TravisO

The stats I url'd are web traffic frm a company that samples a very large amount of data from other sites (they mention how many hits to their counter mechanism). So if somebody jumped on Vista and quickly gave up, they would have little to no affect on the stats.

I've read that all you need is C:\Windows\win.com from Win 3.x or Win 95, but I've never tested this myself.

From experience, these are the best stats (most broad) I can find, and I've been watching them for about 6yrs now. It seems Vista is putting a dent in the 98 world, and while it may not apply to the kind of people that go here, but I wanted to point out that previously Win98 leveled off at 3% user base, but as of this month, it's gone down to 2%. Now the month is not over and the stats can be wrong (they're viciously rounded), but I thought you guys might find the figures interesting. URL: http://www.thecounter.com/stats/2007/February/os.php Of course I'm talking about the masses here, not power users, but I'm guessing anybody that was holding onto their Win98SE is finally starting to make the jump to XP or Vista. I once read in the past that the average person doesn't buy a new computer unless their ghz is 1/3rd of the fastest advertised machine out there. Considering that CPUs have been focus on multicores instead of flat out ghz, I can see why it's taken so much longer this generation. To the uneducated user my 6yr old XP1700 (1.7ghz theoretical) box doesn't seem very slow compared to a 3.2ghz box, even though 6yrs has passed since I bought it. So to repeat my point, I think Vista is finally taking the last of the casual (or perhaps cheap) Win98 users and converting them and I fully expect the user base to hit 1% or less by the next college season (August). PS: I'm not trying to create flame-bait or troll, just want to hear some observations & theories on the matter.

I agree, use Winamp 2.9 or 2.91, I forget the last official version of 2.9x. Also as a FYI, there were some beta 2.9x that were like 2.95 or so, these ARE NOT 2.9x, they are actually betas for 3.0, stay away from them. Also, you should actually find an installed copy of the newest version of 5.x and copy the codecs from it and put them in 2.9 which will give you better & faster support, it might even be lighter on ram, who knows. The files I'm talking about are in: C:\Program Files\Winamp\Plugins\ all the in_*.dll files, just copy them into your 2.9x setup. I've tested this, and it works, but I didn't do ram or speed comparisons fyi.

Let me sum it up with this (poor) analogy: It's kind of like living on the beach and you hide an unmarked key to your house in the sand. Is that a possible security problem, yes, but should you be worried, no. Win98's lack of security updates relating to non IE things are a mixed blessing. The truth is, I'm sure there are many bugs left with the Win98 networking, but the simple truth is, hackers & security experts aren't wasting their time with exploits for 10yr old OSs. They are only concerned with server OSs and XP & Vista, they aren't taking the time to play with the 9x stack anymore. The only reason new 9x flaws are found is because something a hacker discovers in 2003 or XP happens to also exist in 98 as they most likely tested the exploit out in a Virtual PC session just to see if it works. So realize that possible flaws might still exist, but they won't be found because nobody is looking for them, so it happens to make Win 98 secure.

I've previously avoided 8.x because of the huge ram footprint, which was somewhere in the 30mb range where as 7.x only took about 8mb of ram. Does customizing/gutting the installer help? Does anybody that took out a bunch of items care to say what 8.1's ram usage is when it's loaded? I do want to run the newest version, but I want to remove the feature bloat I don't need, I just need IM, not games and such.

Actually it is that fast, even on my old P4 HT I can run Vista very fast on VPC2007, as I currently do. You're forgetting that an OS doesn't use much CPU, especially when idle. So say if you're running XP then swap over to 98, when XP is sitting idle it won't be doing anything so it will be very fast. Despite, I only brought up VPC2007 as I assumed you needed 98 in order to open these old files, if not, then forget about 98 and just stick with XP I've ran across these kinds of people in my life, once in awhile they're absolutely valid in disliking IT. I've seen IT shops so arse backwards running 4 different vendor LDAP servers, all of which have to be logged into and synch'd, with a dozen mainframes with heavy usage of Novell. But if the only problem this group's boss has is that IT demands he runs XP, then I can absolutely say he's the trouble maker who thinks he knows more about computers than the computer people do, and he's dead wrong.In one way, he's right, Win98 was great, it worked well, but he obviously doesn't understand the lack of driver support of newer hardware (which excludes him from HT, multi cores cpus which are very efficient and substantially faster). I should point out that Core Duo is Intel's biggest innovation since the original Pentium, which is now 13yrs ago, a lifetime in computer terms. The fact that Intel canceled all other CPU production (even Xeon cpus) lines to replace them with Core 2 based CPUs really goes to tell you how much better they are, heck even the upcoming Celeron is Core 2 Duo based along with all their proof of concept supercomputers. Anyways, my earlier point about the CNC machines was to leave them be. Let an old 98 box control them, and give the workers XP boxes on their desk to work on the files/data. I understand that using DOS based for the CNC is cheap/free, but realize it's because nobody wants DOS based. He has to realize that one day (and in my opinion that was a couple years ago) he needs to upgrade. Despite, I'm not going to inist you upgrade the CNC controllers, I'm only concerned about the employee's workstations beinc crippled with Win98 limitations. I know this is a 9x friendly forum, but I really insist 98 isn't cutting the cheese anymore for work needs. It has it's uses, and in my book I even say 98SE is the 2nd best OS Microsoft ever made, I run it on some setups I have, but I really insist it's not for business grade setups.

Well you could go with VB6 as it's not very bloated and wouldn't be too hard to write an app in. 32mb is a pretty serious limitation and I think you should really considering bumping that box to 64mb, it will be well worth the money.

Whenever I want to know which card to get, I always check out Tom's Hardware's "best video card for the money" article, which lately has been updated EVERY month http://www.tomshardware.com/2007/02/06/the..._for_the_money/

Cons: 1. USB storage costs more per gig than CD/DVD 2. USB is slow 3. USB has a limited amount of read/writes Pros: 1. I can't think of any pros, it seems to be you've fallen to victum of "newer is always better" which isn't the case in this scenario.

I work in the IT industry and if I saw your suggested setup come across my desk, I would drag you behind the building and beat you with legacy mainframe hardware. Then put you in a requirements gathering 101 class. So have the employees run Virtual PC 2007 (which is free) with a Win98 session & the old software so they can convert them, or have a couple old boxes lying around just for conversion. Don't cripple the entire setup just because SOME clients are using the old software. Keep in mind pretty soon they won't be, and the company you're at will be the one with a new setup running old stuff! Ok so don't touch those machines, you shouldn't be touching those anyways. There isn't something crazy like the CNC controlling computer is also somebody's workstation, is it?! If they are concerned with these boxes, it's time to upgrade to a Windows (or Linux or whatever) solution by now. Windows 9x came out almost 12yrs ago, time to upgrade.Considering what you want, I really think you should stick with Win XP here, sorry 9x people, but I think this guy is barking up the wrong tree for what the company really needs. Most importantly, going with XP will allow you to get them a "high performance" cpu, a Core 2 Duo. From experience, they will be happier if they run XP and a good stable setup. It's up to you to get their head out of their arses and give them a proper setup, which is what they really want anyways, they just don't realize it.

We're talking about Vista correct? I would recommend you let Task Scheduler continue to run.

I'd be more impressed if it has support for MS Powershell... at least then you're using a real (see: usefull or unix style) command prompt.

You won't be able to get people interested unless you have a functioning example, even if it's buggy or slow. You have to "wet their tongue" before they'll want to drink.

.. ignore this ..

The memory column in Task Manager CANNOT BE TRUSTED, if you want the true value an app uses, get System Internal's Process Viewer. Yes, the first instance of a .Net app that runs will use 10+mb of ram, and if you look at task manager and run a second instance, that will say 10+mb as well, but if you use a proper tool like Process Viewer, you'll see that it really uses like 2mb of ram, or less. The problem is Task Manager takes shared memory and assigns it to each process, so instead of 10 .Net apps uses 10+mb each, it's really 1 using 10+mb and then 9 more using 2mb each. If this still seems like a lot, keep in mind as .Net becomes more and more popular, the .Net framework will be running all the time, especially in Vista. Heck I would even consider it a smart "hack" in Vista with 2gb of ram to force the .Net framework to run at bootup so that when you do launch a .Net app, if that's even possible. On another note, just grab that free copy of Visual Studio 2005 Express and code away, it's a great IDE, I've yet to see a better IDE since Delphi, which is actually made by the same guy. Embrace .Net, it's very popular in business and it's best to stick with the skills that pay your bills. But if you absolutely have to write a tiny footprint app, well Assembly is your best bet (writing Windows apps in assembly is for masochists) or perhaps C/C++.

In case you don't know, you can do a simple trace from DOS by typing: tracert <servername> in your case, you probably want tracert cnn.com and see where the request fails. You might want to try this more than once, sometimes I've seen a trace die on requests that work fine in a web browser. But the truth is, overall you're somewhat screwed, and if you want the problem fixed, you need to email your ISP and file support tickets until they fix the issue. PS: I'm 99% sure a DOS tracert will NOT use your proxy settings, so it will always use your ISP's DNS servers to begin the trace.

The only reasonable explanation is the problem is with the DNS servers your ISP is using. I believe when you use a proxy, the proxy server is handling the DNS resolution, which is working fine, but your ISP's DNS is screwed up and isn't responding to your CNN page request.

Actually DFS will work great if you're network is setup so that both servers are route-able to each other. Here's some decent articles you should read: http://www.west-wind.com/presentations/loa...Windows2003.asp http://www.windowsnetworking.com/articles_...ile-System.html http://www.microsoft.com/technet/prodtechn...s/iis6perf.mspx I use to have a 2 server web farm using load balancing, so the servers couldn't route each other, so I had to use a 3rd server that would serve as the master and then it would execute a RoboCopy script every 5mins and dupe file changes from the 3rd server to both web servers.

TweakUI and it's on Microsoft.com, there's a version for each version of windows, here's the XP page: http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/downloa...ppowertoys.mspx

This is a long shot but open up this file in a text editor and see if there's an entry for the US CNN page, and if so, get rid of it C:\WINDOWS\system32\drivers\etc\hosts PS: that's a file with no extension, not a folder

Install IE7 and forget IE6 exists. What you want to do is irrelevant, IE7 is substantially more secure than IE6, anybody running IE6 needs to get their head from their backside and breathe a lung full of reality And if you dislike IE7 that much, go run FireFox, but please upgrade to IE7 if you care about your PC's security.

If it's any help, here's a command for MS PowerShell (MS's equivalent of a Unix shell) that will take all files and sort them by size (ignoring folders) cd \windows get-childitem -recurse | sort Length > files.txt Of course PowerShell is a meaty install itself but you can always enable file sharing on your Lite box and install PowerShell on a meaty box and run the command on the file share. Despite, at least you have a list that you can run down and target the largest files.

Even if you can afford it, you wouldn't want that 100" screen, it's only 1080p, and that's vastly lesser resolution than a 1600x1200 screen.

Also keep in mind that the response time is not absolute, it's relative. What I mean is DO NOT THINK that the ViewSonic can update faster because it's a 5ms and the Samsung is 6ms. If you want to learn more read: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Response_time#LCD_monitors and make sure to read the link part about "Input Lag" Trust me, that Samsung is far superior to that Viewsonic and cheaper. BTW, all monitor mounted speakers are crap, I would never buy a monitor that has a pair. Also, I should point out I pasted the Samsung 204BW model, which was widescreen, and if you plan on rotating the monitor, then you probably don't want widescreen, they make the same model in a normal 4:3 layout, which is the 204B model http://www.shop.com/op/~Samsung_SyncMaster...96?sourceid=298