CamTron

I never use Internet Explorer on this machine, anyway, so would using IEradicator do anything useful? I use Opera 12.02 instead. One thing I have noticed, though, is that the freezing almost always occurs when a program is downloading stuff from the internet (like when I'm browsing the web or playing an online game), so I think it's network related. Would IE's presence cause networking instability? I must also mention that I connect this machine to the Internet using my Raspberry Pi as a wireless bridge since my modem and router are in another room. BTW, are there any good utilities available for Windows 98 to check the SMART status of my hard drive? This drive is about 5 years old.

Here are my system details: Hardware: Dell Dimension 4300 Chipset: Intel i845, 82801BA southbridge CPU: 1.5 GHz Pentium 4 (codename Willamette) RAM: 512 MB SDRAM Graphics: Nvidia GeForce2 MX 400 with 32 MB of RAM Software: Windows 98 Second Edition DirectX 9.0c KernelEx 4.5.2 Maximus-Decim Native USB drivers v3.6 Internet Explorer 6 SP1 Microsoft Office XP Professional Updates: Q242975 (Not sure why this is installed. I don't have firewire ports.) Q256015 (fixes the MS-DOS device name "con\con" bug.) Is it safe to do that? Powering off a computer by force can cause corrupt files since the OS can't clean up whatever it was doing.

Not sure what the problem is. Do you have the latest graphics driver for your card? You can see if dxdiag detects any problems with your graphics. It also says 256-color resolution, so you can try playing with the color depth and seeing if it works. Sometimes Alt+Tabbing out of the game and back in causes it to redraw itself. Since the system requirements say that it needs 1024x768, you might try hooking up an external monitor. If all else fails, try reinstalling the game. On an unrelated note, I just got SuperTuxKart 0.8 running smoothly on my Windows 98 machine!

It would be helpful to explain exactly how to do that.

I attempted to get GCC 4.8 (from mingw-w64) to run on Windows 98 by using Kext stubs to forward msvcrt:_fstat64 and a few other missing msvcrt functions to another msvcrXX.dll library version, and it seemed to work just fine. No harm to my system. However, I couldn't link anything because ld would abort and print out this "ld: asprintf failed" message. I wonder if side-by-side assembly could resolve msvcrt version incompatibilities.

I really believe that the oldest Windows OS you can install on that netbook and have a good experience is Windows 2000. Windows 9x simply lacks the drivers for most of your hardware. I was able to successfully install Windows 98 on my Eee PC, but I had no graphics acceleration, no sound, no ethernet, and no WiFi. The only drivers I was able to use were Bearwindows's VBE9x driver which got me out of 640x480x16 mode, and Maximus Decim's USB 2.0 driver which allowed me to use USB storage media. Now, there is a VERY slim chance that a Windows 2000 driver would work with Windows 98 if you hack up the inf files, since both OSes use the WDM framework, but probably not. I once tried that with a USB WiFi card, and it had loads of missing exports to ntoskrnl.exe and hal.dll, which don't exist in Windows 9x. There's a more recent version 3.6 of that driver, which raymond.cc provides a link for. https://www.raymond.cc/blog/how-to-install-usb-mass-storage-device-on-windows-98/

This is not something that happens particularly often, but when it does, it can be extremely frustrating. Every once in a while, I may be browsing the web, playing Doom, RollerCoaster Tycoon 3, or doing something else on my Windows 98 machine, and suddenly, the shell stops responding and everything becomes unusably slow. Most of the time, I can do the three-finger salute, kill every open application and Explorer, and the desktop respawns, and I can go back to what I was doing. However, sometimes the system becomes so unresponsive that it completely locks up. The screen becomes a still image, the mouse pointer doesn't move, and the keyboard doesn't respond either. Even pressing the power button on the front of the case does nothing. Ctrl+Alt+Del has no effect, either. It's as if Windows was just frozen in time. I once let the machine sit for two hours like that to see if it would finish whatever it was doing, only to come back with it still locked up as ever. As much as I absolutely hate doing this, I have no choice but to hard reset. I hold the power button down for 5 seconds to forcibly power off the machine, and then turn it back on and wait for ScanDisk to take its sweet time checking the disk for errors before Windows boots up. This happens maybe once or twice a week for me, but it's still infuriating. Has anyone else experienced things like this? Are there any ways to diagnose this when it happens and find the cause.

Hmmm... That little character shows up on every browser I use on XP, and even Windows 2000. On both Windows 2000 and Windows XP, I can type that symbol in WordPad using Microsoft Sans Serif and Tahoma, but it doesn't show up in the Character Map with either of those fonts. I think there's some low-level font substitution going on there which provides that character for those fonts. And the play icon shows up in the taskbar, too. yt_play_icon_tab.bmpyt_play_icon_taskbar.bmp

Thanks! Somehow, I didn't think of doing that. I just created a shortcut to devmgmt.msc on the Desktop and set it to "Run as different user". It's a lot to click through, and not seamless like XP, but at least it works.

Will clients for other cards work, or do they have some mechanism that refuses to run with another vendor's card? The one for my Atheros AR5007EG card on my Eee PC 1000HD supports most modern encryption protocols (like WPA2-PSK) and works just fine with vanilla Windows 2000, though the GUI is a bit meh. If you want to try it, extract this and run ACU.exe from the ACU directory.

Like many people, I use Windows with a non-administrator account, this tends to cause problems when I plug in new devices. Every time I plug in a new USB flash drive, mouse, camera, WiFi card, or anything that my computer hasn't seen before, I get this message: You do not have sufficient security privileges to install devices on this computer. Please contact your site administrator, or logout and log in again as an administrator and try again.Most of the time, I can just click OK, and ignore the message, and the device works perfectly fine without installing special drivers for it, but the only way to get rid of the annoying message is to log out, log in as Administrator, let it install the driver, log out, and log back in to my normal account. Is there a way I can allow my standard user to install devices, or even be able to type a password to allow the Hardware Wizard to run with Admin rights?

I'd like to test this, but is there an easy way to switch between 4.5.2 and the 2015 version to compare them?

There is definitely no shortage of browsers for Windows XP. At least for now, you can expect pretty much anything that runs on the latest versions of Windows to run on XP. One that I've taken a liking to is K-Meleon. It's a Gecko-based browser with a hugely customizable user interface and is much faster than Firefox, but lacks a few features. Opera is a great one I've used before. It's basically like a faster version of Chrome. Some lesser-known browsers that are available are SeaMonkey, Midori, QupZilla, QtWeb, Pale Moon, and Maxthon.

I don't find XP to be that limited with a non-administrator account. My standard procedure on any Windows installation is to create an administrator account, which I usually call Admin, and then a standard user account which is the one I use most of the time. You can just right click any executable (or msc, cpl, batch file, whatever...) and click "Run As..." to run it as an administrator. Even desktop shortcuts can be configured to always run under a certain account and they simply ask for a password when run. In the command-line, there's the "runas" command, but I find it so clunky and verbose that I just made a shortcut on the Desktop for an administrator command prompt, which works fine. (and Microsoft, please add a sudo-like command to Windows! ) It can be a bit annoying to type a password to run stuff as admin, but it's not something that one should need to do often.

Amen to that! If anyone is using XP (or any Windows version) with an administrator account, they're doing it wrong. One of our projects in my assembly language class this semester was to implement a virus (well, more like a crude piece of malware) for Windows. After installing XP, the user has admin rights by default. We were able to make a program that when double-clicked (with the default admin rights), it transparently wiped out the first sector of the hard disk (using standard Windows APIs) and made absolutely no indication that it was running. All the user sees is an hourglass cursor for a split second, and wonders why their hard disk is no longer readable after they reboot. I've been using XP on my laptop regularly since the end of support and can honestly say I haven't found any malware on the machine since then. I just scan every week by running AVG from a Linux pendrive. Almost all of the security of a computer depends on the user's activities. Setting your account to limited and only visiting safe websites is the best security measure out there. Antivirus programs should just be a safety net for the rare occasion that something slips through.

After reinstalling, I somehow didn't run into the problems I experienced last time. My machine now boots in under 30 seconds, standby mode works like it should, and I don't get random freezes or BSODs like I used to. I don't know what I did different. I don't want to mess anything up, so I won't install any hotfixes or patches unless I really need them. I'm pretty impressed by the USB Mass Storage support provided by the NUSB driver for Windows 98! I can pretty much plug in any flash drive, camera, SD card reader, digital photo frame, etc. and have it just work. I plugged in an external USB DVD drive and VLC was able to play DVD movies without any complaints. I've never used Windows 95 on a computer with USB ports, so I don't know how good the XUSBSUPP support is compared to that on Windows 98.

Ah, I figured it out! I was missing Windows Installer 2.0 (instmsia.exe), which I believe is necessary to install software from .msi packages. It can be found here. After installing that, Opera 12 installed just fine. It seems strange, because the Opera installer looks like a simple self-extracting installer and doesn't appear to use Windows Installer at all.

I've used Opera 12.02 many times in the past with Windows 98, but after reinstalling Windows on my desktop, I can't seem to get it to run or install. I downloaded the installer from here and set the KernelEx compatibility mode to Windows 2000 SP4, but when I run it, I get this error: Opera has failed to access or upgrade your profile. This may have occurred because your computer has insufficient resources available or because some files are locked by other applications. You may have to restart your computer before Opera will start again. I'm running Windows 98 SE on a 1.5 GHz Pentium 4 with 512 MB of RAM, so this is well more than sufficient resources, and I have barely anything running. I've run Opera before on this machine without any troubleRebooting does not help. I downloaded the file 3 times just to make sure it isn't corrupt, but I still get the error. I've tried Opera 11.64, and I get the same error. Extracting the setup files to a directory and trying to run opera.exe also produces same error. Right now, I'm stumped. Any ideas?

The latest GeoGebra 5.0 (just released May 12, 2015 ) works perfectly on Windows 98. However, it doesn't run out of the box because the bundled Java runtime is not compatible with Windows 98. However, there is an unofficial build of OpenJDK for Windows which you can download here. Delete the C:\Program Files\GeoGebra 5.0\jre directory and replace it with the one from the OpenJDK, and GeoGebra runs happily on Windows 98. GeoGebra does freeze up occasionally, even on Windows 7, so it's not the most stable program out there, but it's still my favorite algebra and graphing program.

I also need advice on updating Windows 98 SE, since I'm planning to reformat and reinstall my system after I fscked it up with Gparted to the point of not booting anymore. Before, I had no updates except for KernelEx and NUSB, and I was experiencing slow boot times and waking up from sleep mode sometimes left me with a blank screen, so I'd like to update my system. What's the easiest way to install all of the official Microsoft updates and patches for it? Is there some auto-patcher that works well, or should I just download all of them (or at least the ones with working links ) from here? Should KernelEx and NUSB 3.6 be installed after all of the patches and hotfixes, because they'll probably overwrite each other's system files?

Most of us who use Windows 98/ME know how great KernelEx is with getting more modern software to run, but I still wonder why KernelEx hasn't been ported to Windows 95. Are there just too many missing functions in Win95 that it would take too long to implement them in KernelEx?

This is a well-known conjecture known as Wirth's law. Software is getting slower more rapidly than hardware becomes faster. I've noticed this pattern time and time again. Opening a Microsoft Word document on Office 2003 on my old 2006 Pentium D takes no more than 3 seconds on a cold start. At school, we have Office 2013 running on 3.4 GHz Core i7 computers, and I see that splash screen with the flowing dots for at least 6 seconds before the document opens. As hardware gets more powerful, the programmers can get away with higher-level languages and layers upon layers of object-oriented abstraction. This is pretty much what the .NET framework is. A slow, bloated, object-oriented abstraction layer so that programmers can write code faster and more sloppily, and be tied to Microsoft platforms. And since Vista, the Windows OS has come to depend on the .NET framework. An interesting experiment: http://hallicino.hubpages.com/hub/_86_Mac_Plus_Vs_07_AMD_DualCore_You_Wont_Believe_Who_Wins

Hey everyone, I recently acquired a copy of Windows 2000 from a friend of mine who had a garage sale. I decided to test it out on my Asus Eee PC 1000HD, and to my surprise, it works very well, and runs faster than XP. All of the drivers I downloaded for my hardware worked perfectly with Windows 2000, except for the AsusACPI and Webcam ones. The built-in Windows ACPI driver works just fine, and I'm using a utility called eeectl to enable the CPU throttling and fan control. I don't care about the webcam since it has awful picture quality and I don't really have a need for it. However, it appears that the hotkey functionality is part of the asusacpi driver, so right now, most of the Fn keys don't work. The only ones that do work are the simulated numpad keys, the brightness control, and hibernate keys. Is there any generic driver or utility available for Windows 2000 that will allow me to configure the rest of them?

Wow! I also have a Win98SE machine with a GeForce2 MX 400 card, and I run Zelda Ocarina of Time in Project64 on that machine! (Great game, BTW ) I've never had texture problems at all with any 3D games on my machine. (Don't know what driver version I'm using, though.) I'm not the most knowledgeable person here, but if I had to guess, I'd think it's a DirectX issue. You can try opening up dxdiag and see if you have DirectX 9.0c installed. It's the latest version for Windows 98, 2000, and XP. You can have it run tests and create a log file, and see if it detected any problems. Does the texture issue occur only with PJ64, or does it happen in other 3D games and programs? Interestingly, I have noticed on my GeForce2 card (and may apply to other old Nvidia cards as well) that using OpenGL tends to give much smoother animations than DirectX, whereas on other machines (especially with Intel graphics) I tend to find the opposite. On games that allow me to select video backends, using the DirectX backend has a bit of screen tearing, while the OpenGL backend is silky smooth. The Glide64 plugin for Project64 gives excellent results on my machine. You might want to try that one.

Microsoft has recently announced that Windows 10 will be available on the new Raspberry Pi 2 released just this month. The Raspberry Pi 2 is still the same $35 price and small form factor as its predecessors, but now boasts a quad-core ARM Cortex A7 CPU @ 900 MHz and 1 GB of RAM! Windows 10 will be free for members of the Windows Developer Program for IoT. I'm glad to see Microsoft become involved with Raspberry Pi development. It will be interesting to see how this turns out. https://dev.windows.com/en-us/featured/raspberrypi2support