azagahl

What am I doing with my XP CD if no one answers me in Redmond to give me a new serial number when I upgrade some hardware or does not want to give me one for whatever reason tomorrow ? Just because of that, I would not touch XP. Even if I would feel XP is superior. My feelings exactly. For each user there is some line beyond which activation schemes / DRM / copy protection (i.e. backup hindering) solutions are too arrogant, instrusive, and irritating to be acceptable. XP crosses that line for me. I do not want a nagware OS. Have you got really the choice if you buy a new computer of which OS you will have on it ? Stop complaining, there are plenty of choices in the market place. You can choose XP or XP N

Hi, I won't respond to all your 20 items, simply because 20 is a lot. Most of the things you mentioned are features I simply don't need. I did not buy a 3400+ processor and 1 GB of memory just to squander it on unneeded bloat. 1. At least 10 times more reliable (fully protected memory model) In practice I find 98 SE with USP2.0RC3 to be more reliable. I've seen XP suffer from inexplicable slow downs, processes that refuse to be killed, and locked files. I've even had it reboot randomly, once resulting in a irreparably corrupted partition. It even warns you in XP when you try to shut down a process that it might cause system instability. 2. Ability to verify device drivers and roll back if necessary You might have a point here, for newbies. But I am a competent user and I often install up-to-date, or even Beta drivers, and I rarely have problems. 3. Support for up to 4GB RAM I do not think a lot of current motherboards even support that much. So it's kind of a moot point. Furthermore, I don't actually know anyone who has more than 1 GB on a single PC. I am not sure what 98 SE supports. It was claimed for years (and recently e.g. by un4given1) that 512 MB was the max and that proved to be baloney. I use 1 GB PC 3200 without problems. Due to 98 SE's tiny memory usage (~40 MB even with a full OS and dozens of programs running, and 16 MB of that is my RAM disk!), I never run out of memory. By disabling features the memory footprint becomes even smaller! If I need to I guess can try installing more RAM. Supposedly Win 98 SE works fine up through 1.5 GB, and beyond that one can probably create a RAM disk on which an immense swap partition can be placed. So even 3 GB might be possible? I guess I might be forced to upgrade in a few years when I need > 1 GB. So far I'm doing just fine with 1 GB RAM and 1 GB page file though. 10. Built in Firewall With 98 SE you do not need a firewall. I ran 98 SE for years without a firewall and did not have any problems. I visisted a bad website once and due to IE 6 security holes I came down with "CoolWeb" spyware or something. It was easy enough to remove. I believe 98 SE simply does not have equivalent to the XP Blaster nightmare. I use a firewall now, of which there are many free ones available, but I probably would do just fine without it. 11. Better application compatability It sounds like XP SP 2 actually has worse application compatability. 12. Better hardware support Unfortunately, I believe I have hardware that XP SP 2 doesn't even support, for example certain Gravis Gamepads. All my hardware - USB hard drive, MP3 player, photo printer, digital camera, LCD monitor, joysticks, etc.. work fine on 98 SE. 17. Bluetooth Bluetooth is not exclusive to XP. There are bluetooth devices for 98 SE as well. 18. Offline webpage viewing This is a web browser function, what does it have to do with the OS?? Back to the thousand freeware/shareware apps. I don't see any thing wrong with looking at all the many freeware solutions available and choosing the best one. Sometimes they are much better than the monopoly-approved version, e.g. XP's integrated CD burning is one example. Assuming I liked XP, I would be happy with getting XP N and downloading my media player of choice for example.

Office 2003 still won't install here. Please instruct me how I can get it to install on this..... Parathapml, it has been mentioned at least twice in this thread that you need to have an earlier version of Office installed first, such as Office 2000. You may then install Office 2003. IF you have time to try this, then thank you and I look forward to hearing if you can duplicate horsecharles' results. No support for transparency. Support for transparency (I assume you mean transparent icons and menus and such) is easily added by installing the Revolutions software that has being developed by one MSFN user (Tihiy). After doing this the only problem that remains is freezing the display when deleting moving or copying large number of files or emptyimg the recycle bin This annoying bug results from IE 6 SP 1. You will not have this bug on a fresh 98 SE install. IF you've installed IE 6 SP 1, you can avoid this bug by going back to BROWSEUI.DLL and BROWSELC.DLL from IE 5.5. (There is also a particular patch for ME that has the latest versions of these IE 5.5 DLL's, if you are interested).

I work with 98 and I know better Are you using an old and crappy system? 98 SE runs fantastically well on my Athlon 3400+ with 1 GB RAM. Have you installed USP2.0RC3? It installs nearly all 98 SE patches from Microsoft - excluding the bad and dangerous ones that is. Works wonders IMHO. If you think you've exhausted all there is to learn about using 98 SE then you may be mistaken.

Your "proof" is someone else who says they have it running? Your lost man. I don't want to prove it to you. I accept that it's not proven. But I still believe horsecharles is telling the truth. un4given1, I tried and tried to prove to you that 1 GB works just fine for me. I still am not sure if you accepted my proof. Honestly I would rather pull my teeth through nostrils than to try proving 1+1=2 to you. There's just no point in arguing with someone who insists on being so obstinate. Seems pretty easy to me No, installing Office 2003 is not at all easy for me since I would have to make a backup image my system, download probably multiple GB of data from MSDN (downloads from there take forever), extract it, and then install it for a long time, and then reimage my system (I don't want to use Office 2003 honestly and I do not want to just uninstall and leave my drive fragmented). All this work just to prove something I don't care about, and you probably won't believe the proof anyway. Is it easy for you to install 98 SE and Office 2003? If it's so easy then go ahead and give it a shot.. Anyone who is using Windows XP and loves it isnt' going to waste their time going back to an OS I agree with Tim as far as Win98 being something to look back on. That has been my whole point the entire time. So you don't want to try 98 SE because of some kind of irrational anti-nostalgic feeling. There's nothing wrong with that opinion. But it does make your assaults on 98 SE less credible when you haven't even used it for years. Things change a lot in 5 years. Trying to install office03 on 98 is a waste of time. Agreed, Office 2000 is less bloated and is probably the better choice.

Until then I believe Microsoft over you. Microsoft probably claims that because of one of the following: 1. They did not test on 98 SE for this software and did not want to claim support when it's untested. 2. They are trying to convince users to upgrade. 3. They made a mistake. Have a screen shot to prove otherwise? No. I don't have unlimited time to waste on arguing with skeptics. I wasted a lot of time already arguing with unforgiven1 about my ability to use 1 GB of RAM on 98 SE and he still never admitted being wrong and, as far as I know, he never tried it out himself once despite access to all the necessary hardware and software. Also if I make a screenshot probably you will claim its doctored or something stupid. Horsecharles is quite knowledegable and I have no reason not to take his report at face value. Let me turn this question around and ask that maybe you should try 98 SE yourself out since you are so interested in attacking it? I will also refer you to the post here regarding using Office 2003 on 98; there are latter posts with more details. http://www.msfn.org/board/index.php?showto...ndpost&p=258466 All of this seems kind of pointless to me anyway because as I said I don't even know why you would want Office 2003 over 2000, or vice versa. Does the dog walk over to my document and drop a turd if I make a typo? So just pretend I said 2000 in my original post if it makes you happier.

That's funny.. Office 2003 doesn't support or install on Windows 98. You say that you can do all of those things with 98 which all are true except the office 2003. You are mistaken on that one. It installs fine if you already have an earlier version of Office installed. I believe Horsecharles was the first to discover this. (If anyone discovered earlier, please let me know.) Yet you bought and installed Office 2003 on Windows 98? No, actually I use Office 2000 on 98 SE. I did not buy Office 2003 (nor would want to) as I have an MSDN license and use Office 2003 on XP via a network license manager. BECAUSE office 2003 is BETTER Office 2000 is less bloated than 2003 and works fine IMHO. I honestly don't even know what the difference is here. A 3D talking dog? I only put forward the possiblity of using Office 2003 on 98 SE to show that 98 SE deserves more credit than you guys give it. It's OK if you did not know using office 2003 on 98 SE was possible. This is probably partly due to the fact that you haven't used 98 SE in a long time and aren't as knowledgeable about it as people who use it every day. FYI there are some really exciting things that certain MSFN users are developing for 98. Such as the unofficial SP, 98SE2ME (yields an amalgam of 98 SE and ME), and also an XP support layer (e.g. you can run Longhorn screensaver on 98 SE). Your stories have holes all in them. I'm sorry that you have that opinion.

if you think that it will always be GrandMa and GrangPa asking how to open a picture then by all means keep 98. You act like there is something wrong with 98. Newsflash: 98 SE works just fine for me. In fact, all of these things work on 98 SE: -Browse Internet. (Personally I prefer Firefox.) -Use Office 2003. -Use Remote Desktop client. -Edit videos. View videos with Windows Media Player. -Compile software. -Use Cygwin or emulate all kinds of game systems. -Listen to music. Usually I use WinAmp5 or for MIDI's I use another program and have about 200 MB of soundfonts loaded. -Compose music. -Run DOS TSR's such as sound and CD-ROM drivers. Then boot into real mode and play DOS games. -Or install DX 9.0c Apr2005 redist and play 3D games. -Use 1 GB RAM (that's what I use, probably others have more). -Use 3+ GHz processors. -Use 300 GB disks. -Defrag disk in background. -Connect digital cameras, MP3 players, USB, FireWire, UltraATA, SATA, and Bluetooth devices. Use multiple monitors. -Run firewall software, virus scanners, download managers, etc. -Create RAM drive and mount a compressed volume on it. -Set up a FAT16 partition with a fixed 1 GB page file. -Spruce up your desktop wtih desktop themes, fading menus, transparent icon text, and transparent alpha-blended icons. Use JPG wallpaper. View Thumbnails in Windows Explorer. -Continuing support from Microsoft. -Install USP2RC3 and avoid having to download Windows Update patches. -Easy partition imaging with freely available software. -Install selected files from free XP SP2 and 2003 SP1 (yes, many of us do this on 98 SE). -Disable unneeded services. Not everyone believes MS's marketing hype. Not everyone agrees with buying software that they don't have the right to use. Not everyone wants the corpulence of a multi-gigabyte OS with features like Resultant Set of Policy and integrated CD-burning. Before you criticize 98 SE further, I suggest you actually try it. For a skilled user, 98 SE is quite nice now, compared to when it came out 5 years ago. I use 98 SE and XP regularly and find that I prefer 98 SE.

Is it safe (or wise?) to install specific USB drivers after the generic ones are installed?

I just had to redo my computer because the Revolutions Pack made all sorts of programs no longer work right I had problems with 1.6. I recommend using the free program Savepart to easily backup your Windows partition before installing scary software. Fortunately, Tihiy fixed almost everything I reported and I'm using 2.2 which looks really nice. Maybe USP 2.1 could have Revolutions

You don't understand, what they are trying to secure is their monopoly, by tricking users into upgrading Edit: I HAVEN'T tried the patch yet.

Good job tim, you hit 98 posts!

Add these lines to c:\windows\system.ini (add the lines to the appropriate bracketed sections in system.ini) and let us know if it helps. [386Enh] MaxPhysPage=40000 MinSPs=16 ConservativeSwapfileUsage=1 DMABufferSize=64 EMMExclude=A000-FFFF VGAMonoText=off PageBuffers=32 LocalLoadHigh=1 [vcache] MaxFileCache=524288 ChunkSize=2048 namecache=4096 directorycache=96 Or better yet, install Gape's Unofficial SP 2.0 RC2.

Zip Genius is bloatware, use IZArc or TUGZip.

If I manage to setup a ramdrive which is not an easy task. Should be easy with xmsdsk (aka furd19_i.zip). RAMDISK does not support >32 MB, so use xmsdsk instead. There is a SafeList section in IOS.INI. List xmsdsk.exe there so Windows does not use harddrive compatability mode. You can also mount a drvspace volume on RAM disk with "scandisk /mount". Put temp and IE cache files on drvspaced portion and swap on non-drvspaced portion of RAM disk if you want! FYI a huge, blank drvspace volume can be zipped twice with PKZIP down to a few KB, this can be expanded at runtime with two applications of PKUNZIP. I use 1 GB FAT16 (32 KB clusters) swap partition at top of 2nd drive. But I would use RAM disk if I had 2 GB RAM I have read that 9x does not support more than 512 MB. Is this another myth ? Yes; I can run fresh install with 1 GB RAM and use it w/o problems. Supposedly there is a bug if the disk cache gets > 512 MB, so either limit the disk cache (MaxFileCache=524288 in SYSTEM.INI) or just install Unoffical SP 2.0 RC2. In SYSTEM.INI it helps me to set EMMExclude=A000-FFFF; I think this is due to my SB Live! Value sound card. I had several people swearing to me that 98-Me does not support partitions of more than 80 gig I've used 200 GB without much trouble. FDISK does not show more than 32 GB. Also scandisk may have problems above 127 GB? If so, just use ME scandisk / defrag. Also you can run Setup.exe with /is option to avoid scandisk.

NEVER going to happen Tihiy! You do not know Tihiy very well do you

Can anyone tell me what files/windows updates are needed to add to a clean install of windows 98se, so that DotNet 1.1 will install successfully. At the moment I keep getting an error and I cant remember what files I added to windows the last time, in order to get it to install. For .NET 1.1 you should install the main redistributable (DOTNETFX.EXE). Also don't forget the service pack, NDP1.1sp1-KB867460-X86.exe. I don't know why you would be getting errors installing these. Perhaps they contain MSI files that require the Windows Installer 2.0? I'm not sure what file provides this, but if you install Unofficial SP 2.0 RC2 (highly recommended) you will have the Windows installer. BTW there is a .NET 2.0 beta. So far I haven't felt like installing a beta framework that nothing I have needs.

I find it quite strang ethat you are using such an old operating system with new hardware. I do this as well - 98 SE with Athlon64 3400+, 1 GB, 300 GB disk space. It's amazingly fast, responsive, and powerful. The way I see it, there's no point in buying a powerful system if you are going to squander the performance on having a bloated OS. Microsoft no longer supports win98! Not true, they just released another patch a few days ago. It's going to be supported at least until June next year I believe, unless they extend it again. It's more than 7 years old! He said 98 SE; that's only 5 years old. And XP is already 3 years old. Not that much age difference really.

I find it quite strang ethat you are using such an old operating system with new hardware. I do this as well - 98 SE with Athlon64 3400+, 1 GB, 300 GB disk space. It's amazingly fast, responsive, and powerful. The way I see it, there's no point in buying a powerful system if you are going to squander the performance on having a bloated OS. Microsoft no longer supports win98! Not true, they just released another patch a few days ago. It's going to be supported at least until June next year I believe, unless they extend it again. It's more than 7 years old! He said 98 SE; that's only 5 years old.

This is my first time posting Welcome, I hope you like it here! You will find a a lot of experts here (I'm not one ). "XP is prettier" Yes, 98 SE looks a bit retro for a virgin OS installation. But after USP2RC2 and 98SE2ME and a little sprucing up (themes, Webshots, etc..) my 98 SE looks gorgeous. XP always feels klunky, unresponsive, and akward, so it is kinda hard to enjoy how it looks. And Tihiy's Revolutions makes 98 SE look absolutely fantastic, but I've had trouble with recent versions... WindowBlinds (at a cost of course) It costs money but there is also a cost of having painfully sluggish GUI performance

I witnessed an exchange like this thread on a Yahoo message board the other day. It was between Sephardic and Ashkenazi Jews arguing which was the “True” Jewish people. It was a pointless and self defeating exchange that only served to cause division between groups that, to an outside observer were indistinguishable. Hmm, wonder how Ethiopian Jews feel about that. Anyway, the division here seems to be between those whose are happy using a particular OS for their own purposes, and those who like to brag about their vast multi-year experience, insult others, and force their own OS choice down others' throats. It's hardly "moderating" to call other forum users uninformed idiots.

I do have to agree with every point you've made, un4given1 I agree with him too. XP is perfect if you are an IT admin, you have to impress other IT people, you have a huge budget to blow on XP and expensive hardware supporting it, users' systems never changes hardware, you have a large number of systems and enforce conformity on every user's system, users are technically inept, you couldn't care less if users machines are sluggish and have 100 processes running, and also you haven't tried 98 SE for years and you don't feel like starting now.

I think you are wrong. It certainly crashes MORE than a properly installed and configured Windows XP PC. Maybe if you tried a properly patched 98 SE, instead of just accusing people of being wrong, you'd agree that it crashes less? You can't really form a comparison between two things when you refuse to try one of them. And FYI the problems I have are not crashing but locked files, tasks that won't die, and inexplicable slowdowns on XP. OS crashes (either 98 SE or XP) are very rare for me. Find me a reputable study that proves otherwise... No. Find your own study. And if it says 98 SE is less stable then I will still use 98 SE because from my own experience it's more stable.

KernelXP compatibility news: - Default Longhorn screensaver works 100% Cool, looks like a compatability patch is in the works that will let 98 SE users run "XP-only" programs. More reasons not to "up"grade.

That's true: every morning I wake up and think, "ho, God, again I have to block port 139!" "Port 139", I can't live without him, It's too much! I'm switching to XP, AAAARRRRGGHHH! Actually you are safe unless you enable File and Print sharing AND do not use a firewall AND are targeted by hackers.