Jolaes

I am having the same issue as Prowler had: EXTRAC32.DLL is linked to missing export CABINET.DLL: 24 Prowler, how did you solve this issue? Or anybody else, please help!

...or if that fails, perhaps you can manually install the driver first (simply right click on the correct INF file, choose "add to registry" or "Install". Then if you reattach the device, hardware wizard might find the driver already registered. This sometimes can help with 3rd party drivers or drivers not specifically written for the device yet working well (based on the same chip family)

Eventually, when all old hardware bite the dust, emulation will remain as the only option. Dosbox CVS/SVN builds are pretty much beefed up these days; support multicore CPUs, Voodoo 1 emulation, D3D / OpenGLide output... you name it. Some people run Win95 in Dosbox, too. I tried Taewoong's build in combination with nGilde 0.95. It works really well with a lot of Dos Glide games. Taewoong's page nGlide

I did not mean proof for reason of the issue itself... English is not my native tongue either and was in a hurry. I corrected the post.

I can confirm what duffy98 said (my own and many other people's experience). On a hunch, it happens 90% of all times because of "delayed start" applications like certain browser addons / plugins, firewalls, antivirus programs etc. A longer response time is completely normal for these under true win32 systems (w2k, XP etc.) but w9x Message Server gets crazy on encountering them. Running Zonealarm and a few Firefox plugins I learned to be patient when w9x boots into GUI, take my time when surfing the net (wait a little after the browser starts) etc. Proof Other people also found the "be patient" method effective: http://www.pcuser.com.au/pcuser/hs2.nsf/lookup+1/05F3B90BE3992523CA256FBA002EBFCC

The Win98 FE serial will not work. You will need a working Win98 SE key. With Win98SE being EOL more than 6 yrs I do not think there is a way to retrieve you original if you lost it, nor getting a replacement. That is why you can download MS Win9x legacy updates without the usual validation. Legally questionable but ethically not (as you HAVE a legit copy all right), you can either get someone else's unused serial and do not use win9x for any business (was not the plan was it) OR buy an old retail copy of Win98SE for a few bucks.

Listen to jaclaz. After switching the CD burner and reinstalling the OS this is more than likely a software problem. I suggest switching to Process Explorer and Advanced Task Manager in order to pin down the resource hog. (Your screenshots do not show how much free memory you have when burning, how much your CPU is stressed, and if you have buffer underruns... You might have constant ongoing error correction at hardware level (in the burner) which is not successful. Even if you cannot monitor this, a longer-than-usual burning of the same source material can be a warning for that. So check if your hard drives and optical drives are operating in their optimal UDMA mode. (Check BIOS if you have made changes before, and verify in Win98 as well.) Vanilla Nero, even an older one such as v5.5 installs unnecessary codecs and stuff. You might not need those. But its memory footprint roughly is on par with that of a recent ImgBurn release. Your decision. If you only write audio discs, advanced functions like high precision RAW writing (to make 1:1 copy of certain copy protected material) are not that important. Burning the ISO will only have significant advantage if you used compressed source material (MP3, Ogg etc) before and wrote those ON THE FLY to CD-DA track.

As far as I know, boards designed for Intel Atoms are a no go for Win9x. Even motherboards that are TWO generations older than yours can be problematic, might run Win9x but at a great price (no UDMA support for hdds, missing drivers for onboard audio, LAN etc..) IMHO you must pin down exactly WHAT you need to run on this small PC in the first place - can you sacrifice functionality for speed or vice versa... ? Is it going to be a win9x only or a dual boot system??? If you want a 100% supported motherboard (with original or hacked drivers, does not matter) then you are upper-limited to Intel 875 boards, up to Prescott processors. Certain Core 2 Duo boards (from Asrock for example) might also be considered but then with their AGI support you can use a selected few AGP cards only. I dont know much about the AMD route but that seems to end with Socket 939 motherboards... Boards that support the Athlon x2 4800+ and the equivalent (premium) FX line... Socket AM2 boards and above seem to have problems as well. If you do not have a basic, working chipset driver at least, you can forget about installing win9x. Read the very 1st sticky: HTH

My experience is the same. Neither AVG nor Kaspersky found anything, not even suspicious sequences. I think V-Buster's heuristics scan is too strong and it cannot be loosened. But it will not delete suspicious files right away, so it is not a destructive program. On a sidenote, I found that AVG reported a handful of "corrupted" Win98SE system files, most of them are from 98SSE2ME (Millenium). They are not infected, of course. But AVG recognised that these are not original Win98SE files so put them in quarantine

Many of those comments on Win98 reveal ignorance, false prejudice and the general misconcept that newer means faster & better. MDGx at least told those guys the truth but that won't change their opinion. I am especially careful not to bring such quick judgement since I got to know people who still use their Amigas for web browsing on daily basis . Somehow their computers never gets infested with trojans and spyware... Strange, really strange. Still, it is a fact that Win98 is still here after 12 years. XP may also live that long (even after its official EOL) but Windows Phone 7...? Who will even remember it in 12 yrs? But then again, it is an OS for devices that age 3 times as fast as PCs...

I have just downloaded, updated online and run a "quick" scan on system files (root / Windows /Program Files dir, boot sector, memory) just for fun... I recall using V-Buster along with McAfee products back in the late 80s, early 90s. This scan (on all files, not just executables) took cca 35 minutes A fast 32bit engine would be nice. Found a worm and a few trojans, need to check these against AVG and Kaspersky on XP.

If your computer is otherwise rock-stable with XP and you can rule out hardware failures (all voltages, all I/O test readouts are OK, Orthos, Prime95 etc. can run at least for 2 hrs) then try to find out what the problem is on Win98SE. If vanilla Win98SE works perfectly then most likely (one of) the upgrades cause(s) the problem. Install one package at a time starting with the one with the oldest files. Maybe it is easier for you to do it this way: 1. install WIN98SE + all drivers 2. TEST. IF OK then make a backup 3. install Uo SP2 or SP3 beta 4 4. TEST. IF OK make a backup 5. install selected upgrades from MDGx's site. (btw he is not the author of Uo Service Packs). Be careful here, many of them have specific prerequisites AND cannot be installed with certain upgrades already present. 6. TEST. IF OK make a backup 7. install 98SE2ME. (This is not only a vanilla ME transplant any more, it contains patched/upgraded ME system files as well.) 8. TEST... you know the rest 9. install KernelEx

After uninstalling KernelEx 4.5 RC5 my registry files (system.dat and user.dat) got deleted. Not corrupted but erased, so Windows could not load. Fortunately, I could restore a recent backup and then installed 4.5 Final. Have I missed something important here concerning proper install / uninstall...?

ad 1 Try Advanced Task Manager (ATM) and Process Explorer. ad 2 Definitely. You can find many patches and fixes on MDGX's site that are more recent, more stable etc than SP2 so eventually 85% of Unofficial SP2 files will be replaced by newer ones. IMHO this means that one can safely skip SP2 entirely. 982ME and KernelEx are what you need on a faster system like a P4 or A64. Keep in mind what LoneCrusader said; having more RAM than cca 1 GB and "large" HDDs (above cca 125 GB) mean that need to install other fixes. For RAM, you can go up to cca 1.25 GB with a free solution, anything above that calls for RLoew's Ram Limitation patch. For large HDDs and onboard SATA controllers without Win98 drivers, you will need RLoew's TBPLUS package. ad 3 Not in the scope of these forums I am afraid, but there are some games which cannot run optimally (or worse, wont run at all) on any other Windows than Win95 / Win98 because they are hardwired to certain 9x specific files (WinG32, ancient Quicktime codecs, video card drivers etc.) For example, Warhammer 4k Chaos Gate was such a game. You should visit other -gaming- sites as well, although there might be people around here who can give you hints, too.

You have a point here, I was wrong, I thought that some simple "copy the .ax and .dll files and register them" method will work but it definitely will not. Real media is now a "player bundle", surgically inseparable from the codec. As for VLC, I also tried overwriting core library files of v1.0.3 with v1.1.x but it results in crashes, clearly the older players do not recognize the new dlls However, I had no problems with v.1.0.3, it was stable (mostly playing H264 720p videos in MKV, FLVs, high res XVID in AVI)

I think for the majority of us '98ers it is enough to install an older, win9x compy ffdshow, then, let's say, ffdshow rev3507 as update on top (need KernelEx w2k comp. mode at this step) then Media Player Classic 6.4.9.1 build 107 (KernelEx also needed because it is a unicode version) and if something is still missing (like those fancy-but-utter-crap new Real codecs) add them manually...

Thanks for the clarification and hints. So even if I eventually manage to install a recent DX9c package, MPC HC would only work in overlay output mode On a Win 98SE2ME system, MPC 6.4.9.1 (unicode) build 107 works with KernelEx. The last DirectX 9c 2008. dec(?) package that was released for Win ME can be installed on top of Direcx9c 2006 versions as well. This is the farthest one can get, I guess...

Hi All, having a recent build of Media Player Classic HomeCinema installed, I found it impossible to set the video output to VMR7 and VMR9 renderer, as MPC HC needs the latest DirectX redistributable package for that. 2010 June DirectX package cannot be installed because it checks (well, tries to check) its MS Certificate and it fails. With KernelEx set to XP SP2 mode, the installer starts and stops at the Certificate check. Under XP and above, running Cryptographic Services might solve the issue, but this of course is impossible on Win9x. The Certificate in question is faulty / missing as well, so MS advised some ppl to hack one of the dlls (dsetup32.dll) to inactivate the check. However, I cannot find exaclty how to do that. Anyone in the know please give specific advice what to do with "dsetup32.dll". Or direct me to the right MS topic. Many thanks in advance.

That order is OK as well. If you don't have working proprietary drivers for your USB device then install the nUSB patch. Generally, the more patches, fixes you install, the more wise it is to make backups of the last well working configuration. Keep in mind that there are overlaps among the different user-made packages and fixes, so it might happen that you install a fix that changes/reverts core system files and it does solve problems for one application, but makes another inoperable. Installing only what you REALLY need will spare you some headache. I did this the last time, works so far: 1. 98SE (Rloew's Ram limitation patch after 1st reboot) 2. chipset drivers (IDE, SouthBridge, SATA, AGP) + Rloew's Terabyte Plus package 3. Audio card drivers 4. video card drivers 5. IE6 SP1 + unoff. fixes 6. unoff. Service Pack 7. 98SE TO ME 8. DirectX 9 9. onboard USB 10. onboard LAN 11. KernelEx 12. applications, games

Hello, the order is OK as far as I know, but stay on the safe side and dont create large FAT32 partitions ( bigger than cca 120 GB). This way older disk utils will still work under Win9x.

I had no luck with installing ANY recent version of Media Player Classic Home Cinema between versions 2371 and 2714. I get errors like: "...the MPC-HC.EXE file is linked to missing export SHLWAPI.DLL." and "the MPC-HC.EXE file is linked to missing export KERNEL32.DLL:HeapQueryInformation" So, what ELSE is necessary, along with KernelEx to make it work ???

If it helps, I have been using RLoew's Ram Limitation Patch for a few months on a computer based on nforce3 chipset with Opteron 170 CPU, 2 GiB RAM and a GF 7900GT video card. OPsys is Win98SE2ME. It is rock stable, no matter what cache and swap sizes I set (within sensible limits, of course). More importantly, I am also using KernelEx and applications designed for W2K and XP, and these work flawlessly with the Patch. I cannot tell the same about using the standalone IO.SYS patch by XRayer. Many of my apps and games were running unstable, that's exactly why I decided to buy the patch, a decision I did not regret. Y.m.m.v., but with a more complex (ie. multitasking) Win9X system the Patch is the better solution. A little off topic, but if your system also contains large HDDs, SATA drives on integrated controller etc. and you want to play safe, the TBPLUS package from the same author may also prove indispensible. Well it did for me. Regards J.

Hello Multibooter, for my simple purposes it is enough to have the mail client on one system so, fortunately, Thunderbird on W98 will do fine J.

Hi MDGx, thanks for the tips ! I think there should be a separate "modern browsing" sticky or something like that, where all stuff concerning moderns browsers (w/o KernelEx), Java, Javascript, Flash etc. could be redirected as these questions rise again and again when a new version comes out. The sticky would need frequent updates, of course. IMHO these days it is much more important to know the COMBINATION of patches and fixes + the right version of software that work TOGETHER on WIN9X than knowing what is the last version of software that worked on good old vanilla WIN9X... J.

Interesting. Maybe it is because there are different Java packages with the same version. I tried to install one (maybe 1.6.04) downloaded from the Sun site and it failed. Then I downloaded the "same" from FileHippo, that installed without problems. This file was different in size. It clearly used an earlier installer integrated. Also, I think one must examine the manual install method for Java (command line switches etc.), there are reportedly faulty or picky packages which cannot be installed on some systems. I had some luck with another version, there the trick was to extract the package under XP, then do some command line wizardry for a forced setup, then adding a few entries to the registry and voila it worked. You might say that is too much hassle...