Gansangriff

I've found a nice little feature in Invidious, the alternative Youtube interface. You can download Youtube videos right to your Windows 98 computer. Tested with a TLS-patched Netscape. When going to a video site, it says "Download as:", then there is a wide choice of video and audio-only formats. Currently, the instance at invidious.snopyta.org makes a healthy look now. But that can change rather quickly, as instances come and go, and need to close down when the load on them becomes too much or Google changes their code to block them.

@Wunderbar98 Might I ask, which would be the cheapest computer in Canada? And where to get them? From a second-hand store? That wouldn't be the case here in Germany, getting computers from private people is often more affordable, because they don't sell them for profit. 15 Euros for a Pentium 4... or 4 and a half big macs (the burger) for that price. P4 computers of around 2002-2006 are currently at the lowest price point. Ebay-Kleinanzeigen is the most widespread site here (but it is Google-problematic). Here on the link, I did search for "PC" below 15 Euros. https://www.ebay-kleinanzeigen.de/s-pcs/preis:2:15/pc/k0c228 Doesn't look too bad, doesn't it? Of course the absolute cheapest way of getting a computer would be to own a scrapyard or know the owner of the scrapyard well. Zero Euros or Dollars can't be beaten.

Aye! The two Salix-machines are running well and setting sail for... well, whatever there is to reach. No other Linux ships in my fleet. They sunk on the way here or were put out of order. Oh. That lights up the question, why I switched to a Slackware-based system. Salix, once set up, that's pretty much "the solution that works all the time". Changes always have a possibility of failure. And they can't be tested 100% for everyone and everything. No matter of patches being made by a big company or a heap of individual programmers, scattered over the world. And I've seen Linux computers failing to boot after updates. Surprise! That happens! So don't try to sell me this as gold, because it isn't. However in comparison every Windows when it's new and needs constant updates has the stability of ooze to be honest. Let me play an angry customer: Whoa! Are you selling me this as gold now? Here is my Epson D92. Linux driver installed, prints, happy happy. Until one of the inks was finished. Now which one, tell me! 'cause this printer of around 2008 has no display. The Windows program did tell me that. On Linux, there is a command line utility, which has to be researched first. And doesn't look good. And is complicated. I just want to print! Now! (Angry Customer mode off) By the way, the Epson D92 was one of the last ink printers with Windows 98 drivers. A difficult recommendation, because it occasionally failed to recognise single ink cartridges, which had to be replaced then (expensively). I think the evil printer did this deliberatlely... My computers are needed for creative processes of all kind. The result counts and easy ways up to that are preferred. Some workflows are easier with Linux, some are better with Windows. I want to say, that I don't look after computers only for the reason of looking after computers. They are workhorses in a stable. Or ships in a fleet. Let's look back to the original question. Why there is a certain grumpyness about Linux here. Well, were those some examples? And again, you should consider yourself lucky with the hardware, that works well for you. I have made probably 50 Linux installations for me and other people and have dozens of examples, where things didn't work as well as with Windows. And that's why people are getting grumpy with Linux on the desktop.

Greetings to Poland. Could you try and reinstall AutoCAD? Maybe one critical file for the program got a "bit error" over the years. Bits are falling apart over time, unfortuneatly. Further testing: Stick another hard drive in your computer and re-install Windows XP and try to install AutoCAD then again.

Hehe, well... a certain amount of "luck" is necessary to have all the hardware at home being Linux-compatible, I'd say. One could look it up beforehand... but let's get fictional to show up a problem of hardware detection. There are these revisions having similar names like T80, T80A, T80B, T80v2, T80v2.5, T80v2.5-2008, T80v2.5-2009, of which half was being being produced in China, and the other half was being prouced in Taiwan, but the the Taiwan model had a replaced chip that has no Linux driver, while the China model had the good chip until a certain year... It can get incredbly confusing to look these things up for Linux compatibilty. No, I'm done with this hide and seek. Of course this is an exaggeration of the problem of not properly naming devices. And it was an exception happening with rather cheap hardware. Maybe proper companies behave more consistent? Solution for scanners: Get 3 old scanners for nothing from somewhere, one will be likely to do the job. I want a solution that works all the time! And that's the brute force method of hardware choice. Fortuneatly my first scanner was a good one, so the procedure could be stopped after one scanner, but WLAN cards, as I said, have some in stock for your upcoming laptops. I'd suggest to new Linux users to use the Xfce desktop at first, and if that runs super perfectly smooth and becomes to look "boring" or "eeek, 90s" then try out more ressource-heavy environments like KDE or similar. Or experimental stuff like Ubuntu and Fedora. Testing a lot is important!

Wouldn't it be better to use Windows 98 in a virtual machine? Because the laptop is quite new, and Windows 98 drivers won't be available. But a VM wouldn't have the best performance for testing Minecraft.

Once, I was propagating Linux even stronger too, writing articles for my local Linux group. One was titled "Linux needs less energy". The testing computer was a Pentium 3 with 600 MHz, and it needed 44W in idling mode under Windows XP. And under Linux... it was just 34W! Of course that's only half of the story, because after moving the mouse and using the CPU, they both had an equal energy consumption. And Windows XP wasn't the most friendly choice for that old computer, too. But it served the Linux propaganda well! I'd conclude that a successful Linux installation depends on the luck to have the right hardware. Salvaging the WLAN cards from scrappy laptops is therefore important, because it can happen with newer hardware, but with older hardware too, that there is no compatible Linux driver available for the WLAN card. Gaming is more optimised on Windows. DirectX looks like a pretty strong graphics API. I currently got into Supertuxkart on my power Linux machine (which is a small mini PC with integrated Intel graphics...), running it on the lowest settings. Some games on my Windows 98 machine looked better, with a quarter of the CPU power! Same goes for GPU memory. LibreOffice... this will never hold a candle to Word 97 in terms of efficency. I remember using it on the bespoken P3, wasn't great, lagged around. Hey, of course I can wait 1 second for my keystroke to respond, but that's not nice. OpenOffice, which is basically an older version of LibreOffice, would have been a better choice. For Salix users, there is a sperate package in the repositories. However using Linux is more important than complaining, therefore I take all the disadvantages, that Linux clearly has, and try to build my way around them. That's only possible with a certain amount of autonomy to gather informations through the web. But the empire mustn't win!

Hey! But hard drives have fallen out of fashion, haven't they? Nobody wants to use them anymore, because they perform slower than SSDs. Obviously Windows 10 might be too much with a standard HDD, at least those were the rumours. If there is one piece of tech that should be easily accessable, it should be classical hard drives. Let it be 10 years old and only have 100 GB (maybe a smaller sized notebook hard drive). You'll never use the whole space if you're not a pro-gamer, playing current games with 10 GB of patches every week, or if you're mining the Chia coin, or building up a video archive. Finding hard drives is easy. Pick up a broken laptop or have a look inside a A3 photo copier. I wouldn't continue to work with a hard drive that starts failing and has bad sectors. That's the beginning of the end of that drive. Same goes for USB sticks or floppy disks. Coming back to the title of this thread: What change (in terms of hard drives)? The only constant are my 20 year old Seagate hard drives, the one with a fish drawn onto it. That must be one of the reliable Seagate models. I've stuffed these computers three times in a moving van, travelled across the country, and these 30 GB hard drives are still in operation. Hopefully they'll do another decade.

@Mr.Scienceman2000 Yes, Salix as a niche-Linux can lead your path to dependency hell, if the package isn't officially available. Maybe have a peek at "AppImages", the new hot stuff, that have bundled everything alltogether. Might work, too!

@Wunderbar98: Dillo feels a little bit unfinished to me, but its good to have its lightness as an option. What about Netsurf on your system? And if the PC would be even older, what about w3m, text browser with mouse functions? Maybe as a hint, if your dual-boot breaks somehow. Then I insert a Puppy-Linux Live CD, which has the menu entry GRUB4DOS somewhere. It installs a rather simple looking bootloader for you. In case the current bootloader got messed up or misconfigured. On Linux, you have to have "luck" with your hardware. Scanner might not work, wireless card is not recognised, printer may lack features... it depends on the things in use. Fortuneatly, all this can be tested with a live CD. (or a live USB system, which allows trying out Linux first before installing it) But no, for me, the driver situation was slightly more problematic on Linux than on Windows. And then we have all the different distros. The choice is overwhelming! I started with Lubuntu 14.04. Now, we have 20.04 as LTS, but oh dear, what have the developers been doing? Important functions are missing now, that were present back then. Give me a menu to reinstall the languages, please, like on Xfce desktops! If the current Lubuntu would have been my first meet-up with Linux... life might have been totally different and I wouldn't have put a plush penguin looking out of my window at all! Meeting up with a local Linux user group was the right choice for me. And now I've ended up with Salix, Slackware-based. 32-Bit computers to the front, you're still needed! Linux was worth my time. It can be a pain, but it empowers the user. We need to learn to suffer more! The big companies are using convenience to catch us!

I have a mouse story for you. You can repair broken parts with psychology, trust me! Well, at least sometimes. It happens to me since a decade or so. The allmighty reliable horse, the Windows 98 computer of my parents, being the main computer in their house from 1999 to 2011. With the original keyboard and mouse. Nowadays, this specific computer is switched on like every quater year. I as a user of different keyboards and mouses have to adapt to my former keyboard, the very same keyboard, on which I taught myself typing through writing down Formula One racing results from books, using the same keys which my 5-year old hands touched many, many years ago. The mouse was heavily used too, and the right button doesn't click perfectly anymore. Right-click... doesn't work. Click harder... doesn't work either. Click softer... ah! Menu opens up! We have a result! So oneself adapts to the "clicking" point of the mouse, being able to use it again. Also, the very specific location, where the finger hits the mouse button, is important. This procedure repeats itself since 10 years now, but the mouse just doesn't want to give up! And after try-and-error, it's useable again... repaired with psychology. Question: Why did the right mouse button wear out quicker? The left one was used more often I think! Maybe the mouse got dropped badly. Fun-facts: The keyboard is not performant enough for my stakkatos of keystrokes in games like Grand Prix 2 or Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 3. The old keyboard actually feels very poor and used, compared to other keyboards. But every time I get back to it, give me a day and I'm back in the rhythm. And finding out how to "repair" a ball-mouse through scratching the dirt and dust off the inner wheels was quite a rewarding feeling I recall as a kid. Might have been my start to get deeper into computers.

Your situation with the Iphone 5S sounds like Apple being dodgy as usual with technology, that they don't want to see around anymore. For work, I got some dated Android phone of a college, which is a 4G-capable phone. The 3G mobile network is already shut off in Germany to save costs. So this smartphone uses 4G plus 2G as a fallback in rural areas, as this is what is available for now. So that smartphone is operateable, despite not being a brand-new 5G thing. Of course 4G will bite the dust sooner or later in your area, when the telecommunications companies are satisfied with the 5G network. Maybe you could take the SIM card out of the Iphone, go and meet someone in your local town who sells a phone so that you can test it beforehand... however the SIM card size must be the same.

The scrap vulture in me doesn't invest any amount of money in this flat technology. Just wait for someone you know to have a smartphone in stock, that isn't needed anymore. And then you can save a lot of money. And you also don't have to worry about getting the wrong model, as no big investment was done! At least the 2G EDGE network is a fallback too, but the web browsing speed will probably not be your taste. Ehm... you still have 2G in your area, right? If you neither want to support Apple nor Google, maybe Jolla with its Sailfish OS is worth a look. But as these devices are quite rare and the prices for used phones are still high. How was the battery life of your old iPhone 5S? Did it got the battery replaced already? Please correct me, if I'm wrong, but that model didn't allow you to open the case I think. But skilled people could do a battery replace even if the company tried everything to throw stones in their way. Of course life would be easier, if the battery could be exchanged by hand. All I can say is that my mobile phone is 13 years old and runs on its third battery now (replaced this year). I'm glad that the phone companies opened up their devices in the past, but now? It's difficult to replace a battery on your own. Depends of course how long you plan to use your phone.

Windows XP is still raising some dust. Is it fair to say, that the Pale Moon developers freaked out by some stubborn Windows XP users? See, that's the power of an 20 year old operating system. This statistic still looks valid: https://gs.statcounter.com/os-version-market-share/windows/desktop/armenia In Armenia, according to Statcounter, the majority of computers runs with Windows XP. Can someone please tell the people of Armenia about all new developments for their machines, new browsers for Windows XP and the forums connecting all XP users all over the world? I only got back to XP after being dissatisfied with newer developments. The fact that companies deliberately break their own products was a harsh truth for my youthful mind. Then, around 2014, a wild Compaq Deskpro with 1 GHz was offered to me, the one with his Windows 98 computer, let's give him an upgrade, someone must have thought. Windows XP is the right choice for that kind of Pentium 3. And so I began to discover my former operating system again. It is the optimum of capability/performance/disservices vs hardware requirements. But celebrations aside, the evil showed its fangs already around XP... forced online activation of the license key is just one thing. How lucky I feel to have found a strange copy of Windows XP from the university CD trash bin, which just can be fed some XP key (found on some sticker on an abandoned desktop probably). Windows 98 has less disservices, but is less capable too. Even a small Linux needs a more powerful computer to achieve the same things as Windows XP, but if the CPU and GPU power is there, it opens up the internet more (for badly designed websites of course, which we unfortuneatly encounter sometimes, but it's unevitable). Depending on the situation, Windows XP has its place on my desk.

Ehm... here, that might be useful for the Windows 98 users with their nice browsers: A Frogfind opensearch plugin. The main frog of Frogfind unfortuneatly didn't notice my mail, showing it to him. So I thought you might find it useful, to be able to access a search engine from your old browser, that understands Opensearch plugins, like the old Firefox, Netscape 9 and Retrozilla. The Frogfind plugin can be found on my home page at gansangriff(dot)de(slash)frog.htm. It actually uses the search results of Duckduckgo. Might not be heaven's sanctuary, but at least not evil Google! Maybe another small search engine is worth looking at? Maybe Mojeek (https://www.mojeek.com/) does actually find at least something for you. In fact, Frogfind would be much more useful on much older computers than Windows 98 machines. However Opensearch might be worth looking at, as it makes browsing the web more efficent. But one thing about this Opensearch standard is very strange! Amazon developed it! And if you alter the little note to a9.com in the plugin itself, the plugin doesn't work anymore. Why is that link crucial for the plugin to work? All I found in the official documentation was, that "it is important, without it you could get an error message indicating, that Firefox could not download the search plugin-in" and an error message appears. That's a pretty poor explanation! @Wunderbar98: Let me know, if you're in Europe one day. One of the trash-picked Windows 98 computers here has no use case for me. You could have it... Similar to the slotcar race computer, I found an old Windows 98 compter for time-keeping on a rental kart track. It looked very dusty and probably wasn't serviced in the last 20 years.

There was some good discussion about the Intel Management Engine in the "Capacitor Plague Thread": Some boards made in 2006 have the Intel Management Engine already.

Linus Thorvalds! I think he uses being raised "Finnish" wisely as a reason to be able to speak up more directly. It's all due to the cold weather! You can't afford to be sensitive I guess! For me, problems with graphics cards are the most common reason for a badly performing Linux installation. Some models don't have a good driver at all on Linux. On desktops, you can exchange the graphics card, but on laptops, you might be unlucky with what's built-in. Fortuneatly Live-CDs show problems with the graphics driver beforehand. With all the advantages that Linux has, the graphical performance on the desktop is far off what an old Windows can do. No problem if enough GPU power is there, but we are speaking here about 15-20 year old Windows 98 computers with a dual-boot option. Very important on my low-end computers was the option to disable drawing the window when pulling and dragging it across the screen (which is possible in Xfce for example). The Windows 98 or Windows XP had no performance issues with that option, drawing the window fluently on screen. It's 20 year old stuff, I know, but is it that foolish to expect improvements in modern developments? Okay, it's not all bad: Tabbed browsing in the file manager, sticky windows, mutliple desktops. Xfce on Linux is nice to use, but why the heck does it need so much power compared to Windows XP? @Wunderbar98: What's your experience with the graphical performance? Are you happy with your Linux installations compared to the Windows on the same machines? ...writing these words on a CRT monitor. They are fantastic for making an old computer setup look even more odd. Big monsters. Sounding like blowing up every time they are switched on by their massive button. Shaking the whole electricity grid. Heating in the winter (no energy is wasted). And then the "Shhhhhhhhh" when being switched off, sounding like the waves of the ocean, ending a computer session on a calming note. But unfortuneatly, the LCDs are the more practical choice it looks like! Still, my beauty award goes to the CRTs. Currently, the prices are very low for CRT monitors and you can still get free working scrap when searching for it, but these times will be over soon, when people have cleaned up their basments from these bulky monitors.

Do you have a newer computer ready to set up the router on the web interface? Or is it just about connecting the old Windows 98 machine with a LAN cable to the router? That will work, LAN cables are old stuff, but maybe the web interface is too complex to configure everything with Windows 98. Does it have to be a little USB stick or would you be fine with a router which has a SIM card slot? Also consider that the 3G network will be shut off in some years if they haven't been already. Here in Germany, you would fall back to 2G (EDGE), which is just very slow. If you would head for old hardware, it should support 4G. Some countries have shut off 2G too, so that has to be checked for your region.

Well, a personal archive of the very interesting things of the internet circumvents the possibility of removal... I can't keep everything, my "big brain" hard drive only has 120 GB, but if you have at least some interesting files stored, everyone can throw them onto a big heap and that's the old internet! Well, part of that at least. Maybe, some day, the computer freaks have to set up their own wireless router, participating in the local city mesh network. But that will be called "illegal" then, so routers will be hunt down by drones searching for "unauthorised" electromagnetic waves... What's left will lack the transfer speed, if the "offical infrastructure" of wires can't be used. The skill of optimising file sizes will be important. The only online game will be Nethack. The underground video portals will transmit their movies as 5-second GIF, no previews, only direct download. IRC should be doable...

Bye, bye, GomPlayer! It flew off my hard drive last week. The old VLC 0.8.6 uses more codecs it feels like. And it plays DVDs so nicely. Unfortuneatly some DVDs have a bigger capacity with a higher resolution, so that they are too much for the old computer. Animes are better too, as they don't look too different when skipping frames. Windows 98 and multitasking... of course it isn't perfect, but if the programs in use are good ones, nothing holds you back from opening Winmap 2.95 for listening to music, a photo editor (PhotoImpact for example), a couple of folders, Word 97 or Notepad++, WinSCP for making FTP connections and a web browser like Netscape at the same time! The old Winamp is the most important program in that heap, because before that I used something called "ProFiler" for listening to music. That program was capable of much more, but was truly inefficent for listening to music... For a good performance, don't mind maximising your RAM, too. Old SDRAM is at the absolute low-point of price now. I optimised my setup, put in only the best RAM that I had (and that the mainboard supports), and got like a 8% speed boost in compiling my programming scripts.

This all sounds, like new technology isn't working at all. Being too dependant on other factors will make in unusable indeed! Blow the dust off your old machines, maybe they are the future? Might be some ARM processor either. Hopefully the companies of Intel and Microsoft collapse soon. They work too much against their users. @Mr.Scienceman2000: Maybe you can use the web to gather some people around you for real-life "Face-2-Face" activities. I currently set up a card club as a non-digital activity, got some people invited to playing cards after work. This game requires too much focus and concentration, so there is no room for a Smartphone nearby. Might feel good to not sit in front of a computer "all" the time maybe. Although I'll still like to use the Windows 98 machine most of all my computers. I was creating an OpenSearch plugin for FrogFind last week with the old thing! Unfortuneatly the developer didn't reply on my mail to put in this fantastic technology in use so far...

The "first" computer system of oneself, always something special. This is, how you learned the world of computing. Despite people being capable of learning new things, the things you learn at a young age become an instinct. @Mr.Scienceman2000 But isn't that screen resolution of 800x600 a bit low? The text and the icons are very large. I could only use that when sitting 2 meters away from the screen!

Maybe a comparison between AntiVirus and vaccines: My Windows 98 machine runs well without. My body's own machine as well. Never change a running system? Works for me at least! @UCyborg: Maybe you have to consider going to another country, where your freedom is still being respected. It won't become a dystopia everywhere. Considering the topic of viruses and Windows 98, KernelEx not only enables some newer programs to run on Windows 98, it also enables some viruses to open themselves. That's to consider when testing viruses on Windows 98 computers. I only had a virus once on a Windows 98 computer when it still was a supported operating system by Microsoft, so around 2006. With an AntiVirus software installed! The reason is simple: I was a stupid schoolboy not knowing how to use the internet properly. My mistake, but a worthy experience too...

Oh no! You're right! This computer has the i945 chipset with the Intel 82801 ICH7 southbridge, which has the first version of the AMT installed. Thank you for pointing that out to me, because I was just relaxing on the production year of this Acer Veriton 6800 and Richard Stallman saying something like use a computer of 2007 and earlier. *sigh* I have to work more precisely.

I won't get away from Pale Moon either, because their product is a proper browser, but after seeing this war unfolding... now, I regret giving them some money at one point. And I've quit their forum, too. What a missed opportunity to advertise Pale Moon as that ressource-easy that it can even run on an 20 year old Windows XP machine. With a slogan like: "Look, this scrap computer runs Pale Moon. Then yours can run it, too." In Germany, we say something like: "If the enemy is known, the day has structure." This whole action wasn't rationally thought. There is no threat from the tiny amount of people running the XP browsers. It's just to be able to use laws. But laws aren't useful all the times! Dammit Moonchild and Tobin! Which advantages do you hope to get through shredding the Mypal project? Roytam and Feodor2, I'd like you to tell the community about this if you have to get involved in any kind of legal troubles. Maybe some money can be thrown together to a reasonable sized heap then to absorb the financial impact. Of all the projects, your browsers are the most important programs for the long-abandoned operating system to be able to use them as daily drivers.