Tommy

Interesting, Skype 3.5.0.239 still works under Windows 98. I can make calls and it doesn't force me to upgrade nor does it throw me out of the program.

There was a way to bypass the MSN Messenger upgrade requirement by going into the actual exe file and changing the version number to something later than the particular file in question was. So for example, setting it from 11 to 13, the servers saw it as a newer version than it really was and it continued to work. So perhaps something like this here would work too? I think it was when MS required people to upgrade to the new MSN Live Messenger or whatever it was called. So maybe that could be a workaround???

Oh geez, why aren't I surprised. I'm a pretty heavy coffee drinker and I noticed at times coffee tastes a bit different than it used to. At least the stuff I make at home tastes alright but the stuff I drink at the diner doesn't taste the same as it always was, so this wouldn't surprise me one bit. People always find ways to make an extra buck.

If I was forced to use a newer MS operating system, I would also choose Vista. I like the older Windows Media Player 11 and the fact that it's got more personality in it than Windows 7 does as far as colors go. I think Windows Vista would do alright on a 2009 and newer machine. I think some tried to run it on a machine that was just too slow for it.

How about invasion of privacy, home invasions, and computer brain removals. Whatever happen to the term PC???? Seriously. I believe this is not news. We have tons of fail-safes already. Why try to rally the public to get more. There's a great big difference between breaking into someone's house and stealing one or a few credit card numbers as opposed to just collecting mass amounts of them online in a few seconds. As for your argument about the term PCs, Macs are generally not considered PCs, so why discriminate against them? Invasion of privacy, that's actually a good one. If it wasn't for Facebook or MySpace, how much invasion of privacy would there really be? So maybe you'll have a few immature people look under the bathroom stall while you're taking a dump in a public restroom, but anything you put out online is literally public domain and many are just too stupid to not control themselves and how much they choose to reveal about themselves. If something asks too much about you, then don't sign up for it! Oh, and how about when your information is put online without your permission? But I'm starting to veer way off topic...so please, go on about your business.

I'm using the latest one you have on your site so far, which is 6.3.32.105 but even that is giving me the 'your skype will retire soon' message. The reason I brought this up is I had version 5 something on my machine and it signed me out saying it was too old and would no longer work until I upgraded.

It's this kind of stuff that makes me want to just wash my hands of computer technology all together.

I just dug up an old thread: http://www.msfn.org/board/topic/161614-skype-61-on-windows-2000/page-2 This could possibly get you going for a little while longer. But hopefully discussion will spark again.

Time to dig this up since it affects us Windows 2000 users to a degree. Tomasz86's version works for now...but what do we do after this deadline hits? The newest version will install, but calls cannot be made nor can files be sent since I just tested it out tonight. I don't know how long we have but this is not good news for us.

I loaded both fail-safe and optimized defaults from the BIOS and no difference either way. I believe I'm using IDE mode since I have an IDE hard drive in the machine.

It's an Award BIOS motherboard, so it finishes POSTing and just before it would show the summary screen before handing it off to the hard drive, that's when it just hangs up. I don't even see a summary screen unless I installed the processor after having the Athlon in there as it shows an 'update success' which I'm assuming it's saving the information about the new processor to the CMOS settings. If I press F12 to bring up the boot menu, it will freeze up before the boot menu comes up so I wouldn't see it. I had the F4 BIOS and installed the CPU and when I did, it actually did get to the hard drive saying Windows 'SYSTEM' was corrupted and to perform a repair installation, but it actually wasn't damaged as going back to the Athlon processor, it worked just fine. Something I failed to mention in my earlier post, I have board revision 1.0.

So I managed to get one of these processors from my local computer shop for a pretty good deal. It appears to be a black edition with the number: HDZ955FBK4DGM on it. After tons of reading, it says that this processor is completely compatible with the motherboard once you flash the BIOS to at least revision F5. I have it flashed to F11 and I'm still having problems getting it going. What happens is the processor is completely recognized and it posts fine except for one of the BIOS revisions which actually hung. It gets into the BIOS just fine and I can play around it in, but once POST finishes and control hands off to either the CD drive or Hard drive for booting, I just get a black screen and nothing further happens. The power supply is a 450w but it only has a 4 pin CPU connector. The 6 pin dedicated graphics plug does fit in the port since there is an 8 pin port but I don't want to boot it up not knowing what will happen and I've read it's really not needed anyway. The RAM is DDR2-800MHz and cooling doesn't seem to be an issue as the machine has its own alarm which will activate and ultimately shut the system down. I tried google all afternoon with answers that really don't help me a lot. Does anyone else know what might be going on. I noticed the RAM goes from being in single channel to unganged mode, whatever that means. I don't really want to spend money on upgrading as the Athlon 64 X2 5000+ is sufficient but why this processor is giving me grief, I don't know.

So I acquired a free laptop with one exception, it came with no power charger. I managed to get one and decided that this laptop was not designed with me in mind. It came with Windows XP and I wanted Windows 98 on it. Well, that was a little tricky as the ACPI BIOS was a big problem so I did the setup /p i switch for Win98 installation and so it bypassed all that. So I pretty much have everything going except I'm not happy with the video. I probably will never use it for gaming but just internet stuff however the ATI Radeon IGP 340M/345M drivers are very hard to find. I tried the Omega drivers and at least I have a full color display but from the dxdiag tool, it doesn't look like it'll support 3D. Maybe it will since I haven't tested it but what bugs me is in the 6.2 Catalyst Driver package, there's a Radeon IGP 340 driver but it's not recognized and when I force it's install, when Windows comes back up, the screen is just black. It hangs before it hits the GUI at all. Any insight would be great on this subject! I do have a few things to look into as there are two 256MB memory modules installed and the BIOS itself only sees 192MB so something is definitely wrong.

Hi blackwingcat, I have tried two different wireless network adapters on this machine with the same results. One was a Linksys WRT54g device and now I'm using a Netgear WN111v2 and both have the same issue.

I'm having a bit of an issue that's been very annoying lately. Randomly I'll get a blue screen which reads as error code 0x000000D1 Address B4EBE7DA Base at B4EB7000 and the file in question is tcpip.sys. If I remember correctly, wasn't this file changed in KernelEx? Does this look like it could've been modded by you, BWC?

I have never tried an SSD but I can only imagine how it can fly since there are no moving parts. I shake my head at the 5,400RPM hard drives because NT5+ just cannot operate well on them. I always choose at least 7,200. Even though there are better things, it's the least I recommend for anyone on a budget. Apps to me sounds like something a high school drop out makes. Applications or Programs sounds much more professional. I know it's nitpicky but I feel the word is too slang to be used mainstream. I fixed a Windows 8 computer for my cousin who complained horribly about how it would jump from Metro to desktop all the time. I was able to bring back the start menu and bypass metro. And I'm sure there is a way to bypass it, but the lock screen is just stupid. There is no way having a lock screen you must shove up with your mouse is productive by any means.

I agree, I don't care for Windows NT 6 either. I feel it's laggy and slow. What needs to happen is the entire OS needs to be torn down and built back up from scratch. It feels too overly patched up to me. You can see XP a lot in Vista and even a bit in 7. But what needs to happen is to just completely restart the code from scratch and rebuild Windows. Aero, while it's kind of cool, it slows the OS down way too much. Windows 8 in my opinion is a bit of a joke and their adaption of the word 'apps' *shutters* is ridiculous. No way should a hybrid OS exist. It should either be for a tablet or PC, not both. The fact that a desktop environment and metro environments exists together is quite redundant and unnecessary. Microsoft is trying too hard to be cool in my opinion. Instead, they should go back to the Windows NT 4/ Windows 2000 days when you had an OS that was purely functional and solid in performance. I've had more crashes from NT 6 than the NT 5 series. I personally think Windows 2000 is king but XP isn't too far behind. The fact 3 desktop OSs supersedes it, doesn't mean that it's less than the best. I think Microsoft and possibly others have lost their way on desktop computing, and how many people truly utilize the *rolls eyes* 'cloud' as much as MS tries to say they do? Sure, you have file sharing services and the like but how many people store everything they own online? My bet is mainly the die-hard tech users. Everyday users, probably not much at all. I'll stop now, I've said what I had to. Also, anything utilizing DirectShow I believe it is will suck in Vista/7. I have games that use DirectShow and they either don't work at all, or very very poorly.

Windows 2000 will always be my choice OS. It's secure and FAST as heck.

tomasz86 has been very busy and therefor doesn't frequent much here at the time, so I will try to help. So try explaining to me, what do you do to get Chrome working? What I do that seems to work is download the offline version, not the online version. This will download the full version of Chrome: https://www.google.com/chrome/browser/index.html?standalone=1 Before launching it, fire up your Chrome tool, go down the list by setting the registry compatible and then keeping the tool open, launch the installer. It's silent so you won't notice anything really happening. After it installs, it should give you the option to detect the XP error message, just hit auto and then clean up the registry. It's pretty self explanitory but if you run into any errors, respond back and I'll try to help further if I can.

I agree, I think it's stupid. As for your OS analogy, I gave Windows 7 a fair shot. All it did was crash my web browser numourous times for no reason. Starting the computer up after updates takes forever to get to a logon prompt. It's slower in general. It's not in my book what I would really call reliable. So good old fashion Windows 2000 is back on my machine and I haven't had a single issue yet on things Win7 dropped the ball on all the time. Nintendo however is failing from what I heard and so they're pushing people to get new consoles if they want to continue playing online with friends but honestly, I barely have interest in new game consoles anymore anyway. I don't even know why it is called a console, might just as well call it a computer with a built in controller input.

From what I can tell, IE 8 will NOT run on Windows 2000. Even with using blackwingcat's kernelex updates, it still doesn't have the required ordinals and extensions needed to run. Even if that weren't the case, I doubt it could be installed as it would update the Windows 2000 explorer shell itself. It seems to me I completely broke a Windows 2000 virtual machine install to install even IE7 beta and I couldn't even get into explorer anymore. It might be possible someday down the line with a lot of hard work but with the fact it's not even supported anymore, I doubt it would really make much difference to the standard user. Then again, switched to Windows XP because of that very fact, he needed Internet Explorer 8 for his work or whatever he does. So for him it would be practical but for us, there's Firefox, Pale Moon, Chrome, Iron, Safari, and a bunch of other ones that would work. Also, do NOT mix UURollup with blackwingcat's installers. Despite UURollup using bwc's files, the two aren't compatible. As far as I can remember, you have to use one or the other. I've used UURollup for quite some time but it hasn't been updated in a while with tomasz86 living an extremely busy life, so if you're unlike me who can wait for updates, uninstall UURollup and just go with blackwingcat's KernelEx and Extended Core updates. I haven't tried mixing them but I'm sure it wouldn't be a good idea to do so. I was told by him one time to use one or the other.

They're nuts if they think I'll be participating in such nonsense. But we live in a push push push society now where everything new is pushed onto people and most that don't have a mind to think for themselves just go right along with it. Then again, Obamacare was pushed on the people without anyone even having a chance to vote on it so I won't be surprised if they try to do this too.

A nice site to look at for latest updated versions of common programs is http://www.oldapps.com/ . I prefer http://www.oldversion.com since it seems pretty IE5 friendly so if you don't quite have Windows 98 up to snuff, you can still download stuff easily without much guff, especially if you're looking to grab a version of Firefox right off the bat.

I never like to buy new OEM machines, I prefer to install Windows myself. Wild Tangent does drive me nuts, especially since it wants you to buy their games if I remember correctly. Norton AV is just pure crap in my opinion, you'd be better off with no virus protection than it. I had a Toshiba laptop I was working on for a client and it was so slow and bogged down. I took most of the crap off and it started running a bit better. Talking about XP though, I went to our local computer store and picked up some free XP machines that people wanted to get rid of because they were scared of XP now since it's no longer supported and even he said that it's no worse off now than it was when it was close to new, which I somewhat agree with. As for Windows 7, I have to go out on a limb and say that I think people praise it way more than it deserves. There's nothing wrong with XP as long as you treat it good and you're always better off slipstreaming all your updates and service packs so they're installed when you install XP rather than doing them as separate updates. Heck, I've been using Windows 2000 and I scan my machine regularly with Malwarebytes and very seldom do I find a piece of malware that doesn't belong on the system (something that's not a false positive). Windows 7 most likely has a huge market share now so that's where the attacks are going to be directed at, but then that's just how I feel.

Basically my view on Windows 2000 is it's Windows NT 4.0 on steroids. Now, I've tried out Windows NT 4.0 but have never used it for a main machine but from what I did with it, it was quite fast. I setup the explorer to work slightly more like Windows 98+ by having it open up just one window instead of a new window for each explorer process opened. The one and only complaint I have with using it is there is no address bar. So say I know what directory I want to go to, there's no address bar to type it in at. But then if you want a workaround, you can just use Internet Explorer itself to do that and to my knowledge I think it will work out as long as you have a newer version installed but then again, I could be wrong since I'd skip the explorer enhancements that could be installed with IE4. I've never received a blue screen using WinNT either. The bootup time is a little slow to my experience though, especially if you're like me and you turn the computer on and do something else while it's booting, but that's just because of the OS select menu which can be changed but it set to 30 seconds by default. Honestly though, I don't see the need for Internet Explorer integration in explorer.exe anyway. My personal opinion is that is what made newer OSs a little less stable. It's mainly fixed in XP onwards but I don't remember crashing explorer so easily in Windows NT. But my personal feelings is that if it does everything you need it to, why not use it? As I said once before, if Windows NT were to suit your needs just fine and had no hardware issues...why install Windows 7 or 8? It's like buying a space ship to travel three blocks to the grocery store. It just clutters up hard drive space, requires awesome computers to run well, and would basically be redundant. But then that's how I feel about it. Windows 2000 meets my needs and why originally it was never meant for gaming is beyond me. But that's what I like so that's what I run. I don't need newer. Besides, Windows NT is for real Windows users anyway. Since there's no device manager, you have to basically know what you're doing to install hardware. Now it's so easy that a child could probably do it. But as far as performance goes, it was so fast in general for me that clicking on something in explorer opened up almost instantaneously. As for me, Windows 2000 right at this point does just about everything Windows XP can with a few exceptions so I don't see why I need to run XP at all, especially since I also hate activation even though I'm cut in on a deal that I have access to a volume license copy but it's still the principle of the matter. But heck, if Windows NT would do the things I needed it to do, you're darn right I'd use it. But the fact it doesn't run anything newer than DX3 natively, that's the big deal breaker for me.