Foxbat

Wow, thanks for all the responses. The Win9x community is still as active as ever! That's a lot of info to look over. Only as a last resort. Years ago, I got into the habit of powering off the surge protector when closing out for the night or prior to leaving to keep all the connected electronics from wasting power. Good habits are hard to break. Thanks for the script. I will try it when I have the chance. For the modified drivers, I could not get 98 to accept the inf. It doesn't see it, and always go back to the generic driver. When I went to change custom resolutions, that option is not there anymore after switching to the Dell. I guess I can't change it with this monitor. That's all the time I have for now. Life's getting busy again, so I will have to spread this out over time.

MSI GeForce GTX 970. Too recent, not gonna work. My 98 system doesn't have PCIe. VBEMP provides no harware acceleration. I need the system to be fully functional with nothing nerfed, otherwise, it would defeat the purpose of using 98. 1. I couldn't get my modified drivers to work. 2. Haven't had much luck in messing with custom resolutions in the past. I'll give it another go this time around. 3. The next alternative monitor that fits my specs start in the $1000 range, so I bought the $500 Dell monitor. It has to be one single monitor to share with 98 and 7. In order to meet the requirements of my line of work, I had to get rid of my beloved CRT and deal with some pet peeves of an LCD. Works well with 7, but not optimal for 98. It's either one or the other. Can't have both--everything's a compromise.

Checked Win7 with DVI. No problem there.

Win98SE is using a GeForce4 Ti 4200, which only has VGA and DVI connections. DVI is the only choice here.

Thanks for the ideas. Every little bit helps. I haven't had any success in getting the system to recognize the modifed inf. It probably wouldn't do much anyway since Windows is already aware that a Dell U2413 is connected, and recognized its native resolution without the drivers. There's a possiblity that it could be somewhat EDID related since I am not connected via VGA, but instead of the OS, it could be the monitor not getting the return signal. The U2413 is completely digital and does not include VGA or DVI-A connections. Win98SE is connected via DVI-D, Win7 via Display Port, and changed via an input selector. I've done some more testing, and found what could be a possible explanation why the problem occurs. If I boot up Win98SE system first, the floating mouse behavior appears on the monitor. If I later boot up the Win7 system and switch input to it, Win7 inherits the problem, and remains that way. However, if I boot Win7 first, there is no floating mouse problem, and if I later boot up and switch to the Win98SE system, it stays problem free there too. Note that power must be completely cut to the monitor at the surge protector in order for this to work (a monitor cold boot if you will), otherwise, the monitor will remember the inherited problem from a previous Win98SE boot and keep it that way. I think the monitor is not receiving the proper communication from Win98SE on DVI, and thus, it operates in some form of compatibility mode. When Win7 sends the proper signal to the monitor from a monitor cold boot, everyting is all fine and dandy if I switch over to Win98SE. However, booting up another system if I only want to use 98 is just silly. While this is not a solution, maybe it can lead to one.

I called Dell tech support. They searched through their knowledge base and haven't found anything related to this. All they could come up with was some kind of compatibility problem between the OS and monitor. Due a lack of data for this monitor and Win98SE, they couldn't pin it on anything else. All that's left to do is to try and see if I could modify the drivers to work with Win98SE, if I can get it work at all. I am using the monitor on Windows 7 without any drivers, and it doesn't have that problem.

Installed and tested the ASUS drivers. No improvement on the mouse problem. The drivers were a little bloated, so I went back to the reference drivers. Might have to let this sit for a little bit and come back to it when I have more time.

Thanks for the replies. Checked DxDiag and AGP Texture Acceleration is enabled. I have DirectX 9.0c, Dec. 2006 release. I don't have a spare graphics card available, and there's no integrated graphics on the mobo, so no hardware swapping can be done. My card is an ASUS AGP4X using the reference drivers. I'll try out the ASUS drivers.

After having waited long enough for LCD technology to improve to an acceptable level of performance, I finally upgraded my Win98SE computer's monitor from a CRT to a Dell U2413 professional level IPS. I compared the latency between both monitors side by side, and the LCD lags a bit as expected. However, there was an unexpected weird behavior with the mouse pointer on the LCD. There's the expected slight lag, but moving it around the screen, it appeared to have a floating feeling, as if a smoothing filter was applied to the mouse movement. No such option exist in the mouse settings. Mouse acceleration is off. If I click and drag a window around the screen, the pointer does not exactly follow the window where one would expect the pointer to be. Same thing happens with scrollbars, or dragging anything around which provide an object of reference. I though maybe it was the input lag. I use IPS and TN monitors all the time, at work, in school, and at home. I have a cheap TN that is connected to another computer and an LCD TV connected to my brother's computer. LCD TVs are notorious for terrible input lag, yet there was no floating mouse phenomenon. This only happens on my Win98SE computer with this monitor. To eliminate some factors, production models of the U2413 from the first two years had problems with ghosting and overshoot, which has been resolved in the latest revision, and is unrelated to this problem. The U2413 has a game mode that makes it one of the fastest IPS monitors, making the display lag performance as Class 1 in an in-depth review by TFT Central. Activating game mode doesn't fix it. Tried swapping different mice, optical or laser, high or low DPI, PS/2 or USB, and it's still there. Searching for a solution, I found something that might explain this behavior. According to this condition, the GPU renders the mouse pointer separately from the rest of the screen. It is usually not apparent in CRTs, but sometimes, the floating mouse behavior appears on an LCD. Some users experiencing this issue reported it to be resolved if the hardware acceleration slider is moved one step to the left, while others needed to completely turn it off. I tried it, and it did not help. Anyone recognize this problem? My configuration: PIII 1Ghz Windows 98SE NVIDIA GeForce4 Ti 4200 with 56.64 drivers NUSB 3.6e KernelEx 4.5.2

WDIDLE3 is an unsupported tool released by Western Digital to solve specific issues. It was not meant to be widely used, so it is kept deep within their website and not actively advertised. Yes, the tool does what is says it does. Of course, this tool was a candidate for the process of elimination in troubleshooting my problem: head-parking is not causing it. I am already well aware of the Green drive head-parking issue. The computer silencing enthusiasts community has been talking about this for a number of years. Although the head-parking does cause a few issues, it's the SMART cycle count that is raising eyebrows. It's a case of mass hysteria. People forget that other HDDs also head-park: laptops. Explaining the details would be out of the scope of this thread. Using a service pack would be redundant as I already have the updates.

The motherboard is PCI 2.2 spec. The controller card is also PCI 2.2. Thanks for responding to this thread, dencorso. I am already using Widdle3 v. 1.05.

/s0 with WDIDLE3 doesn't do anything at all. From WDIDLE3 help: Resolution is 0.1 seconds from 8.0 to 12.7 seconds. Resolution is 30 seconds from 30 seconds to 300 seconds. Note, times between 12.8 and 30 seconds will be set to 30 seconds. It looks like valid entries are from 8-12.7 and 30-300. Although some sources report /s0 being used, my guess is /s0 would be for older green drives, while newer drives respond to /d. WDTLER doesn't work on this drive. Thanks for the suggestions, jaclaz. No solution in sight yet, but it was worth a try.

I have a Western Digital Caviar Green 500GB WD5000AADS SATA connected to a SYBA SY-VIA6421-3S1P IDE/SATA/eSATA combo PCI (VIA VT6421A) non-RAID controller card. This particular configuration seems to be causing the system to hang, mainly with larger files about 1GB in size. When the system becomes unresponsive, I could hear the head of the drive continually park and unpark indefinitely every 8 to 10 seconds. Examples of when this happens: while watching a video (freezes at random spots every time, never the same position); benchmarking with RoadKil's Disk Speed (freezes at 8KB blocks and 16 KB blocks, does not happen with Crystal Disk Mark, however); and when performing a binary compare (files are verified to be identical through a different connection). Move and copy operations are unaffected, so I was able to load it up with files. System specs: OS: Windows 98SE (RP9, KernelEx, both are unaffected by this problem) CPU: Intel Pentium III 1GHz Memory: 512MB Motherboard: Intel 82815 Motherboard (28-bit LBA BIOS, IAA installed) HDDs connected to motherboard: Maxtor 200GB IDE (128 GiB in use) Western Digital Caviar Blue 160GB IDE (128 GiB in use) AGP and PCI (no conflicts): Video: nVidia Geforce4 Ti 4200 128MB Audio: Creative Labs Sound Blaster Live! Value USB: Rosewill RC-101 NEC chipset USB2.0 PCI card NIC: LinkSys LNE100TXv5 10/100 Etherfast *** Controller Card: SYBA SY-VIA6421-3S1P non-RAID PCI card (VIA VT6421A) *** HDDs tested and working fine with VIA VT6421A controller card: Western Digital Caviar Black 500GB SATA 6Gb/s (jumpered to 3Gb/s) Western Digital Caviar Blue 500GB SATA 6Gb/s (jumpered to 3Gb/s) Problematic HDD: Western Digital Caviar Green 500GB WD5000AADS-00S9B0 SATA 3Gb/s (not advanced format) (jumpered to 1.5Gb/s) I have been using the controller card for a year with WD Black and Blue SATA HDDs, and it has been running fine, until I started using a WD Green SATA drive. This problem only happens with the Green drive connected to the controller card. It does not happen when connected to a USB to SATA bridge, or connected to another computer. I checked for data corruption; there is none. I've changed ports, and swapped cables with known good ones. I tried it with and without the 1.5Gb/s jumper setting. I've tried smaller partitions without success. The SMART looks as good as it should for a brand new drive. No bad sectors. It passed the WD DLG test. Going further, I examined the major differences that the Green drive had compared to the others. Green drives run at 5200 RPM and have an 8 second head-park feature. RPM is not an issue, but 8 second-head park has been know to cause problems in very limited and specific conditions. As a precaution, I used wdidle3 to disable the head-park just to see if it might alleviate the problem. It did not. Additional testing has shown it to be in good, working order. The only possibility I could come up with is some form of incompatibility with the controller card and Green drives, but I was unable to verify this. Syba support only offered the same basic procedures that I have already performed, unplug this, plug that, etc. In order to eliminate any doubt, I returned the Green drive for a replacement. Once the new drive arrived, it was tested for potential problems. It checks out fine, and when I went to reproduce the problem at hand, the same thing still happens. A month of troubleshooting hasn't brought me any closer to a solution, so I am out of ideas.

You're at it again, Hu$tle. Sometimes, you look at these projects in a negative light. Do you realize how much time and effort was put into it? Xeno could be doing any number of things, but he chose to work for the dwindling 9x community, without any reward to compensate. If you haven't already, I recommend that you volunteer your spare time into projects such as this, or in your school, or even at a local non profit. This can help open your mind to the importance of working together as a community. And if you don't have that kind of time to spare, then you already understand very well why Xeno and others can't work on projects like this indefinitely. Like you, they have their own lives to attend to, and many other important priorities that sometimes WILL get in the way. Instead of looking at what they have done for you lately, please try to see it for what they have already given to the community. If you still feel that they haven't given enough, then there's not much else to say.

You will need to download the update directly from the website yourself. The file can be obtained from this link. http://www.avast.com/en-us/download-update The definitions are updated daily. I have the link bookmarked for easy access. It is unknown how much longer Avast will continue to provide 4.8 updates. Expect support to cease at any moment.

Avast continues to release definitions for 4.8, despite their official announcement of not releasing new definitions after May 2012.

loblo made an awesome set of Opera skins to solve this specific problem a few years ago. See this thread: http://www.msfn.org/board/topic/145272-win-98me-standard-skin-replacement-for-opera-10506070/ Download the appropriate file for your version of Opera. MSIMG32.DLL from Windows ME is not required, but without it, you won't get the most out of these skins.

Have you read the first several posts?

[*Improved and updated with more Q/As*] I think some of the following are very important questions to address (for any package) as I had a few of them in mind when I first browsed MSFN long ago. At that time, I had to find the answers the hard way by reading every post of nearly every thread in the Win9x forum. Remembering what I've read is another story though... Here's something to start off with: Q: What is the Unofficial Windows 98SE Service Pack (U98SESP)? A: The U98SESP is an unofficial update package for Windows 98SE. The project was started in late 2004 [*correction needed?*] originally by Gape to continue where Microsoft left off. Development stalled at around the year 2011 as Gape had to leave the project. Since then, PROBLEMCHYLD has graciously taken up the project, and currently maintains the service pack. It contains all the official Microsoft updates from the former Windows Update website, and hundreds of time-tested, community-created unofficial updates, fixing issues that were never addressed by Microsoft. Q: What does it do? A: The service pack updates your Windows 98SE installation with the latest files, bug fixes, security vulnerability fixes, and stability enhancements. Your system will be much more stable, secure, and with additional functionality which allows Windows 98SE to do things that even Microsoft said was impossible! Q: Do I need it? A: The U98SESP should be installed by all Windows 98SE users, as it contains hundreds of bug fixes, critical security fixes, and stability enhancements. Having a more stable environment is reason enough to update. Advanced users who update their installations manually with the latest updates may not need this, but it can save a lot of time. Q: Are there any incompatibilities/risks involved in installing the U98SESP? A: The U98SESP is time-tested; it has been around for 8 years [*correction needed?*]. As long as the instructions are followed, you will be fine. As with any service pack, even those officially from Microsoft, there is a very small chance that it could conflict with something from your installation of Windows 98SE. It is STRONGLY advised that you BACKUP all valuable data before you proceed. Even if you are just browsing and do not intend to install the service pack, if you have not backed up your data, you should do so as soon as possible. In the event that Windows fails to start or another serious error, you will need your original Windows 98SE and/or system installation discs. Q: Where do I download the U98SESP? A: The link is in the first post of the U98SESP thread: Carefully read the instructions before downloading the file. Q: How do I install the U98SESP? A: Carefully read the instructions from the download site. Once the service pack is downloaded, browse to the location of the file. If the file's extension is ".exe", double click to run it. If the file does not have an extension, add ".exe" (without quotes) and double click to run it. Carefully read the meassage and click yes to continue. Next, check-off the options you want to install. Highlight an option to view its description. Most Windows 98SE users will only need the Main Updates. DO NOT COMPULSIVELY CHECK ALL OPTIONS. If you do not understand what an option is for, you do not need it. Click OK to continue. Once the installation is complete, restart the computer. You may need to restart a second time after Windows loads up. That's it. Windows is now fully updated, and much more stable than it ever was. Q: Which updates should I check-off? A: Highlight an option to view its description. Most Windows 98SE users will only need the Main Updates. DO NOT COMPULSIVELY CHECK ALL OPTIONS. If you do not understand what an option is for, you do not need it. 98lite users should check-off Internet Explorer 5.5 SP2 Core Files. Q: Do I need to download updates from the Windows Update website? A: Microsoft has taken down Windows Update, but it is not necessary to download those updates at all. The U98SESP already includes ALL of the updates from Microsoft. Q: I already downloaded the updates from the Windows Update website when it was functioning. Do I still need the U98SESP? A: Windows Update was horribly obsolete. It did not even contain every official Windows 98SE update that was available. The U98SESP has everything that Windows Update and Microsoft Download has, as well as hundreds of community-created unofficial updates. Q: What if I have problems installing the U98SESP? A: If you run into any problems, you may post in the U98SESP thread: along with information about your computer, hardware, software, the state that it was in before installation, and what you did to get to this point. The active community there will help troubleshoot your installation. Q: Why is there no uninstallation entry for every update installed? A: If you have used Windows Update previously, you will notice that some individual updates can be uninstalled. If the U98SESP would do the same, there will be hundreds of entries cluttering Add/Remove Programs. Q: Is the U98SESP safe to install? A: The U98SESP is time-tested; it has been around for 8 years [*correction needed?*]. All files are thoroughly scrutinized, and must have a beneficial and useful function in order to make it to the service pack. Files are not added simply for the sake of having an updated/newer file. Q: What if my Anti-Virus/Anti-Malware detected a virus in the U98SESP? A: This is a false positive. A false positive is when legitimate files are mistakenly detected as a virus or other form of malware. All Anti-Virus/Anti-Malware programs have false positives. If you are still concerned about the detected false positive, post in the U98SESP thread: Q: Is there a history/changelog? A: The U98SESP has been in development for 8 years [*correction needed?*]. That's way more detail than any changelog can record. There are some changelogs available, but the threads themselves can also serve as a detailed changelog. http://www.htasoft.com/u98sesp/ The Q/As here can be edited/polished up as needed for the final FAQ.

Did you blow smoke up our @$$ or are you really going to update it? So far, no actions from you, and to be honest, I don't think there will ever be Tone it down, Hu$tle. We need more words of encouragement rather than discouragement, please. Our community has already lost many developers. Let's not drive the few who remain away.

Currently, Western Digital's entire line of Green drives are 4KB sectors. Previously, within the Green series, only the larger capacities were 4KB. The transition is beginning to accelerate.

That's strange. It works on my system. jumper, could there be elements in play other than KernelEX that may also affect 10.63 functionality? A statement from Opera regarding 10.63: "Opera 10.63 is a recommended upgrade offering security and stability enhancements". Hmm. 10.63 appears to be a regular release, and not listed as an RC or beta. Edited for grammar

You are correct. Opera 10.63 is THE very last compatible version for unmodified Windows 98SE. Don't worry about 10.66. It raises all sorts of red flags.

My apolgies. I completely forgot that an older Msimg32.dll already exist as I use bat files to do the replacing for me (I must be getting spoiled). I use the updated dll with modified Opera themes.

msimg32.dll fixes the ugly transparency mask problems with graphics and icons. msimg32.dll does not exist by default, so it is not a replacement. All you need to do is copy the file to your system folder. KenerlEx is not needed.