Nomen

I've condensed your ideas into a handful of points. In some ways, what you are thinking about applies to the computer as we know it - the desktop or laptop computer - regardless which version of windows it has. Sales of this type of information appliance or productivity tool are falling each year. I have a 15-year-old toaster. I can toast a small variety of items with it. I can't do anything new with it any more. Does that concern me? Does that make me consider replacing it with something else? A toaster-oven that's bigger, requires more space, more complicated to use? No. Looking at your points above, regarding USB 2 media (for me, USB 2 media = thumb drives), I have no worries that USB 2 thumb drives will get cheaper over the next 5 years, and if I don't already have a "lifetime supply" of them now, I certainly will soon enough. You mention a "safe" browser. I've hit many malicious websites that try to perform browser exploits with my win-98/Kex/FF-2 systems, usually on purpose, and watch as those exploits fail to execute properly. For the past 3 years at least, I have no concerns at all about my systems being vulnerable to web-based exploits, and I run no AV/AM software at all. You know there has been a spam campaign for months now, giving links to "fedex delivery receipts" or "american airlines ticket" receipts. The spam contains links to .zip files. I download the files, unzip the contents (ticket_receipt.exe) -> AND I've RUN THE PROGRAMS on my system. Guess what - they fail with "illegal operation". You mention various software. For me, every win-98 system has MS Office 2k premium SR1, Coreldraw 9, VLC, Firefox 2, uTorrent, and a few others. I have hundreds of programs that I've downloaded and installed, used once or twice, and have never used again. As much as I use my systems for office and personal productivity, I also need them to work as internet-access appliances. In that regard I will be concerned when FF2 fails to render the majority of websites I visit. So far, FF2 works perfectly fine.

Put your computer up for sale here: http://milwaukee.ebayclassifieds.com/ List it as zero dollars. You don't need to register in order to post, but you do need to give a working e-mail address. Most likely, it will be someone that will strip out the large metal parts for recycle value, so the machine will be trashed one way or another. submix8c wrote: >13. No user shall, by any means: > 1 - Sell, trade, or give away hardware, software, or any other goods whatsoever. I seem to recall that some of that does indeed happen here once in a while - customized $oftware that gives win98 certain abilities to access large amounts of ram, advanced chipset and sata drivers, etc.

If more of us participated in the win-98 usenet newsgroups, we wouldn't have this problem where posts get lost forever...

Packet radio? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Packet_radio

I'm not familiar at all with nForce motherboards, but for the record here's the nvidia download page for what is probably the last version of nForce 3 drivers for win-9x: Version: 4.27 / Release Date: July 19, 2004 http://www.nvidia.com/object/nforce_udp_win9x_4.27.html I can't tell if this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NForce applies to nForce 2 or 3 or higher. Performance problems are mentioned. nForce3 seems to have been made only for AMD CPU's, whereas intel and AMD versions exist for nForce4. The nForce3 chipset was introduced between Sept. 2003 and June 2004 - so Win-98 support is not unexpected given those dates. In comparison, Via PT880 Pro and Ultra and PT894 were released in January 2005 and are probably superior to nForce3 in terms of speed and features. Does anyone know of a board based on PT894 ? The PT890 (released April 2006) does indeed seem to have Win-9x drivers. The MSI PT890 Neo versions F and V have win-98 drivers available for download. I downloaded a couple different nForce4 driver packages to look for "chicago" inf files, and found some only in LAN and audio driver section.

Here's another option: http://www.ebay.com/itm/Asrock-P4i65G-S478-P4-IV-SATA-AGP-DDR-/281112855545?pt=AU_Components&hash=item4173a1c3f9#ht_1752wt_1153 Asrock P4i65G S478 P4 IV SATA AGP DDR ($20) Asrock webpage: http://www.asrock.com/mb/Intel/P4i65G/

Looks like I'm too late to tell you to buy this board: http://www.ebay.com/itm/ASRock-775i65GV-Motherboard-Socket-775-/111076487638?pt=AU_Components&hash=item19dcacb1d6 $30. The vendor says 3 available. If I lived in Australia, I'd buy all three. I've never seen a socket 775 motherboard with i865 chipset. Perfect for Win-98. It would beat the pants off the Athlon board you did buy. You can still buy this one, you know... ================ http://www.asrock.com/mb/overview.asp?Model=775i65GV - Intel® 865GV chipset - Supports LGA 775 FSB800/533MHz processor, Prescott Ready and H-T Technology - Support Intel® Dual Core Processors, including Pentium® D and Extreme Edition - Supports DDR400 and Dual Channel Technology - Int. Intel® Extreme Graphics 2, ASRock AGI8X - VGA upgrade interface - Advanced storage interface SATA 1.5Gb/s - 5.1 channel Audio, 10/100 PCI Ethernet LAN - ASRock I/O Plus: 6 ready-to-use USB 2.0 ports - Supports DDR400/333/266 non-ECC, un-buffered memory - DIMM slots: 2 - Max. capacity of system memory: 2GB - ASRock A.G.I.8X graphics upgrade slot (AGP8X/4X compatible) - 3 x PCI slots( PCI 2.2 compliance) - 1 x AMR slot OS - Microsoft® Windows® 98SE / ME / 2000 / XP compliant

Unless I'm mistaken, all USB-3 expansion cards are PCI express (just like SATA 2 and 3). Does anyone here know of any motherboard with working win-98 drivers for the PCI express bus?

My advice is for you to go down to your local municipal e-waste recycling depot and pick out a mini-tower PC that someone has given up for scrap. You'll probably find that the hard drive has been removed (by the previous owner) but you'll probably find one in good condition with cpu and video card and ram all intact. Yes - people are throwing away 2ghz Pentium-4 mini-towers with 1 or 2 gig's installed ram. Find one of those and install win-98 on it. What you have now should have been junked 10 years ago. I can't imagine that you use it as a portable computer - your battery is surely dead and it has no wifi capability.

When it comes to the VIA chipsets, I imagine that the VIA PT880 Pro/Ultra is the highest / last chipset with win-9x/me drivers. A popular (and probably one of the last) motherboards based on that chipset is several ASROCK Dual boards, in particular the Dual VSTA. There is one on ebay for sale for $30. It has AGP and PCIe slots, and also has both DDR and DDR2 ram slots. It takes Intel socket 775 CPU. If you can find any 775's still NOS (new, old stock) then great, but most likely the ram and CPU will be e-bay purchases as well. When it comes to intel chipsets, there is i845 - i875 (and the older P4 CPU's), and I keep thinking that some version of the 910 or 915 chipset might have 9x/me drivers.

If WindowsUpdate was still functional, and if I started with a base install of 98se from the CD, does SP3 include everything that I would get from WU except for IE6 - but still include all the IE6-related patches ?

I was testing a malware link recently on my win-98 system (with Kex) with Firefox 2.0.0.20, Adobe reader 6.0.2, and Java 1.6.0_43. This is what happened: The link ends up causing my system to load the Java engine and process some java code, which in turn tries to invoke acrord32.exe and render some sort of pdf file. Java and Acrord32 displayed these error messages: ------ Application Error General Exception (!) java.lang.NullPointerException (ok) (Details) ------- And this: ------- Acrobat plug-in ! This operation is not allowed (ok) ------- Looking at the Details for the Java error: ------- java.lang.NullPointerException at sun.net.www.ParseUtil.encodePath(Unknown Source) at sun.misc.URLClassPath$Loader.getResource(Unknown Source) at sun.misc.URLClassPath.getResource(Unknown Source) at sun.applet.AppletClassLoader.getResourceAsResource(Unknown Source) at sun.applet.AppletPanel$7.run(Unknown Source) at sun.applet.AppletPanel$7.run(Unknown Source) at java.security.AccessController.doPrivileged(Native Method) at sun.applet.AppletPanel.createSerialApplet(Unknown Source) at sun.applet.AppletPanel.createApplet(Unknown Source) at sun.plugin.AppletViewer.createApplet(Unknown Source) at sun.applet.AppletPanel.runLoader(Unknown Source) at sun.applet.AppletPanel.run(Unknown Source) at java.lang.Thread.run(Unknown Source) ------- Before I dismiss these error messages, I do a search for all recently-created files. I find these in windows/temp: Acr6392.TMP Acr6390.TMP Acr639C.TMP Small, useless PDF files. I can't find anywhere on the web to verify this, but I believe that Adobe reader must create these temp files during it's normal operation, so these are harmless. AV scan on them turns up nothing. I find this file in windows/application data/sun/java/deployment/cache/6.0/host: 31ba0019-40d9db35.hst It's a text file that contains this: 184.82.108.82 I have this file in my firefox cache directory: 10D13CC8d01. It contained comma separated decimal representations of ASCII characters for the <applet>some stuff</applet> container. Also contained period separated values represent the ASCII characters for JavaScript for downloading of the malicious PDF, Java jar, and Shockwave flash object. The malicious PDF contained stream object (111) which is a compressed obfuscated JavaScript which works on yet another blob which is the PDF heapspray/exploit code which also has two shellcode variables. The shellcodes had URLs that were not encrypted. VirusTotal identified that file as containing: JS/Exploit-Blacole.ld - but only 2 out of 46 AV programs flagged the file as malicious. I dismiss the java error, and then the adobe error. Immediately another Acrord error pops up (same as the first). I dismiss it. Firefox then comes back to life and displays this page: www.google.com/search?q=404%20error And at this point we seem to be done, with no lasting effects. This lame attempt at a browser/java/pdf exploit just bounced off my win-98 system. I have yet to find a pdf exploit that can work correctly on the combination of win-98/Acrobat Reader 6. And the heap/spray exploits seem not to work correctly on win-98 systems as well. And many of the malware files that I seek out (as a result of following recent spam links) turn out to have a very low rate of being identified by antivirus programs - at least during their first day of circulation.

There's a lot about the technical differences between win-95 and win-98 that I don't know. Technical differences that have an impact on usability and stability. I would be eager to learn about perhaps the most important of these differences so that I (and perhaps others) would have a basis to switch over from win-98 to win-95 during a future OS re-installation. (I do not mean to question the subjective feelings that people may have for one OS or another).

I don't know why the OP would be wanting to "get win-95 running" on this particular machine vs win-98 (he could explain that if he wants) but I'd like to know, in a general sense, what advantages there would be for system tweakers like ourselves in running win-95 vs win-98, given that either OS was leveraged to the max with any available files and settings from all sources. Is there a case that can be made that if you are going to run win-9x/me on a given (older) system, and if maximum usability and stability are your goals, that win-95 can meet that goal better than (or even equal to) win-98 or ME?

Here's another flash issue that I have. Once in a while (perhaps once out of every 10 or 20 times that I boot up this win-98 PC) I get this error message during boot-up: Microsoft Visual C++ Runtime Library Runtime Error! Program c:\windows\system\macromed\flash\flashutil32_11_6_602_171 plugin.exe R6025 - pure virtual function call (ok) With that error message still on-screen, I run CCTask and sure enough, the above-mentioned flash EXE file is one of the processes running on the computer. I open msconfig look at the startup list - and see no evidence that flash had somehow inserted itself into the list. I run regedit, and search the registry for all occurances of "flashutil32" and again I don't see how or why that program would have been running as part of the boot-up sequence. I dismiss the error and I get one final error about flashutil32_11_6_602_171.exe causing an illegal function call in module FPB.TMP. I do a search and find 6 copies of that file, each in it's own serialized subdirectory in windows\temp. Feb 22, March 13, 21, 28, April 4, 11. The files are all 468 kb in size, and appear to be .exe files. File info says: Description: Adobe flash Player Helper 11.6.r602 File version: 11.6.602.171 Any explanation?

On one particular win-98 system that I have, regardless if I try to run either of these programs: conf.exe 4.4.3345 April 23, 1999 636 kb conf.exe 4.4.3399 April 09, 2004 657 kb And regardless if I set the KernelEx file properties to "disable KernelEx extensions", I get the following two error messages when I try to run either one: The Netrap.dll file is linked to missing export ntdll.dll: RtlInitAnsiString (ok) (path)\conf.exe -> A device attached to the system is not functioning (ok) Something is telling conf.exe that the system is running something other than win-98, presumably some version of NT. Either of the above versions of conf.exe is able to function on win-2k because (I believe) it has an internal dependency for netrap.dll. Microsoft did not code a different version of conf.exe for win-98 vs win-2k. It's the same binary file. Is there any way to know what on my system (a particular file, a particular registry entry) is causing this?

I had JRE 6 Update 41. Works fine from what I can tell. This is on win-98 with kex. 10 minutes ago, I downloaded update 43 from here: https://dl.dropbox.com/u/23365262/jre-6u43-windows-i586.exe I unpacked it using 7-zip, but the MSI and cab files do not appear using that method. I ran the exe and (as mentioned) obtained the msi and cab file. I forgot what the exe did (it probably crashed). I right-clicked on the msi file and selected "install" - and it did just that. It installed without problems. I went to the c:\program files\java\jre6\bin directory and renamed the directory "plugin2" to "junk-plugin2". I then ran javacpl.exe (it's in the \bin directory) and under "Advanced", "Java Plug-in" I de-selected "enable the next-generation Java Plug-in". I then went to javatester.org and verified that update 43 was working (it was). So I don't see what all the fuss is about...

I was looking for something that would function similar to the unix "grep" command, and I'm finding that there appears to be a "DOS" command -> findstr, but that is not a valid command when you open a DOS window from win-98 (for what version of windows is there a shell findstr command??). Anyone know if there is a "grep.exe" or "findstr.exe" for dos? Edit: Apparently there is a "findstr.exe" on XP, but that file is linked to some function in ntdll.dll related to ansi strings that win-98 doesn't have. There is a find.exe that apparently does function soft-of like grep - except that it doesn't take wild-cards (like *.log) for filespec. Findstr on XP does take wildcards for filespec.

Strange. Even with a duplicate set of files, running netmeeting (conf.exe) on one of my win-98 systems doesn't work. It seems that conf.exe has a dependency for netrap.dll, but that dependency only kicks in if it thinks it's running under NT (probably win-2k). This confusion also happens during installation (running nm30.exe). I end up with an extra file (nmasnt.dll) on the "confused" system that is not present on the working system. Kex is running on both, so that can't be the issue...? I either have a .DLL or a registry entry that is making some software think it's running under NT instead of 98...

Strange. I was able to install Netmeeting on a different win-98 system without errors (both systems have Soyo 845 motherboard). Both have Kex. I'm going to copy the netmeeting directory over to the problem system and see if a straight file-transplant will work.

I've downloaded NM30.EXE from here: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=26c9da7c-f778-4422-a6f4-efb8abba021e&DisplayLang=en This is NetMeeting 3.01 Service Pack 2 (SP2), Build 3396 and is for all versions of windows except for 2000 (so sez Microsoft). I've set the KernelEx properties for nm30.exe to disable kernelex extensions. In the registry HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion I've set "Version" to Windows 98 and "Version Number" to 4.10.2222 which is their original values (I have had them set in the past to Win-2k to install either flash or Java). When I run nm30.exe, the installation proceeds just fine up until what I think is the very end, at which point two error messages pop up at the same time: 1) Advanced INF Install Error Creating Process <"C:\program files\netmeeting\conf" -regserver>. Reason: One of the library files needed to run this application cannot be found. 2) Error Starting Program A required .DLL file, NETRAP.DLL, was not found. So why it's asking for netrap, I don't know, since that's a dll that's not normally found on win-9x, and it NEVER works even when you put it on a win-98 box. Is this program being confused and it thinks it's running on some NT version of windows? I dismiss the error messages and I'm left with a non-functional installation of netmeeting. Trying to run the "conf.exe" program does nothing. Any ideas? PS: I've gotten remote desktop sharing to work - I can log into a win-XP pro computer from a win-98 machine, but the bummer is that the XP machine is essentially non-functional for anyone in the vicinity of the machine (the screen displays a login screen). I would have wanted the screen to show it's normal desktop - ie to show what I see when I'm logged into it from a remote machine. I'm thinking that maybe netmeeting will allow that - assuming I can get it working...?

I have flash version 11.6.602.171 (most current version right now is 11.6.602.180). Adobe's flash player test page says my flash is working (the ball is moving back and forth). I can visit other sites (youtube) and flash seems to work just fine. I have disabled my hosts file, and tried this on FF2, Netscape 9, and Opera 12.02. I get the same results with all three. I have changed my browser User-Agent string on FF2 to a more recent version of FF - and it doesn't matter. On a win-XP computer, it works fine. What I'm trying to do is run the flash-based speed test located here: http://206.47.199.107/speedtest.swf When I go to that page, I enter some numbers for a phone number (9 or 10 digits, the numbers don't matter) and then select "begin test". It then displays my IP and something that looks like a tachometer and a cute diagram of a computer and server separated by a data pipe. After a few seconds I get a message saying "Unable to connect to the test server - A firewall or VPN might be blocking the connection to our speed test server. Please check and try again". I'm using neither a VPN, proxy, nor a firewall. For some reason, this flash app doesn't work for win-98se with Kex, but it does work for me when I try it from a win-XP computer. Does that speed test URL work for anyone else running win-98?

Well, this is a P4 2.5 ghz machine, so it can't be that slow. Just scanning through the entries I have in that list, there are 10,800 entries (!). Of which, only 19 are marked as "Allow" and the rest being marked as "Blocked". Some of the ones marked as "allow" make some sense to me, but I honestly don't remember ever manually adding any of these to this popup exception list, and I have no idea how all these Blocked entries got there. Last night I found a site that does an on-line pop-up check of your browser, and my FF2 seemed to pass all the tests (did not show any popups). But it seems that spawning a new browser instance (which is really what I'm complaining about) is technically something other than a pop-up.