TravisO

And you might not even want to use the max of 138. Keep in mind, the larger the partition is, the more space FAT32 will waste. I don't have any hard figures, but even if you can get Win98SE to support large drives (200meg or more) you don't want to. This is one of the many reasons why NTFS was created.

I recently started using Virtual PC 2004 to run some other OSs on my computer. I'm creating 3 different Win98SE setups for testing: #1 just a standard install, no updates, #2 includes all WindowsUpdate fixes (IE6 SP1, WMP9, .Net 2.0, patches, but no DX updates) #3 (once I fix the bloat of #2) will be the same as #2 except I will apply uSP2. As the title states, my standard Win98SE install was only like 230megs, I copied this setup, applied all the updates and now it's bloated to 820meg, any suggestions where I can remove some bloat? I've already cleaned: C:\Windows\Temp\ C:\Windows\Microsoft Downloaded Updates\ (I forget the proper name of the folder) I also set IE's cache limit to 10megs and cleared what was there. I suspect that .Net 2.0 might have left some residual install files, along with IE SP1 and WMP9 but I can't find them. I can't believe that a clean Win98SE /w all updates really needs 820megs. Please note I am NOT interested in removing applications or nLite'ing this setup. Thanks in advance

Well deleting C:\Documents and Settings\johndoe\Application Data\Mozilla\Firefox\ and C:\Documents and Settings\johndoe\Local Settings\Application Data\Mozilla\Firefox\ did not fix the issue, is there a more official way to remove profiles in 1.5? Google claims older versions of FF had a profile manager but I can't find it in 1.5, any other suggestions?

PHP icon, why not use one of the official icon/logos from: http://www.php.net/download-logos.php

Yes this is 1.5 final, I re-downloaded it to re-install it a couple days ago. As my original post described, I removed all registry and folders relating to this app, which means I removed the profile (which I also suspected as the problem). I don't use Gmail (nor the notifier), but realize this is a generic error that any app can cause.

It's pure paranoia and bs, I have deployed SP2 across 300 machines, not a single problem. Any new CD wll have SP2 integrated, which is what you want. The only diff between XP Home and XP Pro is that XP Pro allows a remote desktop sesson (Remote Desktop is MS's version of VNC aka PC Anywhere) Yes, but you really want 256meg of RAM, most people don't realize, RAM is the bottleneck, not CPU. Yes but you don't need media editon, just buy a TV TUner card, and it will include an app to record your TV into MPEG, MPEG2, or AVI. There are no advantages to using Media Edition as a desktop OS.

If you don't have any other users setup on your PC, MS has a utility that will allow you to run a program in a non-admin mode. Just follow this tutorial I wrote: http://thespoke.net/blogs/travisowens/arch.../05/476899.aspx

I keep gettng this error: ------ firefox.exe - Application Error The instruction at "xxxxxxxxxx" reference at memory at "xxxxxxxxxx". The memory could not be "read". ------ The"x" values change everytime. I get it very often, sometimes at the start of FireFox or within 5-10 mins. Bizarrely, on my wife's account on the same PC it works fine (same binary!). So I un-installed FF, removed the folders, deleted registry keys from HKEY_LOCAL_MAHINE and HKEY_CURRENT_USER (just for myself). I re-installed FF, and it's the same exact thing all over again. My PC is clean, no virus or spyware, on junkware, a nice clean XP SP2 /w all updates and 768megs of ram. I have never had problems with any other program before. Also, I run the same setup with the same plug ins at work with no problems.

Tsk tsk, sloppy programmers.

Thanks for the url, I don't know how I ever missed it. I find it surprising Flash 8 is smaller then 7, but whatever. I also notice they seperate it out into 2 install, IE only and Mozilla based browsers (Netscape, FireFox, Mozilla). What software? Provide a url please.

Acrobat 6? Are you using Win2000 or older? You know Acrobat 7 was a total rewrite and is much faster, this is especially true if you disable the extra plugins and get read of the "Acrobat Launcher" thingy. Although IIRC Acrobat 7 requires XP. Also, does anybody have the FULL (aka network install aka offline install) install of Flash 8? It seems Macromedia won't give it out without an "agreement", but yet they use to give the Flash 7 offline installer out freely (you just had to look). All I have is this 927k "web installer".

What you heard is correct, Win x64 CANNOT run 16bit apps. You'll have to run a VM (Virtual Machine ala VMWare or Virtual PC) in order to run 16bit, I'm surprised MS didn't provide a native VM with Win x64 to do 16bit. Unfortunately if it wasn't a priority now, it will never be, so I highly doubt MS will even add a native VM to Win x64 for 16bit. If you are talking about DOS based, then DosBox would be a great way to go, and technically you could run Win 3.11 inside DosBox too (I've never tried it). DosBox will allow you to mount NTFS drives too and make them work for your DOS apps. I only use DosBox to play my old Sierra and Apogee games on XP.

Well I said, you won't like the results. You can't extract singing from music or vice versa any better than if you took a picture of a wall and wanted to get what's behind the wall, the data doesn't exist. There is hardware that can do a slightly better job, and probably software too, but no matter what, the results are always going to be craptastic.

You have to realize that flat music formats (WAV, MP3, AAV, etc etc) have the sound meshed together just like how a multi-layered image gets flattened to GIF or JPG. There is a way, but you won't like the results very much at all, the ONLY way to remove singing from a song is to mute those frequencies. You can actually do this already with WinAmp, just use the equalizer and turn down the left-most and right-most bars, and keep working your way to the center until you remove most of the non-singing sound. Please note you WILL NOT have an acapella version of the song, nor will doing this in reverse give you a karaoke version. All you are doing is making the music or the singing quieter but you are also damaging the song's sound. Once you have done this, just use WinAmp's WaveOut playback to write a .WAV of the song.

I prefer the XP "eye candy" look, in fact I use the Media Edition "Royale" theme because it's got more shine than the default XP themes. But the only legitimate reason to disable it, is because your PC is low on ram or cpu power. Outside of that, anybody with 1+ ghz of cpu and 256ram+ that disables the XP themes is just scared of change. But what are you going to do when the XP theme is the "classic" and the '2000 Classic' look isn't even an option. One of you will somebody just create a theme that looks like 2000 Classic and people will use that :P

And after you create a shortcut to it, you can also right click the icon, pick properties and set a short cut key (ex: CTRL + ALT + S) Of course why don't you just lock your machine? (WinKey-L)

I have found no compatibility problems. You can safely install 2.0 over your 1.x setup. In fact if you have a fresh machine, you only need to install .Net 2.0 because it supports 1.x also. MS spends way more time than you think making sure the newest framework is 100% compatible.

Back in the mid/late 90s WD was one of the best consumer grade HDs on the market, but I switched to IBM once I found out they were much quieter and better. Back then WD was infamous for begin VERY noisey but IBMs were whisper quiet. Of course we're talking 10yrs ago but I highly doubt WD quality has "gone down the drain" and I'm sure they are still a good buy, but probably not the best buy. Now-a-days I buy Maxtor (they were total junk in the 90s) becuase they are very good drives and very cheap but I still have some IBMs I rely on still. Aside from a maxtor I've never had a HD fail (I'm seen a few Maxtors fail in the 90s so I'm not one of those "1 drive fails and the whole brand is crap" guys).

Well by default, doesn't XP install the driver file onto the PC anyways? Despite, I believe the newer SP2 version of the XP install contains more drivers, and you should also add some custom drivers on there for major things such as the ATI and NVIDIA drivers.

My favorite new plugin is called "T-Mobile USA" which puts a little T-Mobile logo and the number of minutes I've used in my plan. Considering how poorly my wife keeps track of her minutes (she talked for 23hrs last month!) this plugin is a life-saver. Unfortuntely as far as I know, there is no other plugin for any other phone plan. As far as a plugin that anybody can use, I recommend you get the Download Manager Tweak which gives you a better download window, more options. Although generally speaking, I dislike how the download manager takes control of your focus and pops up so perhaps you might want this mini non popup download plugin (I haven't used this yet) This plugin adds small icons to all of your menus, making things look more interesting. I'd like to point out that the less plugins you use, the better, at one time I was using over 20 plugins but realized tons of them sound neat, but I only used a few. Despite, this plugin lets you sort your extensions window alphabetically.

1. Panda AV 2006 (best spyware & virus blocker on the planet) 2. Firefox (/w some essential plug-ins) 3. Winamp 4. EditPlus2 (my fav text editor & simple coder IDE) 5. Photoshop 6. 7-Zip (WinRar is lame) 7. Forte Agent (for Usenet, not the best app, I'm just use to it) 8. SpyBot (just as a double check, but Panda has always caught everything so far) 9. Visual Studio 2005 (hey I'm a developer!) 10. Nero (it's bloatware but still the best burner) 11. EggTimer (keep track of time on a given task) I also have some custom reg files I use, one is a series of tweaks, the other is my IE search shortcuts (ex: by typing in the IE address bar "wiki blah" I search the WikiPedia for 'blah', I have made dozens of similar ones).

Here's a rough list of stuff I've listened to over the past 2 years (2004 & 2005) and I feel are good enough that other people should check them out. This is a VERY concise list, I listen to about 30-50hrs of music per week, no joke. Brackets imply specific albums. Synthpop: Iris De/Vision (new material, don't know if I like it or not yet) Depeche Mode (mixed bag now-a-days) A-Ha (their early 2000 stuff is great) Industrial: Coil NIN God Lives Underwater aka David Reily (whom recently passed away) VNV Nation Ohgr Skinny Puppy (only their latest album which is actually Ohgr) Misc: Current 93 (apocalyptic folk music) retro video game music & covers Various Electronic: Boards of Canada The Aluminum Group Prefuse 73 (hip hop meets IDM) Purple Motion (yes the same as the Future Crew musician) Tron [Movie Soundtrack] Alpha Conspiracy (the talent behind Iris) Hip Hop & Rap: Kayne West Neptunes aka NERD Missy Elliot [Cookbook] Paul Barman (because of the high brow approach to rap, BTW the mp3s on his site suck) Outkast Pop: Robert Downey Jr [The Futurist] Zero 7 Gwen Stefani [Love Angel Music Baby]

I should point out this isn't a bad thing, in fact it sounds like the team are following a solid coding practice. RC1 means every feature is finished and major bugs are squashed. Many shops release their software at this point and deal with the bugs later, but often RC1 implies there are no known bugs but further tested is still needed. When further testing (public testing) is done and the last bugs are found, they are fixed, RC2 comes out and the process repeats. When the RC2 bugs are fixed, we get RC3, and a few times I've seen software where RC3 was the same as the final build.

It seems we only disagree on semantics here, not the issue. Yes, Win9x can be mimic'd, it probably could have been mimic'd 10yrs ago (assuming MS wouldn't have sued). Oneday MS loses the ability/feasibility to sue over this mimicking. My point is (and has been) that MS doesn't have to release the source code, nor will they ever do so for many reasons.

Anybody still running Win9x in 20 years is either a historian or insane, stop sniffing glue people, Win98 isn't that great. Perhaps except MS isn't required to hand out the code, nor will they as they don't want other OSs to have Windows compatibility.