waltah

#2 is done. By setting new tab pages to Luxxle this largely covers for the fact that SM allows default search engines only if chosen from a small list. #3 remains frustrating: I cannot be the only one using SM with less than perfect vision and as far as I can tell all themes and color scheme customizations give fine gray lines and white icons on a very light background. There may be worse scemes for visibility but it's hard to think what they'd be. However I expect that as SM becomes more popular this will get fixed. Windows and virtually all of the popular Win brwosers over the years had this right: SM (or Chromium's?) new bad idea won't go without an option indefinitely. Unless, of course, I'm still missing something obvious. That could happen. #1 The software you suggest is Win 7 and later I believe. My 'modern' machine (this one) is XP. I can probably do the edits by hand but I'll wait until I'm sure everything is stable. Though come to think of it most other browsers are capable of setting themselves as the default so switching away from SM should be easy if ever needed. Supermium is tops. Thanks for the help! Back to working on Win 98 on a Dell 4600.

Been running Supermium Version 138.0.7204.298 (Official Build) (32-bit) on win XP SP3 on Dell Dimension 4700 3.5 Gb for a week; pretty much 'box stock,' ungoogled. It's all but flawless. I've run most of (all?) the popular browsers for XP at one time or another in the last few years; this is the only one that will reach every site and renders all of them useably. I no longer have trouble with Cloudflare even though my ISP is considered a red light district. I don't do banking online. I have AdBlocker Ultimate and UblockOrigin installed. Performance is perfectly adequate; even the one YouTube I tried was okay. The Mars landscape photo jerked at about 1/4-1/2 second intervals when panned. GeForce GTX 645 card. Twitch and British Gas sites looked okay to me. The 'don't autostart videos' setting does indeed work only sometimes. It takes ten tasks running to see one tab which is -WOW!- but probably makes for better use of limited memory. Overall a stunning piece of work! Three questions/issues: 1. Is there a way to set Luxxle as default browser? As far as I can tell the default browser must be chosen from a very short built-in list. 2. Is there a way to set a URL that opens in each new tab? Even AI flails on trying to answer this question. 3. My eyes are not the best and the three icons at the upper right corner are basically just a gray blur. Either whte on a dark backbround or black on a lighter background would be fine but I cannot find a way to get either one. Or extending the mouseover color change of the 'X' icon would also work. But the other two get lighter which is no help at all No other browser I've used had any of those three issues so it's surprising to see them here. But still a fantastic piece of work. Any help appreciated!

I installed Supermium, Version 138.0.7204.298 (Official Build) (32-bit) on win XP SP3 on Dell Dimension 4700 this AM. All seemed well -- it rendered even a brand new site that MyPal shows as garbage --until I entered an incorrect address and Windows Defender stepped in to protect me. WD? Where'd that come from? I thought it was part of Win 11. One reason I run only obsolete systems is to get away from the Microsoft nanny state. It's continued presence would be a deal breaker as far as daily use is concerned. So: 1. Where did this come from? Is it really part of Supremium? 2. Is there a way to turn it off? I looked at lots of options but ... way too much to comprehend and nothing labeled as 'Windows Defender.' Thanks for any help!

I am sorry, I have no idea how that became a link. I have delete most of it which seems to have gotten rid of that.

As a fanatical MyPal user the first thing I have to do is thank Feodore for keeping Win XP practical for daily use So THANK YOU!I'f (The rest had problems so I have deleted it)

THANKS to all for advice. XP SP3 does indeed run SATA just fine. THIS (Dell 530s) machine has done it for several years on a WD SATA HDD. I installed this system from the XP Pro SP3 CD without any updates or added files; it came right up and has run without problems. Further, I can use that same disk to install XP SP3 on a Dell 2400 on a SATA ->SSD<-. And that runs fine (for tests -- an hour or so) on that machine. When I try to either install on that machine and port the drive here OR install on that SSD on this machine I get a BSOD the instant the hardware touches the drive. HOWEVER: I can plug in the SSD with the installed XP system as the slave drive on the 530s, can then look at its files, copy them, etc., without error. I think the fact that I cannot port a working SSD system from the 2400 to this (530s) machine without getting what looks like exactly the same error eliminates the install from CD question. Sure a system genned on a 2400 might not work right on a 530s but it ought to come up a bit before failing. I can read the BSOD during the install: It's the message I (inaccurately) quoted above that winds up saying 'take out any new hardware and try again.' The one that occurs when I port what should be a bootable system is just a flash of blue -- can't read anything. Then it goes to a generic 'we're just d*** sorry' and 'if this is the first time, try again.' The only hardware oddity I know about is that the 530s is a multiprocessor machine running single processor (in BIOS). My hope was to clone this system onto the 16 Gb SSD. I'd have to do a lot of pruning but it could be done without too much pain if I could leave the WD HDD spinning and just switch plugs so the project could go one step at a time over a month or two. The fresh install was intended just as a proof of concept -- which failed. I thought I was just testing drives but since I got the same failure with two different makes and two different sizes and they all work on the 2400, it seems to be the 530s. I chose this route because I don't buy multi-hundred dollar items like a new larger SSD that would come with a guarantee of working. My wife gets new computers but hers are laptops and that's about all we can afford. If I can make it work on a 16 Gb used drive, then maybe someday I would upgrade to a larger new drive -- SSDs wear out, after all, and these are under $10 each because they're used -- but I'm not starting there. Another way to go is to make THIS machine into a standby and do a fresh install on what is now my standby machine -- another Dell, a 3000 or 4600, I think. That's a pretty big job since I'll have to switch back and forth between machines daily until there's enough on the 'new' machine to transition but it might be the most practical approach. However Jaclaz and others have given me some things to think about first. This (from jaclaz) made me LOL: "1) buy something else 2) that is not possible 3) upgrade your (hardware, OS, software, whatever) to a newer version" This is ABSOLUTELY the generic one-size-fits-all advice from the 'net! Anyway, I tend to suspect a 530s timing issue -- but if so I'd expect to find something on the web -- especially on the Dell site. I cannot be the only idio ... I mean, semi-geek, to try a solid state drive on the 530s with XP. Of course if I had started out with a fresh install on another machine I might be done by now -- but I wouldn't have learned anything much. Again, thanks to all!

Small SSDs are so cheap I thought one would be an interesting upgrade on my 'daily driver xp sp3 Dell 530s. Not so ... The machine is SATA so this should be plug/play ... right? Nope ... BIOS (up to date) detects the drive correctly. FDISK finds three partitions 1 & 3 are small, non-DOS. 2 is most of the drive, DOS. Reallocate to one primary DOS partition, FAT-32. (Like my real HDD for this machine.) Formats fine. Start to load XP from CD, it goes through the loading of files, etc. then crashes as soon as it touches the disk. "SESSION3" and a lot more stuff. The long code begins 0X20006F and the rest is 0X000000. The error message can be found with a web search but basically tells you what the text on the screen says "Something is wrong with your hardware. Take out any device you just installed and try again." Self explanatory but taking out my new drive isn't actually a solution to the problem of installing a new drive. More data to further confuse the picture. 1. I installed XP successfully using a Dell Dimension 2400. It runs FINE on that machine. I installed it on a total of five SSDs: Three were 2Gb ones -- too small for any more than a demo, but useful for that, I thought. The FIRST one of those actually came up fine on the 530s -- but I have mislaid that one. (Dummy ...) I also installed it on a couple of 16 Gb ssd's with the same (failure) result. All but one of the 16's were APACER, the odd one was SANYO, I believe. 2. For the fun of it I tried booting up one of the 2 Gb drives without doing anything to it: It came up, displayed an XP black screen, then went to a Windows Embedded logo, and finally to a hospital logon screen, which -- since I have no password -- was the end of the line. And probably wouldn't have gone anywhere interesting anyhow since it knew nothing of my keyboard or mouse. But what this says is that there's nothing inherently wrong with either the drives OR the Dell 530s. I have looked pretty broadly for more ideas, others who might have had this problem, etc., but no luck. Since the XP install causes an upchuck on the 530s I can do nothing more there. I can try to install the Dell 530 drivers on the SSD system running on the 2400: Often you can get away with that and at least the chipset and IDE ones might make a difference. Anyone got any more ideas? I've gotten more good advice on MSFN than all the rest together, so I thought it worth trying ... THANKS!

I was lucky: When I installed 98SE on a Dell 2400 and then tried to install the Dell 1370 integrated graphics driver (845 chipset on the 2400) it simply refused to play: "This device has a conflict." The conflict was between three of the memory areas needed by the 1370 driver and ACPI memory allocations. There is no access to the ACPI allocations -- at least, not that I could find. I was able to change SOME of the graphics chip allocations but one of the conflicting ones could not be changed. The answer was to re-install Win98SE with ACPI disabled ("SETUP /P I"). With ACPI not demanding memory the graphics driver installed smoothly. I expect the symptom can vary depending on exactly what the conflict is and whether Win can report it rather than just falling over dead. Certainly for any mysterious problems seeming to involve Win 98 on a Dell machine and graphics I would try reinstalling Win without ACPI before giving up.

I just got done installing Win98SE on a Dimension 2400 -- 845 chipset. Dell supported that chipset for Win 98 but Dell did not so the same sorts of issues came up. Most of it was straightforward; the integrated graphics was the one exception. Doing a straight Win SETUP I had memory conflicts between the graphic adapter and ACPI; there's no access to the ACPI allocations and although SOME of the graphic allocations can be changed, there's one that can't. The solution was (as above) to use SETUP /p i -- must be a space between p & i because the 'i' is a param passed to whatever the 'p' invokes. This eliminates the ACPI and the graphics adapter then works fine. A search for 'win98 setup switches' will find an explanation of what they all do. There's a BUNCH of them. The reason I installed Win98 on this machine again was that I discovered that solid state HDDs are now frequently under $10 for devices that are plenty big enough for a '98 system -- 2Gb is ample. If you're going to have Win 98 run on a 2.4 gHz machine (for the Dim 2400), might as well have a SSD too. The ones I've seen are all SATA devices but a PATA to SATA adapter that will fit a 3.5 in. drive bay is just another $10. There are no tricks to this: Windows doesn't seem to know that it's not on a hard drive.

Sorry -- I can't think of a more dignified title than that. I'm running Win98SE autopatched, NUSB3.6, etc. on a Dell 2400 and it works FINE -- very fast. I use it for an old version of Autosketch (old enough that I first installed it on Win3.1) and some games. THANK YOU AGAIN to the many people who developed fixes and packages to make this practical and to several others who helped me with specific problems. The biggest issue now is that the sound volume from the Turtle Beach Santa Cruz sound card I'm using is enough only for headphones. I know of one card that will produce plenty of speaker volume in this machine -- the Riptide 90079 (no suffix) -- but that one causes Combat Flight Simulator II to crash, er, on takeoff. Really ... push forward the throttle, F6F starts to roll, and it freezes solid. The game plays fine with the Turtle Beach card, but only with headphones. Surely there's another card that would work -- PCI, has both sound and joysitck, works under Win98 -- and would produce enough volume to drive speakers. Maybe a watt or two per channel? Not much more. Suggestions?

Only one slot left on my Dell 2400 and I need sound, a joystick, and (preferably) a 56k modem for times when only a voice grade line is available. There is a card for machines of this generation running Win 98 that provides sound and a game port: Search for Ensoniq 1370; there were also cards with 1371 and 1373 chips though I don't know if these would work. EBay has the cards and drivers are available at the usual places; I found the 1370 card trick-free to get going. Wanting a modem too, I had exactly ONE choice: the Rockwell/Conexant Riptide 90079. This card has sound, joystick, and modem all in one and works on Win 98 machines. It too is available from eBay. This one, though, COMES WITH A TRICK. Namely, there are two near-identical cards but only one of them will work for this job. The card was introduced in October '97, began shipping summer of '98, and about November was adopted by HP for installation in their 'Pavilion' series of machines. The early cards supplied all three functions. Full-funcition cards can be identified by having a Conexant RDSP020 chip at the lower right corner when looking at the chip side with the PCI connector at the bottom. This chip is about 3/4" square. The card back side has the number '90079' with NO number after that. Some time after the introduction on their machines, HP changed to a version of this card that did not have the RDSP020 chip: There's a place for it, but nothing there. I bought an HP Pavilion desktop at WalMart in 1999 and got my first card with it. Machines having this 'Model 90079-2' card do audio decoding on the motherboard: There is an audio amplifier chip on the card, but the decoding chip isn't there. If you install this card on a machine without on-MOBO decoding it will load drivers for 'NOAUDIO' and all the audio controls (system sounds and multimedia) will be grayed out and locked. THIS LATE CARD APPEARS USELESS FOR GENERAL WIN 98 AUDIO. Since the audio still has to go to the card to get to the amplifier and various audio jacks this card is likely good only as a replacement on a computer originally shipped with it. When I noticed that eBay cards were of two styles and found a photo clear enough to read the number on the sometimes missing chip the rest of the story was an easy guess. I don't know exactly what HP models got the early 'full service' card and which got the later 'crippled' one. I do know that when I installed an early card and the proper driver in my Win 98 Dell 2400 verything including sound, worked. My GUESS: The crippled card was part of the answer to the AC '97 codec which does indeed put the digital functions on the MOBO and analog functions on the sound card. So HP machines supporting AC '97 likely have the late card and those that don't, the earlier one. There are half a dozen different driver packages and updates floating around; the one that worked for me is the one that's about 11 megs in size, found HERE: http://www.driverguide.com/driver/detail.php?driverid=213851&si=bf40bb34411ab30816727bf946065ee5

"... Add New Hardware in the Control Panel ..." I should have tried that. This project has been a series of loops (often have to go back a step in the hope of advancing one and a half or two) and if I get back there again, I will try it. FOR NOW, the answer is a PCI card that provides a parallel port. I tried a StarTech PCI1P2 which -- though it does not claim to support Win 98 on the package or offer drivers on the CD, DOES have win 98 drivers on the mfr. web site: I could not make it work. It kept showing as an 'adapter' of no particular character in Device Manager. THEN I got a SIIG 1-Port ECP/EPP Parallel PCI Adapter (JJ-P01411-S1). This SAYS it supports '98 but no drivers on the CD for that one, either. However the Win 98 drivers on the SIIG web site work FINE. Device Manager shows LPT1 and when you plug in a printer it shows up and you can install the mfr's software. Amazon has this item. One of the software packages I want to run on this machine is Autosketch 1.03. Bought in the mid-90's AIRC, AS was ideal for what I was doing then and should be equally good for the same things now -- but it does not seem to support changes in line weight. (Program was distributed on two 3-1/2" floppies -- this is NOT a large package!) Printing with a modern hi-res printer the lines are often invisible. I no longer run Win 3.1 and in any case that machine -- 66 mHz I think? -- was very S-L-O-W with that package. However a HP 952C installed on LPT1 on my Dell 2400/Win 98 system produces perfect drawings and the package does everything INSTANTLY. So there's the two steps forward. The one step back is the 2400 has only three real PCI slots. One is devoted to a WLAN card, LPT1 takes a second. Functions laying claim to the third slot are: Sound (internal sound is off); a 56k modem (everything here has to be able to go voice-grade line as backup) and a joystick for games. There's a way to do all that in one slot, but ...

Further use of my Win 98/Dell 2400 system turned up a new issue. Among the reasons for this system is a software package that is too old to run well on even an XP system. That package needs a printer so I cheerily hooked up an HP 952C and installed the software. OOPS! My system has no LPT1. None. It was turned off in the BIOS but turning it ON and trying the various options (AT, PS/2, ECP ...) did nothing for Win 98. My guess is that this is a consequence of all the stuff that I turned off to prevent resource conflicts. LPT1 is SO 'OFF' that Windows 98 can't tell it's there, even when it is. Any suggestions for a way I can tell Win 98 "Hey -- You've GOT an LPT1 port"? More to come, in any case.

I've been on a mission to get some of the iconic Win 3.1 through Win 98 screensavers working under WinXP. There's no practical reason to do this but who here doesn't remember 'Flying Toasters' or perhaps 'Bad dog!'? This is now effectively abandonware but everything does seem to be out there. The technical challenges are considerable -- the early modules used 16 bit calls and of course short file/folder names, 256 colors, and had no speed throttling -- they ran flat out back when a 66mHz CPU was Wow, Man! But most of that actually has been solved, hacked around, or at least recognized as "don't bother with that module." There's almost nothing (that I could find) here on MSFN. There's LOTS to be found out there if you search but close to 100% of it is rotted links. THIS is the main currently useful link elsewhere: [link to warez removed] The good news is that essentially everything is there. It's close to 400meg of stuff but nearly all the workable After Dark stuff is there, together with quite a bit of fixed software and how-to for everything through Win XP. HOWEVER: It's not exactly plug-and-play and I haven't been able to get past a problem that others have solved. One problem with the "Do these steps using this code" approach is that you don't learn very much that will help with troubleshooting. I HAVE gotten the Version 4 Plus 1 savers working. That one's easy and gives you one of the several Toaster savers, Rain Forrest, and much more. However of the Version 3 savers, only 'Starry Night' will play. I can go through the motions to install 'Voyeur' or the others (from, say, the 'Totally Twisted' disk), it shows up, you can select it in Display, but it blasts out the world's fastest moving error message when you try to start it -- only can be read by poking PrintScr: "Unable to load selected module" and the path to the Voyeur (whatever) module. I suspect that somewhere down there the code isn't able to deal with folder names containing a blank (as in 'After Dark') and that this was patched in the 'already fixed 3.2XP' saver that I installed -- but ONLY FOR 'Starry night.' Has anyone gotten other Version 3 modules to play correctly? Can someone walk me through the data structure so I could go in and manually fix the names where needed? THANKS for any help! NOTE: Purists won't want to mess with this. Like virtually all pre-Windows software, After Dark installs a bunch of stuff in the root segment on your 'C' disk and without a MAJOR code rewrite (which no one is going to do) that's not fixable. Nor are there reliable (or in many cases, ANY) uninstallers. If you want the thing out of there it's going to be a tweezers and hammer job to do it. But for the Slightly Impure, it can be fun and more or less harmless!

Many thanks for the long detailed reply, MrMateczko. Overall, I chose a path that would be simple for most people who might consider doing this installation to understand. Experts of course will see many choices at each step. I often use a file on the disk rather than the CD to actually do such installs. I had a number of bad experiences with USB mass storage support using the 98SE support; among those were permanently destroyed thumb drives and other kinds of data loss. This was years ago: Drive manufacturers are much down the learning curve now and perhaps they're not as fragile with respect to software errors. But my instinct is to NEVER use 98SE mass storage support for anything that matters: Upgrade that first. The floppy certainly isn't the only way to fly but most Dell 2400's have them and anyone doing Win 98 will most likely to have spares. An additional consideration in a procedure that involves booting from a flash drive is that such boots are critically dependent on the machine and bios, possibly also on the make of the drive. Some combinations will work, some will not. Experts can troubleshoot such issues but not everyone who might want a faster and more modern 98SE machine is an expert. NUSB because I have used it a number of times over the years and never had a problem. Perhaps there's now something better out there and I should investigate further. AUTOPATCHER is the same deal: The A-P'd system is so much more stable than 98SE 'as installed' that I don't know how I'd notice further improvement. After you posted I tried Opera in various flavors including 12.02. It didn't render any sites that FF 8.01 won't and it failed on one of those that FF 8 handled. For an obsolete system (98SE on a 2400) I'll learn a new interface and deal with quirks but the thing MUST cover as many modern web sites as possible.