Eck

Yeah, even sealed retail box versions are still around. Some on web stores, others on ebay. They've been going up in price lately after being available at about half the normal price for quite some time. Now they're almost nearing full retail price again. Soon to disappear, I'd think.

That shouldn't be happening from the latest version of the Unofficial Service Pack. It was fixed. Yeah, I do remember there was a work-around fix but it was so long ago I've forgotten. Try reading some older threads. Also, I think I remember running the Internet Explorer Repair Tool fixed it for me.

It's unclear to me whether Microsoft will leave Windows Update working with the older updates or they will just make them available in their download site, as they have announced they will be. You could use the Windows Update Catalog to download all the updates they make available there and burn them to a cdr. However the mdgx.com site is a more complete way to do it. He offers a zipped up file with all the directions, or you could just print out his web pages. Whichever, you still need to download all the actual update files. I did this, and put them into clearly labeled folders based upon his descriptions so I'll know what I'm installing. I think there's an Italian version of the Unofficial Service Pack for 98SE. This installs many of the updates, then I just install most of the other stuff from the MDGx download's I have saved to cdr. (I put 'em on the hard drive and remove the read-only status first - cd \MDGx folder, ATTRIB -r *.* /s.) OF course we won't be getting any more security patches from Microsoft. Eventually that will become a problem, especially for users who use Internet Explorer and Outlook Express. But for now, fully updating and using VirusScanners, Firewalls, and Spybot removers make things pretty secure. Especially for Firefox, Thunderbird users. If your system runs too slow for Firefox try using SeaMonkey 1.01 (or whatever is latest) from Mozilla. It's basically the old Netscape/Mozilla suite updated with bug fixes and security updates. It uses less memory than Firefox and may be a good solution for older computers. You should be okay for quite some time as long as you set things up using the tools currently available here and at the MGDx site. It can get confusing and is a hastle, but that's what we get for keeping our old machines running much longer than intended by the businesses that built them. They need profit to stay in business. They can't keep supporting older technologies forever.

I'd say no to WDM audio drivers on an old system. They tax the limited resources, and his Dos games will no longer play FM synthesizer sounds unless using an actual ISA soundcard that has an FM chip on it. Vxd's play better with dos (and use less resources generally) as long as they have dos drivers. Wdm's don't need dos drivers, but they need games to have an MPU-401 general midi setting for the music as those that don't will not have sound (unless it's an ISA card with an FM Synth chip). On a newer board, of course, WDM's are preferred as you can use the Dosbox program for dos games, music will sound better in most cases, and gaming shouldn't be a problem as newer computers have plenty of processing power to handle all the increased software calls by the WDM's. Also, on older systems, lots of USB throughput such as using USB for networking, etc, is problematic. Limited processor and memory bus speeds slow everything down and blue screens will happen even with properly working drivers. This, because one piece of hardware will gobble up too much resources for its needed throughput and another piece of hardware will not have enough resources to operate. It shuts off and Windows reports a driver error as it doesn't know what else to call it as the hardware device isn't working. And, .sys drivers like your network driver are mostly NT based drivers. Real VXD drivers are .vxd. I'm not sure how this pertains to your problem but I know that on my systems I cannot use Via AGP Gart drivers on 98SE newer than the ones on 4-in-1 version 4.43. I've gotta install the latest Hyperions without AGP and manually update the Microsoft PCI to PCI controller to the extracted AGP driver in the 4.43's. Only then do I install my ATI video drivers. The newer one's are .sys drivers that don't enable AGP on 9x. The card operates in PCI mode unless using the older vxd Gart driver. You wouldn't need more memory than you've got if you were only using USB for minimal throughput stuff like mice and keyboards. But it might help for you to get some more memory if you really need to use USB for highly taxing tasks like high speed networking, Wi-Fi, etc. Not sure if this will help but it might! Too bad even your older 98 networking drivers are .sys. I'm thinking that might be one of the problems. If I insisted on trying to get that old thing working I might try some added memory, but would be prepared to be disapointed as that slow system bus will still hamper things. If you did without the networking I'm sure for simple old gaming and low-speed (dial up or an ordinary ethernet PCI card connection) internet the box is still just fine.

Happy now! Can't think of much to pad this post with. The GUI change makes more sense this way as we can choose. It still is the patched Explorer file though, right? The one that Gape's pack installs? I'm assuming it is, but just with the additional option available to toggle the StartMenu GUI.

The Zipfolder description confused me. I regularly install the latest Winzip version first on a new 98SE installation. I use it for unzipping all the motherboard drivers and such. Eventually I install the Microsoft 98Plus! cd with Zipfolders being the only utility from it that I install, the rest just being the screensavers and themes stuff. After installing the Zipfolder security update, I just run Winzip and when it asks to restore zip files to open with Winzip I say yes. Thereafter, Winzip works normally with zip files. The zip icons appear with the Winzip icon. So, Zipfolders are available to use if I want to, but I use Winzip as the default normal operation. How come you say that I must remove the zipfolder's dll if I want to use Winzip? I haven't noticed this. On another change. What if I like what Gape's pack installs as the StartMenu banner? I like the Windows 98 Second Edition there, not the Killer Replacements thing. I use Option 2 in 98SE2ME. Can you possibly make this change optional?

VMWare Workstation doesn't list any 9x operating systems as being able to run as host. Maybe older versions of it? I sometimes run it, but on XP as host with 98SE as guest. Interesting though. Which VMWare version will work on 98SE as host? And can we still buy it somewhere?

Me too. Auto-updates off. Though I do check often. For my non-computer interested friends who's machine's I set up, I turn on Auto-updating. Except for one guy who has a machine with an on board Ge-force 2 MX400 that Windows always wants to install a "critical" driver for. I just badger him to go to Windows Update periodically and to always say no to unhide that critical update.

Oh. Well maybe if he reads this he'll think about including uninstall possibilities, if only just for the IE Cumulative update. The other's are probably not uninstallable anyway. Microsoft doesn't even make that available for things like Scripting 5.6, etc.

erpdude8, It'll be nice if they leave WindowsUpdate functional, but I seem to recall reading on Microsoft's End of Life site that only the downloads area will remain active and that automatic updates will no longer be available. Meaning they will make the updates available but no more Windows Update. Just the Microsoft download pages. I can't say for sure that'll happen, but that's what I gathered from reading their site. Since they won't be offering anything new, it wouldn't be a huge loss anyway. This last time I built up my 98SE there were only language files there for me. We don't need no bloody WindowsUpdate! (Well, except for XP. It installs about 45 critical thingy's for me when I go there fresh from an SP2 cd and just installing drivers, WorksSuite, and Windows Media Player 10.)

Yeah, I've always noticed that help update "do you want to keep the newer file" pop up. I always just kept the newer file (answer yes) and haven't noticed help problems. It will be nice when a newer version of the Service Pack will handle some of these questionable (meaning, we're not exactly certain we're installing precisly the needed versions) files. I do think it's proper to wait until the end of use is here and we see how things are when the smoke clears following all the last updates from Microsoft. We'll also be familiar with what to do with all the needed fixing and work arounds and Gape can just put all that into the pack so it'll just do all that for us. (Wishful thinking?) Sure, though. Just using the Service Pack isn't enough at this point. Maybe if someone isn't going on the net, but otherwise there's plenty of other updates we have to manually install (and then, sometimes, fix up so things'll still work!) No biggie, though. Plenty of help here. Bless the guru's!

We're looking to really tax my memory as I tried this driver way back when my system was on an Abit KT7A! I just remember well that one of the readme's for at least one of the versions of this driver explicitly read that once installed, this driver may not be uninstalled. Of course, that's not saying it's impossible. Just unsupported officially. I remember my cd drive's throwing me fits trying to figure why sometimes they couldn't read cd's, or if they could, with great hardship. Spinning, freezing, blue screening, etc. I remember Nero burning some, losing more coaster's. I remember trying to copy file's from cd to hard drive and lot's of errors. The board ran everything fine without that driver, and everything flaky like with the driver. The old 4.38 4-in-1's and the USB Filter 1.1 were all it needed. Recently I had been lurking about the ViaArena forums looking for info about this ESDI HD limitation thing and found several replies from folks helping others there. They usually recommended only using this driver on a 686B Southbridge and Windows 2000. That's where I got that from. Mainly, I do recall in the current version's readme or at least somewhere in the official information about it on either Via's main site or ViaArena a specific warning that this driver does not solve the large hard drive issue on 9x/Me operating systems. That wasn't a poster (one fellow who post's there claims it does make 9x work with large hard drives, but according to the official info he is wrong), but the official comments about the driver. As I was using it on a motherboard it was specifically designed for (to fix Zip drive problems) and still experienced many issues, it's not something I would recommend. I did use a USB Zip drive at the time, but learned not to use it! I joined the world of cd burning. Funny. My main soundcard in those days was the SBLive and after making just a couple of adjustments in the bios settings that KT7A worked fine with it. And that was one of the boards everyone was complaining about with the SBLive. I sure wish my capacitors hadn't melted away! That was one awesome old motherboard. Heh. It still works. Just noisy, probably from those leaky cap's. But once I heard the noise I retired it from even playing around. I don't want my other hardware destroyed when it blows up or something!

And, it's looking like there aren't a lot of 9x users left. even GrandPa's and GrandMa's. But, Microsoft still has a few Cumulative Update's to go before they stop with 9x. So one can hope but I won't hold my breath! At least the reader's here have some ways around it. Nope, not even an uninstaller for the Maximus-Decim package. Though since most of those included are necessary critical one's, one usually wouldn't have a reason for uninstalling any of them.

PsychoUnc, Sure would be nice for ease of use to have one of those "check what you want" things. There is an old update program that included versions of 98SE2ME, etc, but things like that get out of date pretty quickly. Worked great for a couple of weeks though! I think there will only be a small community of folks running 9x pretty soon. So perhaps a bunch of seperate packs and some individual manually installed updates is probably all we're going to be able to manage. After all, it seems that we all will never come to common agreement on which versions of things we all want to use, etc. Gape's pack is still darned good at installing the bulk of the needed updates and includes check boxes for some nice additions. I'm looking forward to his eventual update to it.

That Via driver does not include 9x support for larger hard drives. I read such in the readme for it. It also shouldn't be used unless using an old 686b Via southbridge chipset with Windows 2000. Although it installs and runs on other combinations, there are many bugs associated with optical drives and IDE file tranferring, copying, etc. It also helped with Zip 100 parellel port drives on 9x. But it screwed up other things. It also cannot be successfully uninstalled once installed. A format is necessary to get things working properly again. They also warn of this in the readme.

Hey, I just set up a new Epox EP-8KRAIPRO board and worked through this stuff before coming here and noticing you guys working on it. After all the usual stuff and having used the Maximus-Decim IE updater I of course experienced the problem. The reason KB912812 hadn't been present in add/remove was because the Maximus-Decim updater doesn't put it there. But things have worked out nicely since I did the following. I extracted the older 905915 installer and used System File Checker to replace the newer URLMON.DLL with the 1525 version in the 905915 folder. Reboot. I then ran KB905915 so it would apply the URLMON.DLL 1526 version, now that the one version older was present. It updated it fine. I copied the URLMON.DLL version 1526 to a folder and then ran WindowsUpdate and had it install KB912812. Reboot. I then used System File Checker to replace the crappy new 1538 version of URLMON.DLL with the saved version 1526. Reboot. Now everything works and I have all the other updates from the newer KB912812 there, but the working URLMON.DLL. WindowsUpdate, OfficeUpdate, Flash, etc all download and install ActiveX controll's (asking permission appropriately) properly. With a few more month's of 9x support you would think Microsoft would take care of this without our needing all this playing around. They were pretty quick to include a patch for it on XP. Maybe they're laughing at 9x users now and hoping they'll get some quicker XP sales when users can't get ActiveX to work. The web is kind of quiet about this problem on 9x system's. How many folk's do you think would find there way here to figure out how to solve this? Sheesh. Without reading MDGx's post I would never have figured out which file (URLMON.DLL) was causing the problem. Don't ya think they really should fix this without needing 3rd party information to work around it? They are still in Extended Support phase at this point.

When you choose Option 2, you do get what you want. But you also get some other fixes for buggy 9x/Me Microsoft files that everyone should have. That's why they are not voluntary. They shouldn't be voluntary. (Okay, maybe you don't want the games (but I do!) but you can always remove those!) And make sure you do the Unofficial Service Pack first as that gives you many more necessary updates. And those will not be overwritten by 98SE2ME. No worries. All this is in MDGx's readme for 98SE2ME. If you just want the official (and, as they are, really unreliable) Windows Updates, then just install Windows Me and run Windows Update. Of course, that route will be gone in July. And also, if you want a well-running system then going all official like is really not acceptable anymore.

MDGx has seperate pages for 98SE fixes and addon's, WMP, Internet Explorer. I usually follow the order from the former Gape thread with the suggested order of installation. Meaning, I install all the drivers, IE 6 SP1, Dx9c, Microsoft WorksSuite (since it installs Office files), then the Service Pack. Then I install the few updates post Service Pack that are on MDGx's 98SE fixes page (like the unofficial 891711, KRN386). Then the WMP and DirectX additional stuff from those pages. Then the IE updates newer than IE6 SP1 from his IE page, and the addon's I want from his 98SE addon's page. But before doing the MDAC, MSXML and latest IE Cum patch stuff I install 98SE2ME Option 2. Then the Maximus-Decim MDAC updater and the remaining IE and Addon's from those pages. On this last install I included the new Maximus-Decim Internet Explorer updater. Probably not necessary since it seems I already installed those things from the MDGx pages. Following this I found I needed to go back and correct the problems caused by the last Microsoft IE cumulative 912812 update. This breaks ActiveX installs. So, things can get quite complicated especially with Microsoft's latest changes in ActiveX behavior and there being no current way to get the newer URLMON.DLL to work properly on 9x. I think it needs the Internet Explorer popup toolbar from XP to work properly. This isn't available on 9x, so there's no way to give IE permission to pop in the ActiveX message box that will allow the control's to install. So far it seems the only way to get the latest security updates included in the files of 912812 but also allow ActiveX controls to install is to install the older IE cum update over it and manually extract the file and either form Dos Mode or using System File Checker (what I did), replace the newer URLMON.DLL with the one from the older Cum update. That leaves the later dll's intact, so you keep the latest security fixes. It's kind of a mess at the moment. I'm hoping Microsoft releases a newer patch that makes this all easier.

Yeah, I guess it's some other problem interferring. It'll be nice if he can troubleshoot it out, but if not I suppose he'll need to clean install again. Sheesh! I hate when that happens.

Lot's of folks have problems getting the default bridged networking to work. Switch to the other one (NAT, I think. I forget exactly.) and it'll work. But make sure you install a firewall and virus scanner on your guest (Windows 98SE) operating system. Your host OS won't be damaged by an attack, as long as your firewall is active there, but your guest is susceptable to attack just like any standalone computer. If you connect to the net on your guest, also make sure you fully update it with all the security updates for Internet Explorer, etc. By the way, the driver is automatically installed for the emulated LAN card in the guest so you needn't worry about that. Just be sure to install VMWare Tools for video and download the Creative SB16PCI WDM driver for audio from the Creative website. (Install the 98SE WDM Microsoft update before the soundcard driver.) To fix midi and wave so it doesn't speed up or blank out, add the following lines to your Windows98.vmx file: pciSound.DAC1InterruptsPerSec = 0 pciSound.DAC2InterruptsPerSec = 0

Yes, but the upgrade cd will eventually ask for proof of your previous licence. You then put in your cd or floppy of the previous Windows version and setup examines it. You then put back your 98SE cd so setup can continue. Ya know, with the exception of my XP Home which are retail upgrade cd's, I've never experienced this. My 98 cd's are all full versions. At least, what I described above is how the XP upgrade cd's setup does it. Does the 98SE Upgrade really not ask for proof of eligability? That would have been strange for Microsoft to do!

You probably just need to reinstall the older KB905915. I went the full route and first reinstalled HTML Help update, then KB905915, then the latest Maximus-Decim MDAC update pack. This just makes sure all the latest versions (that have been proven to work) are there. After doing that my stuff seems to be working fine. You may want to check the version of URLMON.DLL after installing KB905915. Make sure the older version is there as that's the one that makes the ActiveX stuff install properly.

Thanks erpdude8. Nice instructions that I printed out. I guess I have the wrong version of URLMON installed since I manually did it. I'm not sure I want to run the file again since I just went through all that and the activeX appears to be working right (except for that problem I had with WindowsUpdateCatalog that I'm not sure is related). Running it as you said will allow the setup to patch URLMON to the correct version (1526) so I may do this sometime. I just might wait a bit. After all, Microsoft might possibly update the thing one more time and fix it automatically. Not too worried for now. It's nice to have the instructions on how to properly set it up. So, thanks!

charles, That Security Update Cd caused flaky Windows behavior for me when installing newer updates afterwards. Besides, the Unofficial SP is more up to date. The Internet Explorer, WMP, MDAC updates on that cd can be installed manually with the versions the user desires instead of using the cd. The rest of it is outdated and, for me, was flaky. One thing it did was change the Windows version number. Why did it have to do that? Microsoft also discontinued it. I have a feeling it was because they got reports of it messing up Windows systems. Originally it worked fine. A few months later I noticed Windows would be wrecked after installing newer updates on top of it. WorksSuite install's would kill my system too. This, whether installing WorksSuite before or after the update cd. Needless to say, I stopped using that thing.

Hmmm, some new glich, eh? My install of the MDAC updater went fine. Don't know what might be mucking up the works there. Just guessing it's probably something left over from that kernel32 project. Frustrating, freak'n Windows! Perhaps the important stuff got installed. Have you tried testing Internet Explorer to see if ActiveX stuff will again install properly and work? Mine mostly does. I had a problem with Windows Update Catalog when trying to go to my download basket, but that might be a Windows Catalog website problem. Dunno, really. Also, sometimes different versions of MDAC components installed by other programs stop proper installation of other versions. Right now the only 3rd party interferrence I've got with MDAC is the ATI Multimedia Center and possibly stuff installed by WorksSuite 2005. Since I have the latest available versions of both installed, perhaps that's why the MDAC updater worked for me without problems. If you've got some really old version installed by a game or something it might interfere. See in add/remove if you have DAO listed, and if it's there more than once (meaning you may have more than one version).