Eck

Don't worry khan, it's a compilation of most of the tools offered for 9x. You choose, with a nice autorun screen, which stuff you want to install. Essentially it's the same as downloading all the stuff yourself and putting it on one cd with an autorun menu added as a bonus. Very nice, but it's best to check back here to see if some of the stuff gets updated.

Actually, if you unrar the "Upgrade Pack 98" just recently updated you'll see in the "w" folder a "bugfixen.exe" file. This extracts the older IE5.5 versions of the two problem files to the Windows folder, leaving the IE6 versions in the System folder alone. The batch file then makes a registry entry pointing the system to use the files in the Windows folder. copy browselc.dll %windir% copy browseui.dll %windir% CD %windir%\System regsvr32 /u /s %windir%\System\browseui.dll regsvr32 /u /s %windir%\System\browselc.dll regsvr32 /i /s %windir%\browseui.dll regsvr32 /i /s %windir%\browselc.dll This way Internet Explorer uses the latest files but Windows Explorer uses the older files. I think. (Could be wrong.) In any case the older files work fine when browsing or working in Windows Explorer. No more freezes or slowdowns with folder activity. Edit - Not that I was thrilled with that Pack. Way too many assumptions as to how a user wants his system to be tweaked. I much prefer Gape's Pack, although I learned to install OfficeXP AFTER the Service Pack. The Pack appears to install some older MDAC files that destroy Windows ability to start the registry if a newer (OfficeXP) version of the files is replaced by the Pack's versions. I didn't think Gape included MDAC but that's what happened to me. Wait until after the Service Pack for OfficeXP and everything's fine.

I think I need Geordi LaForge to translate this stuff for me. Electron's, Kelvin Scale's, ZeroG. Huh? Guess that's what I get for majoring in Music. Excuse the interruption.

Yep. And I even have about a week left on a RapidShare premium account I bought when I wasn't patient enough to wait for somebody's huge file split into a bunch of 100MB parts. I could have just uploaded it. Still, all's well since I don't think he needed all that stuff.

MDGx, Did you actually get my huge attachment? I'm asking because Outlook Express is still showing that it's sending the thing. This is the 2nd attempt after the 1st one got somehow stopped by McAfee. It's 115MB. The blinking McAfee systray icon is still showing Items 1 Sent 0 and offers no other information. For the 2nd attempt I went into McAfee and shut off outbound scanning. Task Manager is showing some network usage but I really have no idea if this is just the normal activity from being connected to the internet. There is no progress bar in Outlook Express running. I'm about to go ahead and deleat (or attempt to) the message in the Outlook Express Outbound folder. You'd think I'd have at least a progress bar if it was actually doing anything. I guess huge attachments are not what email is designed for? You said you saved what you needed and I assume that means you've got what you need. Edit - Well I managed to clear out and fix things. McAfee just needed a Windows restart to clear up the email systray icon. I had tried to send you all the files but you probably don't need the packs you already have anyway.

There were 3 sites I got my info and downloads from. One of them had a hacking method that was later superceded by the http://www.geocities.com/thypentacle/ website. He created a 3.2 version for all the Afterdark 3 screensavers and can be used on 9x or XP. He also created a 4.1 version that also works on 9x and XP. The nice thing about it is he doesn't include the screensavers in 4.1 as the 3.0 screensavers originally included in AfterDark 4 do not run within version 4 when using Windows XP. You need to use 3.2 for those, so you install both versions and keep the 3 version screensavers in C:\AFTERDRK and the 4 versions in C:\After Dark. The other main place for info and downloads is http://www.andy.clark.dial.pipex.com/hobbi...n/screen_ad.htm and between the 2 sites nearly all the screensavers can be downloaded. The andy clark site had moved from some tigarheli site and I needed to search around to find it again. Most of the screensavers have XP adjusted versions within the packs from thypenticle. These all install without reinstalling old versions of the program so his packs are the best way to install them. Only the Disney pack (that's on the andyclark site) is weird in that it needs to be installed by its original installer, then you delete the entire AFTERDRK directory, end process on the After Dark tray application and install the whole 3.2 package again along with re running the 3.2XP update. Then just install the pre-zipped up disneyXP pack. After playing around with this, I discovered that's the best way. So I install the Disney Pack as the 1st pack of screensavers after installing AfterDark 3.2 and 4.1 then after I'm done fooling with reinstalling 3.2 I'm free to just unzip all the other packs to the appropriate folders. Both sites have servers that severly limit downloading. I think it took me several days to get everything as after downloading a couple of things the servers cut off access to all downloads for a period. Since you are good at this stuff it's probably easier for you to download just a couple of XP packs, examine what he did to the files and just do the same to your existing files. It'll probably be a lot less hastle for you as I had to download everything. So, get the 3.2XP and 4.1 and a couple of packs and print out all the FAQ's and stuff and you'll be all set. The older info about hacking the original AfterDark 4 was http://www.uneasysilence.com/?p=4694 but this only runs the 4 screensavers and you wind up with all the useless non-working 3 versions that do work with 3.2XP. Edit - Uh oh. I just examined the Andy Clark site. He just lists the older instructions for hacking 4.0. That's not the way to do it. ThyPentacle has the new 4.1 version. The old TigerHeli site that had the rest of the 4 packs and some great FAQ's is gone!

Yes that is the site for the paid bios's I was talking about. I'm just not sure I have a bios problem or not. These computers work with 80GB hard drives. It's just that the Bios page only shows up to 64 GB. I really don't know if there's anything wrong or not. I do know that I've continued to use format from the 98SE Windows Startup floppy and that shows the wrong amount on larger drives yet formats with no problem's. When it's done it shows the correct amount. That's a cosmetic flaw acknowledged by Microsoft in a KB article. I'm thinking what I'm seeing in these Bios's is the same type of thing. After all, if Windows winds up seeing the whole thing what could be wrong? I have read most of the available descriptions of the various limits. So far nothing I've read has even mentioned that a Bios could show a smaller amount of space than is actually there, yet all tools used will see and use the whole thing. It just seems a bit weird that no one has even mentioned encountering this. As far as I can tell, I can use up to the 137GB limit on 9x (with the standard ESDI driver) with a regular IDE hard drive on these computers even though the Bios will read 64GB. Not that I would. I don't have a need for 137GB of space on that old of a computer. But 80GB is nice to put my mp3's on there. They take up about 18GB. And I like putting full encylopedia's too, so I don't need to insert cd's.

Noooooo!!! Not my Themes! I like those old things. Install the one's in Plus!98 too. Then I just add others I like. Then I wind up being boring and just using default. But I like the choices. Big hard drives. Don't mind some bloat. I even sometimes use the old AfterDark Screensavers, but now on XP. I found a couple of sites that have installers updated for XP. I only haven't tried them on 98 yet because of the resources they probably use. Talk about old stuff though! I never used them in the past. I didn't even know about them. BadDog! Flying Toasters! Star Trek! Heh, heh. The neatest time waister's.

Thanks Drugwash. I have tried over there. The SiS5598 SPAX-M board only uses HP Bios's and the Intel SE440BX isn't on any list I've noticed. I've got the last Intel Bios on it now. So I think that unless I order one of those $30 jobs from another site I can't seem to remember now I'm stuck with the manufacturer's releases. The site I'm talking about makes their own custom Bios's for just about any board made. I just can't remember the name right now. It's late in the day. Even if I did remember I think that if the Wim bios site hasn't made one (which is just an updated manufacturer's bios) then I'd rather just use what I've got. I really don't need full 48LBA, USB 2.0 etc. on these old things. I just was interested to find out why the bios said one thing but the system didn't seem to care, and uses the larger hard drives fine as far as I can tell.

Yes she did listen (or rather, read) what you wrote. No, you cannot use Windows XP drivers on Windows 9x system's. You CAN find the proper drivers by going to Diamond's website (just search for it). I did it once. You'll need to fill out a form there and they will email you with a link to their full driver setup. It's possible the one you got on driverguide was not the one for your card. It's also possible that you haven't installed the AGP Gart drivers for your motherboard's AGP chipset and that once you did that your driver (if it's the correct one) would work. 9x operating systems had very few native drivers except for some very old one's, and those were always surpassed by drivers released by the hardware manufacturer's just like on XP.

So, what reports the partition sizes to the MBR? The Bios? If so, then the Bios is showing me 64,440 (something like that) but the MBR somehow knows there are 80GB's there (or, 74 some odd thousand MB). See what I'm saying? The Bios shows me a total as if it has the 64GB limit, but then FDISK, format, and Windows wind up using and seeing the whole thing. These old 1997-1999 Bios's seem to behave this way. But is there really a 64GB limit if Windows seems to be operating correctly with using and seeing the whole drive? I figure if there was a real limit then the WD disk would have installed the On-Track Bios to be able to access the whole drive, but this wasn't done and doesn't seem to be needed. I have one board that did have the 8GB limit, a Chaintech 9ESA. The WD cd installed the EZ-BIOS automatically when it prepared the drive. Now, in both of my systems that only show up to 64GB in the Bios they both had Bios updates. But neither mentioned anything about dealing with Logical Block Addressing. Maybe they did somehow fix this but that fix only shows the 64GB even though it will report more to the MBR (like the Windows format command). So, just a cosmetic thing?

What about some older pc's with Bios's that only report 64GB but you've got an 80GB drive? I just got an Intel SE440BX that's like that. Windows sees and uses the whole drive that I FDISK'd and formated in one big partition. To be certain, I first used the Western Digital cd to prepare the drive. When I noticed it hadn't installed the On-Track thing I figured they must know what they're doing and went and prepared it normally with a 98SE startup floppy. My old HP Pavilion 4430 also did that. Bios would show 64GB max, but larger hard drives worked fine. Not past the 137GB Windows driver limit mind you, but up to that was fine. It seems similar to the "cosmetic" error in the Microsoft format program that doesn't report the correct size until it's finished formatting. So are these bios's actually providing the full drive access and the size reported error is cosmetic? Or will we run into problems when we use the sectors larger than 64GB? Inquring minds want to know.

Hmmm, maybe it's because I had the premade cd version but I didn't need my Windows 98 cd's to use his MS-DOS 7.1. The cd version he used to have was complete in itself. I have no idea about the Windows 98 GUI or Windows 95GUI he also offered as I never used them. Anyway, I didn't buy several retail boxes of Windows 9x versions so I could use someone's hacked version. Anytime they upgraded Windows I went like a good puppydog to my local store and bought it. And since I wanted to cover myself I have 3 of 98SE. Weird, eh? Only now do I find out about kits with keygen's and the like. Sheesh. Could have saved hundreds of dollars. I've bought 2 XP Home retail's and 1 XP Pro retail as well. Along with 3 Plus! Super Packs. I thought the MS-DOS 7.1 thing was cool though. Since I have so few dos programs I didn't use it for long. Mostly games, and I've always been able to play them on any official 9x/DOS/XP. It just was fun to check out. Can't see the point for most folks today, except to mess around with it for a little while.

I don't remember and haven't gone through my cd's to look for the stuff. Maybe jimmsta knows since he has the files handy. Maybe there's some info among the readme's.

I used that fella's MS-DOS 7.1 for a while, and still have the installation cd. I'm wondering whether his website disappeared more for non-interest than any legal issues. Not sure. His installation cd does not require any version of MS-DOS or Windows installed, nor any Windows cd's. It is fully stand alone. He also provided a Windows 98 GUI executable which would install a full Windows 98 GUI to use in conjunction with his MS-DOS 7.1, and also had one for a Windows 95 GUI. I never installed these, as I was multi=booting with his MS-DOS, Windows 98SE, and Windows XP and didn't need ANOTHER Windows. Actually, it seems to me upon typing that stuff out that ALL of that would probably be considered pirating by Microsoft. I guess they wouldn't bother going after the individual user at this point but they still might make a legal fuss over those files being posted on a popular website for all to download. A shame, because his cd has optional installs of some nice tools that, although all available separately (if you could still find them today), are nicely all setup by his installer with very little user fussing with configurating them. It really was a nice piece of software. Probably not legal though. One could, if the additional software was gathered, set up essentially the same thing with Windows 98SE. You'd just need to set up MSDOS.SYS to load MS-DOS at startup instead of Windows. He does set memory up optimized for MS-DOS, but I suppose we could do that ourselves too. It was just a nice way of having it all configured for you. I would load my SBLive dosdrv folder and play my dos games in there.

Ah! You've run into a rampant problem that happens with many Creative cards and their software. If you searched the Creative forums you'd find many have encountered this. Some have gotten the software installer to actually recognize that they did indeed have "SoundBlaster hardware installed" by first extracting the driver/software package and then running CTZAPP.EXE. This installs the basic driver. Then after restarting Windows 2x and the drivers running fine, they could run the normal setup and the installer would then work and everything could be installed. Just directing Device Manager to the driver folder will also get drivers installed, but this doesn't fix the setup for everything else. You need to use the Creative driver installer (CTZAPP) to get the software setup to recognize the card. This usually doesn't happen on a fresh Windows installation, but often does if there has been any other audio card installed, Creative or otherwise. CTZAPP somehow fixes this. But not always. The CTZAPP installer is not always called CTZAPP as Creative made different versions. But it always is something like that, or driversetup.exe, and is located in the Audio\Drivers folder of the extracted files. If you're going from cd then there's nothing to extract. The file is usually in that Audio\Drivers folder. The SB0100 will not be recognized by older cd's made for the original SBLive 5.1 like the SB0060. But most packages made since 2002 will recognize it. The setup file just sometimes needs to be coaxed. I have no idea why Creative setup files have this problem but the CTZAPP workaround works most of the time. Finally, you may need to clean uninstall any Creative software and drivers then use driverheaven.net DriverCleaner in safe mode. Then shut down and physically remove the card and startup with no soundcard. Reboot a couple of times like that, maybe running DriverCleaner again in normal mode. Then install the card and see if the Creative setup will run correctly.

Windows 98 was indeed made for EMS loading games and sound. In fact, it is the best MS-DOS environment for any program designed for MS-DOS and any game designed for MS-DOS. The problem is not Windows 98, but rather newer motherboards and chipsets that castrate dos memory management. Usually it is not so bad that Windows 98 can't run on them except for the most recent motherboards. However the resouces available for Dos gaming, ISA audio, and memory management are now usurped by motherboard devices or high powered videocards that reserve these resources. This is not the fault of anything Windows 98 does, but rather the price we pay for new hardware technology. MS-DOS 6.22 was much buggier than the Dos versions in 98 and 98SE. MS-DOS 7.1 in Windows 98SE is generally regarded as the best Microsoft MS-DOS version. If a game or soundcard can't work in that then it won't work on MS-DOS 6.22 either. That said, have you FULLY explored Dosbox? The newer versions and the latest CVS updates enable the use of dynamic core much more stably than previous versions. And independant users have developed plugins for the later advanced graphics modes that do not by default come with Dosbox but may be installed according to directions. Just trying a game and being dissapointed by how the default setup and settings run it is not fully exploring the program. Most older games need little to no tinkering but later, more resource intensive games do require some research on those VOGONS forums and installing some other stuff. But they require a LOT less hastle and bother than running games in true dos and configuing all the hardware and software. Oh! VMWare is easy. Just remember that you are setting up a computer. You've got to set the Bios to the correct settings (not your Bios but rather the VMWare virtual machine's Bios), FDISK and FORMAT, install Windows 98, install VMWare Tools, install the Creative SB16PCI drivers (a seperate download), and update Windows like it's on a computer. Full security like VirusScanners, a Firewall, Spyware detectors are also necessary. The only thing it uses from your real computer is your processor and up to 2 USB 1.1 devices. I never got the Virtual Machine to play any Dos games though. It couldn't recognize any VESA video support. Non DirectX Windows games work fine though. That's right, there's no Direct X acceleration on a Windows 98 Virtual Machine and only experimental support when adjusting the settings and using a Windows XP Virtual Machine. Though some games will work fine, neither Microsoft Virtual PC nor VMWare Workstation are designed for gaming. For dos gaming it's either a really old computer or a super new computer with dosbox. I'm still waiting for my darned Pentium 3 to get here. It's being sent from Canada so I guess that's why it's taking so long. I actually have a Pentium 2 300MHz I could use but would rather just set it up with the new one with 450MHz. And, I've warned you about those SBPCI's. You could probably get an SBLive 5.1 cheap and have a much better chance of having your Dos sound emulation working.

Ah, now I understand. And you've probably got that blue GUI for the Creative software like SurroundMixer, etc. That's what does work now. Your SB dos emulation in Windows dosbox's is the WDM spec emulation. Just one IRQ needed and it doesn't matter what the actual IRQ the card is using. WDM's use the SET command and set it to 220-5-1, with T3 spec for the SBPro. One reason I mentioned "horrible" in my description of the dos emulation on those 252 WDM drivers is that it has some hesitation, static problems and no FM midi emulation. Plus, it emulates an SBPro card at 220-5-1 with the only midi available being that of General Midi at port 330. The older vxd SBLive Windows dos emulation had far superior SB16 emulation with complete FM midi emulation (as well as General Midi). See, WDM drivers DO natively support FM Midi, but only if your card has a hardware FM chip on it. As far as I know, only ISA soundcards have this. Some games do not offer the MPU-401 General Midi as an option, so the music won't play in dos box's. You gotta have dos emulation drivers and go into MS-DOS Mode for the game to sound like it's supposed to with these games. Music, sound effects, etc. Strange that the Riptide's SBPro emulation actually sounds better than the SBLive's SB16 emulation. Anyway, getting back to the original poster. MDGx's recommendation of actually using an ISA Soundblaster card is the best choice for dos gaming. The SBLive is the best next choice as you may have more than 2 speakers and the old Riptide is only 2 channel (otherwise I'd prefer that. You can get one on ebay, but try to get it with a Riser for the additional ports like Microphone and LineIn, LineOut. They're not on the card itself, only the amplified speaker out and the modem connections are there). The SoundBlaster PCI varients are risky for dos as they often just won't work properly. The Audigy 1 was the last card to have dos drivers from Creative. Never had one of these.

Choso4, Interesting. I've got several SBLive's. CT4760, SB0060, SB0100, SB0224. They all seem to give identical results when using the latest DOSDRV files I got from the SB0100 cd (the last that came with them). That is an updated version of the files that are offered anywhere on the net or the older CT4760 cd. I found that some games that wouldn't run on the older DOSDRV files would with the later version. You said you have the SBLive using IRQ5? I would think that would be extremely problematicle, as the dos emulation cannot share IRQ's. It is an ISA emulation that needs to have an IRQ all to itself. If the Windows SBLive driver is using IRQ 5, then the dos emulator, from what I understand, would crash Windows or simply not run correctly if the SBLive was using IRQ 5 at the same time. And it would be, as the Windows dos box audio would be routed to the SBLive. So the sharing of IRQ's would occur. Problem there. My card was usually using IRQ 10 and, on older machines I could leave the Windows dos emulation on IRQ 5, and on newer machines I needed to check the "allow LPT interrupt sharing" and the dos would use IRQ 7. And I would make sure all the references pointed to IRQ 7 in that case. ctsyn.ini and the dosstart.bat files needed to be changed to IRQ 7. (Autoexec, if using a pif instead.) Believe it or not, I've never used a real ISA SoundBlaster except for one time with my old Abit KT7A. It was one of those SB16 Wave Effects cards. I was using Windows 98SE at the time, and actually installed the SB16 and the SBLive at the same time, with a cable connecting the SB16 line out to the line in port of the Live card. When installed that way, the SBLive vxd driver setup recognizes the SB16 so does not install the Windows dos emulation, using the real SB16 for that. It was an interesting experience, but as I had gameport/midi problems with that setup it did not stay installed on my box for long. Unfortunately the LiveWare 3.0 vxd drivers do not get along with something in Windows 98SE files after they are updated these days. I tried on 3 different computers. Although they work at first, as soon as I get started updating Windows I eventually get an Error loading device IOS, Real Mode Memory Allocation Failed. Windows will only boot to Safe Mode once this happens. I tried all the renaming of RMM.PDR, deleting Smartdrv.exe, extracting RMM.PDR from the 98SE cd, etc. Nothing would get Windows back. This does not happen when using the newer WDM 252 Creative drivers. So I ended up using these, and just installing the DOSDRV drivers manually and booting to Dos for most dos games. The WDM within Windows is okay for the games that use MPU-401 General Midi, although not anywhere near as good as the old vxd emulation. I also went that route for games that needed to access my Sidewinder Gamepad or Precision Pro Joystick. I just bought myself an brand new retail boxed Intel SE440BX motherboard! I have no idea how the ebay guy had this, but the thing is brand new. I've ordered a Pentium 3 450MHz and downloaded the latest bios that will enable that. I have a 20GB Western Digital hard drive for it. (Hope it takes that without the stupid drive overlay software.) I expect to have all sorts of fun playing with that thing. I've got my old Crucial SDRAM 2x256MB PC133 memory sticks. My old Voodoo 3 3000 and Voodoo 5 5500 Videocards stand ready. Lots of soundcards. Got no idea what I'm gonna do with it! But I expect the performance to kill my old K6-2 366MHz, SiS5598 board. It might actually play DVD's acceptably. I'll install PowerDVD 3.0 and see what happens. Sorry for the long post, but this stuff is fun to talk about!

SB0200 series like my SB0224 work fine in MS-DOS as long as you install the Dos drivers. The way I used the card last, I would install the newest cd that does not come with dos drivers. This gives horrible WDM dos implementation within Windows. However, I would install the needed dos driver files to a C:\SBLIVE folder and switch my default.ecw in the Windows folder to the EAPCI8M.ECW file (by renaming default.ecw to EAPCI2M.ECW and EAPCI8M.ECW to default.ecw). Then I would make the correct references in the ctsyn.ini file that is in the SBLIVE folder instead of the Windows folker (as the newer drivers don't come with it), and make a shortcut to command.com that would activate my cdrom, mouse (using the imouse dos mouse driver), and SBLIVE. I just put the correct lines into the custom autoexec and config files in the pif. You can also do this with a boot floppy containing its own autoexec and config files, but it's less cumbersome to just use the Windows shortcut. The files needed are on driverguide.com or a preconfigured set is on the MAME website. If you have an old SBLive cd you can install it to a 98 system and copy the files to a cdr. Make sure you get a copy of the Ensoniq wave sets. They are on older SBLive cd's and also on driverguide. The 8MB EAPCI8M.ECW was the best they made for the old Ensoniq cards and Creative never made any newer ones. Many newer computers will not allow emm386.exe to manage memory. On these machines the motherboard resources set themselves up to hog the particular resources needed to manage expanded memory. The SBLive is useless in dos on these machines. All this is really not necessary today with fast processors and the dosbox program. The latest dosbox combined with the updated D-Fend GUI and the latest CVS dosbox update offer a huge level of compatibility with dosgames. You can even add Gravis Ultrasound drivers (a seperate download) if you like that better than the default SB16, SBPro, Adlib, and MPU401 Midi emulation. dosbox.sourceforge.net vogons.zetafleet.com Read the forum threads to increase your knowledge on adjusting Dosbox to work for your game. You can make custom profiles for each game within D-Fend's GUI. No more fussing with dos commands if you don't want to. Another alternative with a PCI card and dos is the HP Riptide soundcard/modem combo card. This gives lousy sound in Dos Mode, but incredibly good compatibility and quality in Windows dos box's. It also is a fine 2 speaker/headphone soundcard for Windows 95, 98, 98SE, ME. It is horrible in XP, as it loses its Midi Synth, all the dos features, and it hesitates and skips when connected to the internet. Its dos emulation uses both its Wavetable 64 Synthesizer and Yamaha OPL2 and OPL3 for FM sound. Within Windows this sounds great. It also does not require any memory management or any settings at all in autoexec or config for Windows dos box sound. In Dos Mode it requires the 220 5 1 blaster reference and a reference to running Riputil from the System folder. It's not worth the bother though since it sounds horrible in dos and freezes and crashes intermittantly when run there. Great for 9x and dos within 9x though! The SBPCI are varients of the old Ensoniq 1370, 1371, 1373, and CT5880 chipset cards. The 1370 cards nearly always worked in dos mode, but the later varient's many times did not, even with the correct dos drivers. The only SBPCI varient that was the ES1370 was the SB64 card. So, the SBLive's worked on nearly all older boards in MS-Dos Mode but not on some newer one's. The SBPCI is iffy, even on older motherboards.

Yes, I mostly agree. I haven't installed Stardock on a 9x system in years as the looks aren't especially important to me. When I did use it, it worked but I got tired of needing to refresh the skin when resources got spent. I keep renewing only because I want it if the GUI fit takes me and I want to play. I just posted that because it's probably the best implementation of skinning available. With all the possibilities you can make the desktop and programs looks like nearly anything you want. And the fellow asked how to get it looking like XP. This does it nearly completely without changing important operating system files too much. It's like a native skinning method (moreso on XP, though).

Stardock WindowBlinds Enhanced and ObjectBar handle this very well, and you're able to apply many other looks as well. Yeah, it uses GDI resources and Themes need to be reapplied to refresh it if resources get too low (the images start to be replaced by the regular 98 stuff). But it works. Looks just like XP if you get the right themes. Icon Packager really gets it to be XP. Heh, now there are themes for Vista too! Run Vista on 98! So it would make sense to buy Object Desktop to get all the stuff. You really only need those 3 programs from it. Initially expensive, but renewal is only $34.95 for access to newer versions if you want to stay updated. But you wouldn't need to do that if you only want what you need for 98. You're always entitled to download and use whatever versions they were up to when your subscription expired.

XP running stuff from Plus is pretty simple. No need to mess in the registry for most of the stuff. Install on 98. Copy the Plus! folder to a cdr. Copy the animated (cartoon) screensavers from Windows\System to cdr. Copy Windows\Media folder to cdr. Copy Windows\Web\Wallpapers to cdr. Copy the .bmp files from Windows to cdr. On XP. Make a Plus! folder in Program Files. Copy the OSPLUS, Themes, Marbles folders to the Plus! folder. Copy the animated screensavers to System32 folder Copy the .bmp files to Windows, except for Plus.bmp. Copy the Wallpapers to the Windows\Web\Wallpapers folder. Copy the Media files to the Windows\Media folder. Don't replace any existing files in the above stuff. Make a shortcut in your start menu to C:\Program Files\Plus!\Marbles\Marbles.exe. I make a folder there called Plus! and another folder called Games and put the shortcut entitled Lose Your Marbles there. Although there are registry entries in 98 to use Lose Your Marbles they are not needed to play it on XP. If you want the Underwater Screensaver you need to find the Plus! for kids demo for Windows 95 and extract just the Underwater.scr, another file labled Underwater there I can't remember, and the 2 files for the Wildlife Screensaver in there to System32. Then you just choose the Wildlife Screensaver and you get Underwater. No need for any of the other files in there, and certainly don't run any installers or install any Themes.exe file into XP. Everything is controlled by the XP Display Properties screensaver and themes tabs. All the themes will show up on the Themes tab from the Plus!\Themes folder but not all of them will run. Most will. Don't bother with any screensavers except for the cartoon ones. Some people like the Deluxe CdPlayer but really anything else these days is better. If you want to copy that folder onto XP I think it might work, but I'm not sure. There's a fix for the thing to use freedb for cd lookup. I never tried using this on XP. I like other programs better.

Hey there, from your security thread you posted that led to this. I don't know but I always hated that Microsoft Business update download site since it would hardly descibe anything and many of the links to KB articles were never updated when they changed so led to nowhere. And the KB articles were also not so helpful as to what to install first, second, etc. It was a big guessing game whether the update was obsolete, replaced by something else, etc. That description you gave as a possible example would be unintelligible to most average users as, with my experience, I had no idea what the update was for based upon reading it. So, maybe some "could do better," but in my opinion that woudn't be the way. I kind of like the way MDGx has it all set up on his site. Just my opinion.

Well, what else would you suggest? The thread has all the latest links to new updates on the first post that is continuously updated. And the discussions are among the folks deciding how best to provide the updates. A visit to where full descriptions of ALL 9x, MS-DOS, XP, jeez even Science Fiction information exist provide all possible updates anyone could desire, mdgx.com. Maybe you want the same thing in a different format? What is it you're asking for? I mean, if you don't like using a pre-packaged service pack then all you need is comprehensively provided at the mdgx site. No long discussions, just the meat. You go from the bottom of the lists to the top for oldest to newest. You can read the descriptions and decide for yourself if you want an add-on (but the critical updates for your OS, Internet Explorer, Windows Media, and DirectX should be applied on all systems). In cases where an update has prerequisites, it is clearly noted in the descriptions. The placement of the thread in question is in a sticky in the Service Pack forum because that forum was where the hands on folks are working on providing this stuff and just happened to start there. You don't need to install the Service Pack, or anything else there, to contribute or benefit from reading the threads. It just would make it less time consuming to use the pack. You'd just be installing all that stuff yourself anyway. It just provides the important critical fixes to 98SE, with options to also install a few other things along with it. But anyone is free to examine the same (plus a lot more) updates, fixes and add-ons on the mdgx website.