Nomen

Now what are you going to do about: - Video - USB - Network/Lan - Audio ?

> a never ending white loading screen when trying to access part of the in-game online store You might be able to disable access to the troublesome URL with an appropriately-crafted line in your HOSTS file. A more complex solution would be to get a web-server up and running on the computer just to serve up previously downloaded files from the original site server, and modify those files as necessary. Hosts file entries would allow internal re-direction to the local web server.

The board is rev 3.0 On a side note, what happens when you install XP (pro, sp3) on a system with a single core, and then you switch CPU's to a 2 (or more) core? Do you have to monkey with the HAL to get the system to get it to boot at all, let alone recognize (and use) the additional cores?

I have successfully installed XP on the system in question (GA-890FXA). The problem of constant re-booting when the system transitions from the "Text" phase into the VGA-GUI phase was solved by turning off the second CPU core in the bios. The CPU is a retail-box Sempron 145. Some motherboards have a "feature" to activate second cores on some AMD cpu's sold as single-core. This appeared to work fine on this board, but I guess this is one of those cases where one of the cores on this die was flawed, and hence what could have been an Athlon was turned into a Sempron. Funny thing though, Windows system information identifies the CPU as an Athlon 4450e, but task manager shows only 1 core.

> Set the thingy to stop on error (instead of rebooting). I suppose I do that by using a particular command-line argument? winnt /something? > I don't get the reason why you are using DOS at all In the very few times I've installed XP on a few computers that I use infrequently or are used by others that I have to manage, I install on a drive that has been pre-formatted as FAT32 and for convienence and speed has had the XP cd copied to it along with all necessary drivers. It only makes sense that the drive also be self-bootable (into DOS) in order to start the XP installation process and it therefor becomes dual-bootable (DOS/XP) after XP has been installed. > I have to guess that you are attempting ot use WINNT.EXE > to install, right? XP cd is copied to c:\xp-cd, and after booting into dos I change to c:\xp-cd\i386 and run winnt.exe to start the XP install. I think the very first thing I'm asked is to confirm the source directory of the install files (which is c:\xp-cd\i386). > in any case the first part of the install is not > "dos" it is "text mode" or "real mode" (before > the switch to "protected mode"). I'm aware of that, but I believe that even Microsoft calls it the "DOS" phase, so I thought I was just following convention. > How big in size is the disk drive? > How big in size is the FAT32 partition you created? I mentioned that in the first post. Hard drive is 320gb. It previously had windows multipoint 2010 server on it (meaning it had several NTFS partitions). I used fdisk121.exe to delete all partitions and create a single 30 gb FAT32 partition and set it to Active. I then slaved it to a win-98 system and ran Western Digital Data Life Guard (DLG) and set the cluster size to 4 gb and had DLG format the partition. The remainder of the drive (300 gb) remained unpartitioned / unformatted. > In any case, try (only to test) to install in "native" > mode, this way we can exclude issues with the hardware. I repeatedly tried to install with the bios set to "NATIVE IDE" mode (after trying AHCI mode) and still got continuous rebooting after "TEXT" phase of XP install was finished.

I'm trying to install XP-pro 32-bit on a system with Gigabyte GA-890FXA-UD5 motherboard (AMD SB850 southbridge) and all attempts have resulted in the system continuously rebooting after the "DOS" portion of the installation process is finished. The hard drive is a 320 gb WD sata drive, formatted with a 30 gb FAT32 partition with 4kb cluster size and win98-DOS. The rest of the drive is unformatted / unpartitioned. XP-sp3 CD copied to its own directory on the drive. The drive is connected to either SATA-0 or SATA-1 port (can't tell which one) on the board (one of the 6 "blue" connectors). In the BIOS I have 3 choices: "NATIVE IDE" or "AHCI" or "RAID". There is 4gb of ram on the board. If I set the BIOS for "NATIVE IDE", then I can boot DOS with himem.sys (with the numhandles setting) and smartdrv is happy. But I want to install XP with the SATA interface already set to "SATA" (which I guess is AHCI), but with that setting DOS craps out when himem.sys is loaded: Loading Operating System ================== The following file is missing or corrupted: c:\dos\emm386.exe there is an error in your config.sys file on line 4 The following file is missing or corrupted: Command.com Type the name of the Command Interpreter (e.g. C:\windows\command.com) C> ================= If instead I boot DOS with himem.sys from a floppy, it works, but I get strange and different results when I try to access the C drive. Substituting himemx.exe for himem.sys gives same behavior. A plain dos boot without himem.sys, either from the hard drive or floppy, works fine and hard drive seems fully accessible in AHCI mode - it's only when I try to have DOS load himem.sys that drive access is screwed up in AHCI mode. Bringing system ram down to 2gb doesn't help. In NATIVE IDE mode there is no problem with himem.sys. Ok, so instead of trying to install XP from CD-copy on the drive after booting DOS, I boot from actual CD instead. BIOS is set to AHCI. Destination for install is the FAT32 partition. I get the "press f6" thing to supply SATA driver from floppy, and I give it the floppy, select the x86 driver and continue, get the EULA and press f8, I think there is 1 reboot, it continues, then there is one more reboot which ends the "DOS" portion of the install. It's at this point that it just simply keeps rebooting. Ok, fine. Go back to bios, set the drive for NATIVE IDE. Boot the drive into DOS with himem and smartdrv, delete all the garbage that the XP install left behind, perform a "sys c:" command from the floppy just to be sure, restart XP install from hard drive image, do all this twice (once where I press F6 and give XP the SATA drive, another time where I bypass this step), and I do this a third time (install from CD). And still I get same result - system gets into reboot cycle upon transition out of DOS portion of installation. This is my first ever experience with AMD based motherboard. Motherboard was bought on ebay about 6 months ago and at the time I got it all I did to test it was throw a CPU and RAM into it and test it with memtest86 booted/loaded from floppy (it passed). What is going on here? Why does himem.sys interact negatively with the bios AHCI setting? I've never had such experience with DOS/FAT32 formatted SATA drives and SIL-based controllers set to non-IDE-mode access. Should XP install be able to work with ANY sata controller if set to IDE mode without needing F6 driver on floppy? Or is this only true with older hardware (or intel-based chipsets)? Why can't I get past the DOS-based portion of XP install? Edit: I even tried a CD-install where I told it to perform a quick NTFS format of the unformatted drive space and install XP on the NTFS partition, and still get constant rebooting after dos-phase of the install.

A few years ago, after years of using a regular mouse, I developed forearm pain. I looked into alternatives and bought one of these: http://evoluent.com/products/vm4r/ And instantly the pain went away. Bought a second one (one for home, one for office). Both office and home computers run win-98se, and the mouse is fully compatible.

My win98se system is currently using: RICHED32.DLL 4.00.993.4 (May 7/1998) Windows 95 Rich Text Edit Control RICHED20.DLL 5.30.23.1200 (Jan 26/2002) Rich Text Edit Control, v3.0 USP10.DLL 1.0422.3790.4695 (srv03_sp2_gdr.100416-1721) There seems to be several or many versions of RICHED20.DLL with version 5.30.23.1200. The one my system is using is 431,133 bytes. Another varient has 421,888 bytes. I have another version (5.40.11.2210) Rich Text Edit Control, v4.0 (March 19/2001) in an MS-Office directory. The riched32.dll file that my system is using seems strange - as if it's a win-98 FE version. I have version 4.00.834.839 (april 23/1999) in an archived backup of an old win-98se install which I assume is the original 98se file. It is still identified as "Windows 95 Rich Text Edit Control". The previous version of USP10.dll I was using was 1.0325.2180.1 (Feb 7/2000). My current is Sept/2012.

> There is an alternative way to browse that some may be unaware of. > Paste this into your browser: (www.textise.net) Turning the web back into usenet. Something old is new again... Funny thing - using the "textise" service doesn't look a whole lot different to me than using FF 2.0 on most websites. If you have enough host-file entries to block a lot of stuff, you can turn most web pages into mostly text. This is especially true of web pages reporting on news stories like TV and newspaper sites.

Ah - yes. It seems to need gwmetric as part of the syntax, although the documentation doesn't mention it. Seems these people also came across this situation: http://forums.scotsnewsletter.com/index.php?showtopic=43164 I haven't tried this yet, but this apparently works: netsh interface ip set address name="Local Area Connection 2" gateway=192.168.1.3 gwmetric=1 If all I want to change is the gateway IP, then would this work? netsh interface ip set gateway=192.168.1.3 gwmetric=1 Bonus question: Can XP have 2 gateway IP settings, and dynamically figure out which one to use? The TCP/IP properties for win-98 has a list box for "installed gateways" and says the first one in the list is the default, but I have no idea if it really works - will it try other entries as needed from the list?

This is not necessarily XP-specific, but I am following instructions written for XP, on an XP system. Specifically, I'm following the examples on these pages: http://www.microsoft.com/resources/documentation/windows/xp/all/proddocs/en-us/netsh_int_ip.mspx?mfr=true https://technet.microsoft.com/en-ca/library/bb490943.aspx such as trying this: netsh interface ip>set address local static 192.168.2.123 255.255.255.0 192.168.2.2 or this: netsh interface ip>set address name="Local Area Connection 4" source=static addr=192.168.2.123 mask=255.255.255.0 gateway=192.168.2.2 and getting this response: The syntax supplied for this command is not valid. Check help for the correct syntax. All I want is a command-line function to set the gateway IPv4 address. What is the correct syntax to do this from a command prompt?

I find that neither FF 2 or Opera 12.02 render MS kb pages, and haven't for a long time. For example, this page: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/kb/323207 Both Opera and FF show a few banner items across the top, but the rest of the page is blank. Opera says it loaded 18 out of 18 elements. I look at the page source code in FF, but the KB content is not present (?). Is there an alternative way (or an alternative site) where I can read KB content using either FF2 or Opera 12.02?

Yes, I've been running Kex for many years. I downloaded FF 3.6.9 portable from source forge, ran the install executable, told it to install to D root. Then I ran "FirefoxPortable.exe" from D:\FirefoxPortable. A small spash window opened showing "Firefox portable / Portable apps" and then firefox opened behind it. It was my default 2.0.0.20 version, complete with all my bookmarks, etc. I closed that, and dug a little deeper (D:\FirefoxPortable\App\Firefox) and ran firefox.exe located there (properties file version 1.9.2.9). Again I saw the portable-apps splash screen, and again it was my old version 2.0.0.20 that ended up running. Don't know how that happens. I have 2.0.0.20 installed in E:\Software\Firefox\FirefoxPortable\App\Firefox (file version 1.8.1.20: 2008121709). Now why when I invoke the 3.6.9 version the 2.0.0.20 version ends up running - I have no idea. ?

Can newer security protocols (such as TLS 1.1) be added to FF 2.0.0.20? Even if by way of hack? If so - where are step-by-step instructions?

> Apparently you've never had a system with an Intel ICH5 > or later chipset. While they may be available for some > third-party SATA controller chips, drivers are NOT > available for most chipset-integrated SATA controllers. I do believe that most motherboards made with Intel 800-series chipsets (at least 84x, 86x and 87x) have ICH5 chipsets (sometimes ICH5r) and have full win-9x/me driver support. For example, this board: i865PEa-7ILFR http://global.aopen.com/products_detail.aspx?auno=943 claims ICH5r, and points to Intel chipset driver v5.1.1.1002. ftp://asftp.aopen.com.tw/pub/driver/mb/intel/inf/intel_chipset_v5.1.1.1002.zip Unpacking that and it does contain 9x/me files (various ICH5 cat files). Besides, I seem to recall that ICH5/ICH5r implimentation of SATA controller was buggy or faulty in some way. Also there are many socket 478 and 775 motherboards with Via chipsets with onboard sata controllers with full 9x/me driver support. > > No system in daily use, regardless what OS it's running, > > should be using 40 or 80 gb IDE drives > > I depend on them every day. Have for the past 10 years. > No signs of any trouble, and no plans to change either. I have a few win-98 systems that have 80 gb drives and are in daily use. And I know the drives are at or have exceed their MTBF and could fail at any time. I still stand by my advice I would give to anyone in a similar situation - that yes, the 40 and 80 (particularly 80 gb WD) drives are very reliable, but they will not last forever and the only way to know their true health is to look at their SMART data every once in a while. And I certainly wouldn't build a new win-98 system or rebuild an existing one using an IDE drive today. I'd rapidly run out of storage space if I did, and I imagine so would most people.

> So if you've got the parts around, try it. > If not, I wouldn't spend the money on a "might" be a little faster solution. The point of exploring the use of SATA-1 (1.5 gb/sec) controllers with win-98 has nothing to do with disk-transfer performance. The use of SATA-1 controllers allows win-98 systems to utilize cheap high-capacity hard drives in the range of 160 gb to 2TB that have been available starting 10 years ago. More importantly, SATA-1 controllers always have (in my experience) full 32-bit driver support for win-98, which eliminates the 137gb problem that applies to most situtations using IDE (PATA) drives. No system in daily use, regardless what OS it's running, should be using 40 or 80 gb IDE drives because those drives were made many years ago (10 or more years ago in most cases) and the reliability of those drives today will be questionable. When upgrading existing systems or building new ones, IDE drives are no longer an option for most people anyways.

I can confirm that setting the audio playback (speakers) and recording (microphone) to "emulation" by adjusting the hardware acceleration slider to "None" does allow Skype to function (ie - make calls without giving "Problem with playback device" error). In this mode, the quality of the other party's audio (as heard on my speakers) is horrible (stuttering) combined with an echo (things are heard twice). Conversely, my audio (as picked up by my microphone and heard by the other party) sounds fine.

Searching a few drives I have handy at the moment for CTL3D32.dll versions: (1) 2.31.000 26,624 bytes Jan 26/1998 (2) 2.26.000 26,112 bytes Nov 6/1997 (3) 2.31.000 45,056 bytes April 23/1999 (4) 2.31.000 27,136 bytes July 13/1995 (5) 2.31.000 45,056 bytes June 8/2000 (1) is what my win-98 system is currently using (2) located in a Coreldraw 9 program directory (3) located in an archived copy of a win-98 installation from another computer (4) located in a \temp\_istmp0.dir directory of another archived copy of a win-98 installation (5) located in a folder containing unpacked files from Win-ME cd (3) and (5) are same size, but not binary identical. A directory containing an unpacked win-98 CD is not handy at the moment, so I don't know what version of CTL3D32.dll is there. Based on file date, this computer seems to be using a version from win-98 FE? Nothing has changed as far as being able to use skype 3.8.0.188 on this system (see my earlier posts in this thread). It doesn't see or recognize audio components, and I can't change my skype user image or icon picture (see post #11 in this thread). Would CTL3D32.DLL play a role in BOTH of these problems?

Last week I downloaded the daily build "intelligent updater" package from Symantec for an XP machine running NAV 2002. This was only to scan the slaved NTFS hard drive of a suspect win-7 laptop (ordinarily NAV is not running on the XP system in question). The Symantec package was over 700 mb in size (6 or so years ago it was 100 mb). The package updated the NAV 2002 scan engine and definitions to current standards. NAV 2002 runs on win-98 just fine. Now why you need or want to waste CPU power running an anti-virus program on win-98, that's the larger question here.

I took the drive to a different machine that is dual boot XP/7. The machine was off, but it was in win-7 suspend mode because I hooked up the drive and powered it on and it came up (resumed) and was having some difficulty with the drive. The task bar said it was "installing new hardware", and while that was going on I brought up the drive managment console and I think it was showing 2 instances of the drive, showing the same drive identification number and showing it/them as uninitialized. But it wouldn't let me do anything with it. I rebooted the machine and started it in XP, but never got past the spash screen (with the 3 blue boxes scrolling left to right). Drive light showed what looked like random or intermittent activity. I let it go for about 15 minutes and hit the reset and started win-7, but again it never got past the spash screen. So there is something about this drive that not even the "power" of an NT-based OS can overcome.

I had a spare 400 gb sata drive that was pulled from an old XP machine that I wanted to temporarily slave to my win-98 machine (intel 845-based motherboard with 2-port SATA controller add-on PCI board). I disconnected one of the two SATA drives connected to the PCI card and connected the 400 gb drive in its place. Windows 98 booted fine, but (as expected) did not see the 400 gb drive. I then booted into DOS and ran free fdisk 1.2.1 where I deleted the single NTFS partition on the 400 gb drive and then created a single FAT32 partition (I did not reboot between those 2 actions). I then rebooted, but the system would not boot. I tried pressing f8 during startup, but that menu never came up. The bios was set to boot floppy first, then drive-0 (which is an IDE connected to Master primary). I disconnected the 400 gb drive and was able to boot normally. I set the bios to only boot from floppy, and a floppy formatted with win-98 dos (format a: /s /u) with no config.sys or autoexec.bat booted normally. But the floppy won't boot with the 400 gb drive connected to the system. Even if that's the only drive (no other IDE or sata drives) the floppy shows disk activity for about 10 seconds then stops. I'm going to take the drive and slave it to another (XP) system and mess with it until I'm able to connect it back to the win-98 system, but I was wondering what sort of state the partition table must be in for DOS and win-98 to freeze up during boot when the drive is present. ? I've connected many IDE and sata hard drives to various win-98 systems in the past and have never encountered a situation where just physically connecting a drive to the system prevented full booting into win-98 - or even DOS.

This thread should have been added to the sticky "motherboards for win-98" thread.

So what is the relationship to the beautifier output vs the wepawet.iseclab.org output? The wepawet.iseclab.org output indicates a dependency or utilization of an activex component, and it seems to be constructing a target .exe file to download from the above-mentioned domains based on some sort of algorythm using a random number generator. Would be useful to generate one and download the payload from one of those domains - assuming they're still serving up the payload.

If you want to see the "beautified" (more readable) version, I put a copy here: http://pastebin.com/raw.php?i=K7DjsewG See the first link (to wepawet.iseclab.org) I gave in the first post. That is the "de-obfuscated" version of this JS script. I don't know if taking the de-obfuscated output and saving it as a text file (with .js suffix) would result in a functional .js file (that you can throw into a browser to see what it does). ??? I tried it and got nowhere.

I ran the .js file through an on-line script "beautifier" (jsbeautifier.org) and saved the result as a test .js file. FF2 opens it as a text file. IE6 opens it as a script, gives me a warning, and then gives the same error as above - except that I know what line the error is happening on. Its the very last line of the file. Here is what the last few lines look like: ------------------------- for (var xuow = 1; xuow <= 229; xuow++) { tz += this['nbny' + (xuow * 3562)](); }; this[nbny243()](tz); ------------------------- The line starting with "this" is line 817 - the line that the error is happening on (which is also the last line of the file). So I don't know if this file was malformed to start with, or what...