money unless you're a very hardcore power user that requires active directory domain connectivity, bitlocker, and whatever else Ultimate has built in to it.

Solitaire is still included in the Pro edition of Windows 7, but just turned off by default. I don't really see a reason to upgrade to Windows 7 unless of course you're running programs that absolutely require it. If you're going to do the most basic tasks with your computer, I'd personally just stick with Windows XP. MS Office 2010 will run on XP and the latest version of FireFox does as well (not sure about Chrome anymore). Windows 7 will just slow your machine down. If you want the fancy look of themes, just download the Windows Transformation Pack or something similar of DeviantArt. I'm picky so those wouldn't do for me, but for most other people, they'd work out just fine and make it feel like a different OS. But that's just my two cents.

What program(s) was used to get windows media player 11 partially working on windows 2000? Do you think that same program would work with IE7? Basically KernelEx makes it run and I just modded the Windows Update installer, not the installer most people use to include Windows 2000. But if you're able to install it, you'll see that it is a bit broken.

I think you're going to have a difficult time getting IE to work on Windows 2000. A few others have tried and it just doesn't seem possible. I would even go as far as saying that I wouldn't replace IE6 with it, but have it run as a stand-alone browser since it'd probably upgrade a few system files and possibly break something in explorer. I can vouch that Windows Media Player 11 almost fully works on 2000, with a bit of editing, maybe you could get that to work fully? The only things that don't work right is the album library and the one thing that doesn't work at all is burning disks from WMP.

I haven't run into any issues. I downloaded it and gave it a whirl. It's under 1MB to download I believe. But it does a great job emulating Windows 2000 icons. The one thing that irks me is in Windows Explorer, it doesn't replace the left side bar with the classic version but instead keeps the tasks/places bar. But other than that, it's worth a look at!

The Windows 7/8/10 Fanbois are trying to kill off XP because they think one size fits all. That's why I love MSFN, because even though we're a very diverse community when it comes to OS usage, you're very likely to find a few people here with the knowledge you want and seek. I wonder what those fanbois would think if they knew some of us still used 98 on a daily basis. But if worse ever came to worse, I'd more than likely hop to XP before I'd go up to the Windows NT 6 range, most of those are rubbish OSs to me in my opinion.

Was it a Dell Optiplex GX1xx? I have the GX110 and it can only take up to 512MBs of RAM. If you place a 512 stick in it, I believe either the light on the panel stays amber or it beeps, I can't remember which it is. Those machines are solid as a rock though, that I will say for sure!

Since I really like dealing with older machines, there's something really itching on my mind. Why are so many systems that use PC1xx SDRAM limited to 512MBs of RAM? Since PC133 512MBs exists, why can many motherboards not use this type of RAM or that much? What's actually stopping it from using this much? Is it the BIOS software? Is it because the motherboard runs at 100MHz FSB? Is there actually a way to get around this via a modified BIOS? I'm a bit of a fan of the Vectras and even the latest PIII VL400 can only use 512MBs of RAM and that as far as I know can use 133MHz FSB from the processor. So what's stopping it from using 512MB chips? From what I read since I don't have one of these models in my possession is that it can only use a max of 512MBs via 2x256MB RAM sticks. Does anyone here know more details on this and why it has to be this way? When it comes to internet applications, it's really not processor speed that's your enemy, it's the amount of RAM you have since even a few tabs open can consume close to a gig, depending on what you're looking at. Right now, Palemoon on my main machine is taking up close to 600MBs of RAM, that's more than my Vectra has in its entirety. So, does anyone here actually have experience in this matter? Is there a way to actually fix this or is it more of a hardware limitation than a BIOS limitation? I was able to upgrade my HP Vectra VEi8 BIOS that was modded by Wim's Team to break the 32GB barrier since the computer would hang if you installed a 40GB or larger hard drive but I think that's more of a software thing, so the only reason I bring it up is that it's not impossible to mod this stuff, but is modding something that could be done to overcome this limitation or as I said before, is it really a hardware based limitation?

I'll give that a try too, thanks for the suggestion Drugwash!

I will be more than happy to do that later tomorrow. Do you want me to run the patch as just plain old patchmem without the use of any switches? I will send the test files to you via email when I go through with this as well, it'll be easier to do it that way than over the forums.

The problem is not as noticeable with the /c:128 but if you'd like to perfect the patch I'll be absolutely more than happy to test out anything you want me to with your patch. The machine doesn't have anything on it that I'd die if I lost or anything so I'll test anything you want me to.

I'd love to work with you to test this out. I need to bring it back out and work with it. I took it out due to a few minor glitches but I have a board that could support up to 4GBs of RAM that I'd absolutely love to try this on but I don't have that much RAM available so I'll have to get some and max that sucker out. But if there is anything at all I can help you with on this, please don't hesitate to ask.

So then is this not so much a bug but rather a configuration problem? See, this is the same problem I was having on my machine with 2GBs of RAM and so I didn't know what exactly was going on there.

Alright, so here's what is happening. I installed the RAM patch using that particular function and it seems to work better. I have the RP9 package installed so when I do CTRL+ALT+DEL, I can see the stats on the task manager. So I did that quite often and it went down to 0% for virtual memory for a few brief seconds while the machine connected and updated cached files. I connect to Gmail via IMAP if that also helps as in what I'm doing here. But once Outlook finishes downloading, it seems to go back to normal without even having to close Outlook. Now whether this will happen with more emails or larger emails with attachments, I don't know. But since I love to know more, can you explain what this switch does differently than either no switch at all or the /M switch?

Okay, so a simple patchmem installation doesn't seem to kill virtual memory quite as badly as the /M function, but it does still take it down enough to where it can cause issues (around 7-13% VM left). Once Outlook 2002 is closed, it returns to normal.

I did uninstall the patch and the problem went away, that's how I confirmed this problem. I will test this method soon tonight and post back very soon!