Fredledingue

I agree! How manytimes I made the mistake of making a shortcut instead of moving the real file! Especialy now, whe I removed the sparrow from the icons. Worse: it behave that way with multiple selection of files of every types.

No, it makes a difference, thought the biggest difference is between 32 to 96 (or 64). Rams are not alway compatible with each others and it's better to have no more than two modules.

That's it! Now we are changing the kernel is it still w98? Should it be recognized as NT-based (XP?!) ? Should we install versions "for w98" or for "XP"? Should the patch cheat installers by saying it's "XP" instead of 98? How will react the "XP/2000-only" software community? Aren't they gonna be puzzled? But awesome job anyway! Gonna test it soon! Thanks!

Wierd: I can take properties on 2 Gb files (avi) and it comes instantly. of course my machine is 10x faster than a 200mhz but still...

I must agree with that. That's the most popular topic on msfn. Looks like they don't dare locking them up anymore.

So why is it considered as suicide to connect an XP machine to the internet without a firewall, while I never caught a virus in years with w98? Sometimes I even wonder if I realy need an antivirus at all despite the wide range of websites we are visiting... So security updates for w98? Why? Do you XP users need some by any chance? ROTFLMAO! Link21, you are a maniac!

Petr, Is it for czechia or for the whole world? My guess is that in the US XP is at 90%. IMO if XP is so popular, it's because almost every PC is sold with XP pre-installed. So poeple think XP is so great and so stable because they compare XP on a new computer with w98 on the old computer. I'm sure none of the w98 basher has tried this OS on a machine less than 5 years old.

jondercik I agree, except for the "large amount of memory. With SP2 Some poeple here went up to 2 Gb, and 1 GB is proven now.As for dual core and multiple processors, it's true w98 will never support them. That doesn't make XP a good OS. XP is perfect for corporate environement where computers are remotely managed by professionals and where employees doesn't have any knowledge in computering. In this case XP is far supperior to w98. But for a home users and those geeks who like looking a little bit under the hood, XP is a real nuisance. XP is proven slowlier than w98 by a large margin, XP installation by defaut is a monster, managing services require an computer science degree just as if home users were denied the right to configurate themselves their own PC, in fact XP is totaly opposed to the do-it-yourself choose-it-yourself flexibility, using XP without a firewall is suicide but you have to disable your firewall for many applications anyway, etc All these are related to multiusers usage, and has little use at home. If I realy need to block some files there are several freewares to do that. If it's my computer, I wouldn't like the idea to give a password to be allowed in. You can say that even at home password may be useful, but at some point, you always need some other's password to find a document, open a program you can't find in your config etc... But as I said above, in case of several poeple who may not trust each others has to share the same machine, XP is better. It's so true that you can't compare w98 with XP. The evolution from w98FE to w98SE-uSP2 is as big if not bigger than that of w2000 to XP. but w98 is the last Windows OS that is not network-based. In fact there is nothing after w98. XP is a totaly different thing. And look, now you are saying "I won't use Vista, it's too slow, too resource greedy", but in one year you will look like the w98 retards that we are. I can already hear "drop this XP piece of junk, use Vista!"

Link21 -Sure, that's seem obvious, but will a program writen specificaly for XP run faster on XP than a program written for w98 on w98? -In what the existance of another version of the software, for w98, is making softwares specificaly written for the XP platform have les performance? -Why do think that developers are still thinking w98-ly while XP is used by more than 90% of their software users? Aren't the developers you talked with already writing XP-only softwares with XP-specific features? If not, why? -Don't you think that the very OS should first proof its higher performance before hoping that software written only for these OS be also more performant?

Link21 While you seem so adamant, I'm sure you can give us very interresting informations from your experience and your knowledge on softwares and programing. -How many computers have you tested by installing w98 then reformating the HD and then installing XP? Which versions of these OS? Which patches or service packs did you add? Please give a detailed sepcification of these machines. -Which softwares are actualy lacking performance due to w98 compatibility? -Have you made comparision tests between xp-only and w98 softwares? Which softwares? What were these tests? Please give details. -Have you talked with developers and asked them about the hurdles of w98 compatible softwares actualy in developement? What did they say in favor of xp-only programs? Who are these developers? On which softwares do they work? -In program sources to which you had access to, which lines of code have you detected that made possible conflict or lack of performance on XP and that could be rewritten so that the program run better on XP? Did rewriting these lines made the program non compatible with w98? Please post these codes (boxed in between code tags please). Thanks.

Link21, They don't mind about 2000 because 2000 is a previous version of XP so to speak. M$ wants to completely get rid of w98 stuffs and that's why it'snot in the Xbox or any other products. 2000 will die by itself because there is no sens or very little in using 2000 if you can get XP. It's by 2005 that w98 came to maturity, if not perfectness, it took 7 years to have a good w98 OS. I estimate that it will also take 7 years before XP become something I could enjoy to use. Thanks to Safe XP and the SP2, XP is already an OS in front of which I agree to sit down (on days I'm in good mood). It's only because new hardware will never be used to their full capacity under w98 whatever patch or driver comes out that one of these day we all will have to change. Too bad the only alternative windows are XP or 2000. Yeah, that's realy too bad. Let's hope both M$ and the freeware community will do something.

There you will be called an a.s.s as long as you don't instal Linux. Don't go there if you are on M$ Windows or don't say you are. These poeple are radicals!

Because it was written for 2000/XP. What's the point? Yes, two separate versions are the best. (One, small, simple and fast for w98 and another heavy, slow and complicated for wXP. ) These two example YOU gave, illustrate how your fears of performance loss are unfounded. It's been several years already when all softwares are designed primarily for XP with even no w98 compatibility in mind, but fortunately still working on w98 because w98 is a great OS with a wide software compatibility potential unlike XP. The only reason why software companies are dropping the w98 support is because they want to make sure the machine has 256 Mb of ram and at least 1Ghz of speed (nothwithstanding that w2000 machine may not have these requirements but ruling out w98 reduce this risk substantialy). Only large and heavy software suits (like Premiere or CorelDraw) could make use of XP OS elements and other softwares too, but most softwares are too sefecific and need their proper code or don't need these componants except for fancy options. There is no reason why a component included in OS, because it's included in the OS, would be more performant than a componant in the program itself. In fact it will be more likely less performant because the native XP component may not be fully approriate or fully optimized for the task called by the program. I'v told you that already in another thread.

Link21 Lets start from your link IMO it will be very difficult to have this effect on such platform, if you have W98SE-uSP2Further on they give the limitations of the w98 systems: limitations that are even more difficult to reach outside experimental missions. And maybe some of these limitations are already bursted with the upgrades. How much better? Zero. maybe even worse. Simply because the performance of a software/hardware doesn't depends on the OS but on the guy who designed it. If a software works fine on w98, it will work like a charm on XP. The oposite is not true. A developer on w98 will be very careful of not clogging the resources, not leaking the memory while an XP developer will lose these good habits and make monsters that will cause the OS to eventualy slow down to manage all the errors in the program. In fact the survivance of w98 and of the w98 minded development has helped the sftware world keep on making high performance products. Softawre made for w98 will always be more performant than those for XP because on w98 they are obliged to be performant, not on XP. Unfortunately, commercial software companies are dropping w98 support because it's cheaper to create crappy softwares that will just work albeit slowly on XP than sate-of-the-art bug-free low-resource-proof jewels of programing. Fortunately, available upgrade allow these software, when installable) to run fine on w98. ---> to others: I'v never seen such anti-w98 maniac like him!

I just tried now and I opened about 50 times IE6 with msfn forum page as home page (which is heavier than Google). No problem at all. But I don't have any firewall. I think the only way I could possibly crash my PC by opening lots of instances of softwares like IE, would be through a script that open hundreds of windows in a very short time.

Link21 Realy? So how come the main purpose of my w98 PC is video editing? I'm "DivX Wise Trusted Man" on the official DivX website and I have ran and tested all DivX codecs versions, official and beta until 5.2 on w98 without a glitch. I also tested several XviD versions and other stuffs I don't remember right now. I did hundreds of movies, edited on various video suits, with round-the-clock encodings. While encoding in the background, I can use all the other softwares I want, edit doc's in Word, Powerpoint, even edit other videos if I want and never had a crash. Even better, video encoding was as fast on my w98 PC as on a XP PC with faster hardware, with many useless services disabled. I have just near me, as we speak, a XP laptop with a processor of the same speed and same amount of memory as my PC. The laptop, even with many services disabled, act like a snail by comparison. I even experienced "slow typing" on this XP platform. On a 1.8 Ghz: HUH!? Needless to say that I had to have a XP computer to experience this "slow typing" again, an experience that I forgot since the w95 era. I keep XP on this laptop only because we need Corel Draw12 for our professional activities. So I realy don't know who is dreaming here. I do everyday video capture (from tv and camera) at 720/576 resolution 25fps with no frame drop. So please don't lie. I also encoded about 100 audio cd to mp3: in 4 cases the computer froze because of defective CD. These 4 cases were the only cases when I had a serious crash course on w98, all uses combined. And these were even not crashes: it was CDex taking too long and refusing to be shut be the taskmanager. I also know from several users here that even light-XP is slower than w98. As I understand, if you want a perfomant XP, you need to strip down half of it and make it as much like w98 as possible (except windows themes).

link21 What's laughable is that XP, true 32-bit OS users, have less performance than me with my "16-bit" w98 that is merely an upgrade from w95.Even more laughable is that some poeple will be buying the most recent 64bit hardware to run a 64bit OS, and still have a computer not as fast as mine because "the interface that creates a completely new experience" will swallow up all the resources. (Just like XP but even worse). What do you call 'resource intensive"? I often run apps that make my resource meter display a 100% usage of everything, and 0% free, and almost no ram left... the OS still doing fine. Please, concretely tell me what you were doing so intensively? As of today, I still don't know how many apps, running processes and/or windows I can open before it crashes my w98PC. It would be nice to make a test.lunac You don't need it. But you definetly need the latest version of Foxit. HUGE upgrade! My PC is now totaly void of any adobe product. I think even my registry could have no adobe key anywhere, but I don't know if that's possible.

Look cool. Not a lot of topics yet in the msg boards. Is it new?

I'v been on microsuk.com sometimes because I had something to say about M$, but these guys are realy narrow-minded. Only thing they will tell you is to erase windows ad install Linucks. They don't know any other response.

Petr wrote I agree: because they believe XP will auto-fix all the buggs and avoid all the crashes, developers do't spend time designing small effective and optimized software. Instead they dash toghether chunks of megabyte-large codes. You won't find a commercial software of less than 10 Mb today.On w98 they know they will ahve to fix many buggs and that forced them to have totaly bug free softwares. With XP these bugs are not visible and therefore ignored. They are not trying to make softwares work on low resource neither (just as if their program will be the only one in use). They simply recommand higher and higher speed and ram. Most of software companies make XP-only softwares (don't support w98) just to make sure the computer has enough resources (if it run XP it can run anything).

Just one question: What's the difference in philosofy between the Unofficial Service Pack and the Upgrade Pack? Why did you decide to do this? I thought USP2.x had all the tested fixes and updates available? It would be nice to post it in the "Unofficial Win98 SE Service Pack Forum" where all the packs, not only USP are discussed. TBS it's great to have more poeple working on improving w98. Keep on!

Thanks! Is there a way to disable that?

My test (if you remember) was on 512 Mb of ram... is it what you consider "little"? Sure for XP is not "a lot" and for Vista it may be "not enough".

Merry Christmass to everyone! And thankX to the Unofficial 98 team! Let's whis a good year for our w98OS-version2006! B)

I'm typing in the middle of a text, everything is normal, the old text is pushed forward. Then suddenly, I think because I hit a special key on the keyboard, the old text is not pushed anymore but erased as I type. new letters replacing old ones. I never found which key to press to reverse that. It happens everywhere it seems. can be on this message board box for example or in notepad etc. Please help!