Fredledingue

Yes, for $90 you could expect a complete OS that could replace windows.

Thanks for your replies, but I wanted to know if there is a way to turn it off by default like turining echo off.... "If file exists then..." doesn't apply in this case because I'm annoyed by the "file not found" error with the DIR command.

If the XP vs. w98 debate is so boring and irrelevant, why is it always making the most active ttreads? Why is this debate so popular then? After 50 pages of replies (last thread on this topic had 50+ pages before it was locked down), and the continous re-appearence of such topic, you may ask yourself whether some msfn members have in interrest into this discussion and why. Not that I always want to put my 2 cents, but the XP vs. W98 cinfrontation alone is enough to fill a forum.

Link21, A firewall become an obligation with XP because of its legendary security holes. You think an OS is "good quality" as soon as it has an NT-based kernel or whatever else NT-based. It may be better, but in the case of XP, using NT kernel and architecture was not enough. Too many things made it the worse OS ever. Stable, yes, but at the price of so many other disadvantages that I even don't want to use it. Ironicaly a hacker has more control over your XP computer than you will ever have. It's very difficult to control and modify what's happening under the hood of XP. Just take a look at the list of the services and you see stuffs like this: service = "XYZM data flow control agent" So you click on "description" to see what it's doing and if you can disable it. The description is something like: "The XYZM data flow control agent is a service that control flow of XYZM datas. Application that requires XYZM flow control agent may not work properly if you disable this service." But the guy who is in the business, knows what he can do with it and manipulate your computer out of a security flaw in this service, while you even don't know if you can disable it and often you can't. "Services", is concept by which other poeple (virtual ro real ones) are managing your computer for you. XP services are virtual operators that control what the computer is doing without interracting with you most of the time. These service can be controled be a remote network administrator or a hacker or a virus. By contrast on w98++, it's the one who hold the keyboard that control the machine. As for programming, it's nearly impossible to exploit the specificities of an OS to make running apps faster. What the programmer you talked with means is that using pre-build XP libraries is more efficient on XP than using only 98-95 ones (on XP). But the best programmers will rely as less as possible on pre-build functions, and creates codes that does exactely what the application is supposed to do, and therefor create a cross system compatible software. Y! messenger is an example. I mean to get the same effect on the monitor screen, every program on any OS version will always send a certain amount of operations to do to the processor and a certain amount of binary datas to this processor. The skill of a programmer is to avoid useless flow of data and useless operations. You can do it sucessfuly on XP as well as on w98 as well as on Linux or MacOs. Link21, you should know that "stability" or "NT based kernel" doesn't mean "quality OS". There are other things to take in account. And stop saying that if we don't like XP, let's take 2000. It's like saying, if you don't like w98, use w95. No, the only chance is reactOS or alternatives like that.

Thanks for your help! I solved the problem by using XMSDSK from furd19_i.zip . But I had to add /t in the command line otherwise I still had the 4Mb limit. "Parameter /t can be used to tell the driver to allocate XMS memory from the top addresses instead of lower ones. Some machines under Win95 hang up when there's no free memory under 16 MBytes. It can be used too if you have problem playing sounds under Windows. ... "

No, not easily. In fact it never happened to me and I barely ever shutdown my computer normally. I just press the power button on the tower and that's it. I believe you can have a serious problem only if you do that while you defragment the drive possibly. In fact it never happened to me and I barely ever shutdown my computer normally. I agree. I'v never seen or heard of a corrupt Fat32 partition because of a hard shut down or a powercut. Theoricaly it can happens but in practice the risk is nearly zero. Link21 There is no "under the hood" or unkown libraries in XP that will give you even the slightiest performance gain. There are only new programs, some better, some worse. Some works on w98 some not. But all are designed to work firstly on XP platform and this for many years already. I don't know what you are hoping for, realy.

It's like cooking old grand-ma cakes in a new oven. Only taste better.

Add the lines in autoexec.bat reboot delete the lines. See BigOpenBox manual installation...

The fact is that a default install of w98; however relatively unsafe, is still WAY LESS vulnerable than XP with all the armor of firewalls, security tweaks, updates and antiviruses available. Practicaly nobody used a firewall until XP came out.

So Bill Gate announce to step down comes at the same time as support for w98 is ending... Coincidence? For me M$ is a dead company which is in the process of becoming an internet venture...unlike Google that used to be an internet start up and became a brick and mortar company. M$ reached a dead end street with his OSes and is trying to kick left and right with just about everything that makes a success before they realize it. They don't know what to do. There is no imagination upthere. So they copy what Google and Yahoo do. Bill Gate made a fortune by bundling a few licenced software into one or two suites. No it's done and it's over. Adding aero effects on Vista is not going to make a revolution at M$. And they didn't find anything better to do so far.

Did you upgrade from w98 to XP on the same AND unchanged hardware? Or did you add more ram in order to run XP? Because if you did so, you may have not need to upgrade to have a stable system. In fact XP is stable ONLY BECAUSE it requires 128 and because 256 is recommanded and because practicaly no one is running it with les than 512 Mb. Run w98se++ on a computer meeting the XP recommandations and ou will rarely see a crash. _______ Link21 Hate w98 as you want (you didn't test it on recent hardware and with the recent updates anyway) but ONE THING YOU SHOULD KNOW: there is no miraculous performance enhancement for XP only games or softwares. I understand that it's hard for you to admit it, but it's true. Games and softwares are designed only for windows XP already for several years now, and w98 has no influence at all on developpement. Developpers totaly ignore this OS. If some but not all, games works on w98, it's because there is nothing in XP that helps games to work better or faster. XP is in fact, not a gamer freindly OS. XP is stable only because is sucks resoucres out, at the expense of apps and games. That's why games will never run faster on XP. There is no hidden miracle in XP that could make things faster. Games and appps are slower on XP because XP sucks resources. A 3Ghz processor is still 3Ghz with w98 or XP whatever you do. the problem with XP is that true CPU use for applications outside the OS id at best (most services disabled) 2.5 Ghz, while almost full for w98. XP stability is based on permanent loop-checking. It's architecture is patches on patches. The core of XP is still w98. You will be amazed of the number of things that are the same in XP and in w98. The main change is NTSF... which is LESS reliable than FAT32 by experience. Dream on, Link 21, Pure XP software, are already all those you can find regardless of what some 2% of PC users do with w98.

Is it possible to disable the "file not found" error in Batch scripts? Thanks.

My father on an AMD Barton with XPSP2 installed got his PC not responding (Windows not starting, nothing loading) because a file was corrupted. At least with w98 you can always start in safe mode or at the very worse in DOS.

Not only it's pushing poeple to upgrade to XP, but also to buy a new PC to install this XP POS. They won't make an OS that make 2 years old computers behaving like recent dual-core ones. No, Never. Too much stake in the hardware industry. And about security it's laughable: 3 years of daily internet use without firewall or virus guard and I never caught anything. 2 weeks with XP+SafeXP on "full safety" setting but with accidentaly the virus guard uninstalled and AntiVir detected no less than 320 dll infected!

I'm supposed to have a 32Mb limit, but the practicable limit is 4Mb.

CLASYS Regarding WSH, the new installers check immediately if you have WSH5.6. If you don't: do it manualy and bye bye! In fact, because of this requeriment the installer is practicaly for w98SE+uSP since there are not a lot of n00bs and less n00bs who thought of updating WSH (who use it beside me?). (I should add this version check to all my scripts... BTW) And about Windows directory on drive F: (F: after f**k or what? ), or there is a bug in VBS or it should find it. There is a special code for this. What would be cool would be to add several hacks, different sizes for different OS flavors. One downside is that once you patched you can't have the dialog smaller than the huge one I provided! You can't resize it down! There are softwares like WinSize that resize it up, but they take some resource and blip a little bit because it take effect a few millisecond after the dialog appear in its defaut size. So patching is better. PROBLEMCHILD Scripts are low on resource... granted that they stop one day! If there is an infinite loop your processor will turn at 100% until you kill the task! But don't worry I'm careful to avoid that. Beside this danger, yes they stop all activity and clean all garbage they left in the memory once they finished their job. I'm currently working like crazy on the Installed File Checker that is full of errors. I went to sleep at 5 am, if I still can call that sleeping because of that. + all the day today. I'm realy mad on this one because I can't understand exactely what my own program is doing nor even understand why he is making such errors. My whife told me I should care about something else, so maybe I will look at the Windows Maximizer to change my mind. But I don't know if that's what my whife realy means...

I thought it was a good idea to put the internet files and the temp folder in a virtual ramdrive and with some imagination I will certainly find some geeky use for this. The problem is that it doesn't work properly with more than 4 Mb. If I set 5Mb, I do see a ramdrive of 5 Mb in Explorer, but programs won't be able to use it (access violation, disk full, file not found etc) Thiis the content of my config.sys device=C:\WINDOWS\COMMAND\display.sys con=(ega,,1) Country=032,850,C:\WINDOWS\COMMAND\country.sys Device=c:\windows\himem.sys DEVICE=C:\WINDOWS\EMM386.EXE ram DEVICEHIGH=C:\WINDOWS\RAMDRIVE.SYS 4096 /E I was reading that EMM386.exe was not the best... and of my autoexec.bat mode con codepage prepare=((850) C:\WINDOWS\COMMAND\ega.cpi) mode con codepage select=850 keyb be,,C:\WINDOWS\COMMAND\keyboard.sys e: md internet md temp SET TEMP=E:\temp\ Now does it make sens to do this in term of performance, except for the advantage of have all the files deleted when the computer shutdown? I think nowadays, processor horsepowers are the main factor for speed and disk write time is minimal. Anyway, if I could mount a virtual drive of 24 Mb in memory I would be happy, just for experimental purpose.

I tested it. It works ok on my w98se. It's doing basicaly the same as my patch combo. He sets "detail view" by default. It can be nice for some, but I don't like it and it's not optionable. You can set the desired height of the box but not the width. So if you want a wider box, use my patch. The author claims it works on almost every windows version, including XP I don't know if it useful to do that on XP. There are a number of bad programs and a number of good programs. It's just that you have to find them and test them. (With this site alone you can spend quite a bit of time testing stuffs. Reading this page will take you already two hours.) Look at the example above: one or two small details and the program is useless for me. I also did a system files checker while I'm sure that there must be a choice of freewares that does the same thing and more reliably but I didn't find any so far (except the preinstalled one). Same with calculators. I download and tried about 10 calculators replacement and ended up writing my own calc in VBScript (soon in HTA). 6 months later a guy published a new calculator executable with almost exactely the idea I had for the perfect calculator. Sometimes you think that dozen of programs are doing a certain thing, that seems obvious, just to find out that they are either payware, huge bloat, slow, invasive, etc or not exactely what you were looking for. TBS, I'm very happy to have created an installer in VBS. It's been a while I wanted to do that.

Ok, I made a better and safer installer! I forgot that many w98 machine didn't have WSH5.6. If I have time I will write more code in a batch file so that the installer works on all w98 systems. Note that's not a problem to use the patch because you will find the instruction to instal it manualy. download here 98lite users will be happy I thought about them!

Please check your WSH version. It should be 5.6. Downloadable on MDGx website, on microsoft website of course and if this link still works (nobody complained so far) the link is on my vbs page (see my signature). It's true that on the download page I didn't warn of that. I will do it this evening. Thanks for this information. I will write this too on the webpage and in the readme. I have no idea what you are talking about but you got an error then, as I understand, the system rebooted anyway when you were asked to and clicked "yes". Right? No damage I hope... Normaly the installer should find that without error. I beleive you don't have WSH5.6 but it would be interresting to test. Tomorrow I will post a test script for that, if you agree. HTH

A computer Guru whom I have the privilege of knowing personaly told me that XP is faster on the internet than w98++. Does it make sens? IME, I feel that the website server responsiveness is more important a factor in the speed I recieve the datas than my own system.

Alanol, How does WGA reacts when there is no connection or when datas are not received/sent? Are you still able to use your computer for example? Now consider that 100 millions PC has to conect to the M$ server everyday, that makes 36 billions connections per year. IMO I'm not sure that it was wise to do that. M$ customer center will be flooded with complains and questions from the 0.005% of error amongst the 36 bln connections. In all seriouseness I don't imagine that this is economicaly viable unless you resell or use some personal datas in the process. And make no mistake: 6 months after Vista will be released, they will "find" a security flaw that requires an internet update unavailable without WGA. Poeple who have pirated XP will stick with their pirated version. They will never give $150 (let alone $500 for pro) for XP or Vista whatever M$ does. If you want to sell a lot you have to be cheap or only those who can afford will buy.

M$ is shooting in their own foot with this one: Poeple knowing that will want free, pirated version of windows only because they don't like spywares. Poeple were already p***ed at the XP online checking after hardware change. So I don't know... IMVHO when you pay $150 for a software you don't want it to dial up and check if you realy have paid that much. Curiousely, free and pirated version won't do that. Maybe they don't intend to use the data other than for checking the validity of your installation, but the European commission will be happy to fine M$ another billion for anti-spyware law breach anyway.

Arrow, I assume (thought it's wild assumtion since nobody wrote it word by word), that the updates still not included in uSP2.1a are those listed in the first page of 98 FE + 98 SE + ME updates + patches + (hot)fixes here on this forum. Dowload the patches with "direct download" when provided by MDGx (thanks to him for his bandwith), to avoid the M$ webloat pages, that are often too cryptic, uselessly complicated and sometimes don't work. As a M$ customer you are supposed to use the embedded windows update wizard and ask no question. The M$ webiste is for developers, you know.