Crash&Burn

What do you mean by "manual" ... if you mean unpacking it and manually applying it - I don't see how that could be "prevented" ... and if you've not disabled SFC, from my recollection it can be used to update system files. I think I'd redownload it, perhaps its corrupted...if not that sounds like you may have some kind of system instability going.

I'm fairly new to the VM world, haven't tested out the Trial one from MS I downloaded yet, but I thought for a decent testing you needed a sole partition for the VM...or am I mistaken in that regards...or does this do/support that?

You really ought to have some of the better sysinternal apps listed, they are some of the best standalone tools going... NirSoft apps are pretty good too, www.nirsoft.net But just ma opinion

But this thread/poll was in regards to the "best registry cleaner" and CCleaner is subpar at that. Decent at cleaning up junk files, but really thats easy enough to do w/ TotalCommander or batch files.

Everyone should just put Link21 on the Ignore list, though I imagine that wont stop from seeing his posts. Everytime I see one of his posts in this forum its the same rehashed s***. 98sucks, NT is better blah blah blah blah blah. Personally I've just stopped reading his posts.

There was an interesting discussion about this on Total Commander's forum: http://ghisler.ch/board/viewtopic.php?t=8780 I don't necessarily agree with what was said, (Balderstrom there). But a good read for anyone interested. Whether or not its necessary I just can't trust Windows enough to run w/o one. As such I use a dated one I suppose, Kerio 2.1.5 And am behind a router as well...

Anyone that knows anything, leaves IE alone, and opts for Firefox or Opera (and I wont debate the better, its very much opinion oriented, they are both good, I prefer Opera) 98 has fewer backdoors to get into for all these "hacks" as it isn't running AdminLevel Services. Any decent Firewall still supports 98, ie Kerio 2.1.5, which isn't even the current 4+ but it still kicks it. Thus 98 is easier to secure, the reasons to not use it mainly are lacking driver support on newer MOBO's, its limitations w/ > 1GB ram, and the FAT32's limitation w/ > ~130G HD partitions (Which isn't so much a limitation, as much as it starts to get very inneficient past that point)

If I had that much ram, I'd just disable the swap and see what happens. Windows will certainly boot w/o one. But likely you will run into problems w/ some applications and games that think they need one, no matter how much ram you have. The worst that will happen is a system crash, which you can just reboot and add the swap back.

I do believe GAPE's 98 project has USB 2.02 ... just an FYI You can prolly get 98 on ebay for a couple bucks *grin* And I must say I had more "fun" tweaking 98...than any of the later OS's, it was also so much easier to get rid of infestations in 98. Boot to DOS delete thos F"in files from System32, or just kill the process and delete the file... Win2K makes it almost impossible to do the above, once the file is loaded it wont let you delete at all

Yeah anyone that pipes in that is so offtopic as to be utterly annoying, just to trash 98 over and over again. 98 Does have some resource problems, and isn't quite so good with its swap, but really almost all the Critical alerts and such completely skip over 98...an uptodate (as much as possible) 98...or even MDGx's 98SE2ME is very viable, even more so if driver MFG's weren't being squeezed by the balls by Microsoft to not release any Oddly enough after I installed Dungeon Siege II (win2K), my direct-x was reporting to be 9.0d ... I don't know if that was an anomoly or what, as it certainly isn't available for download.

The only "lockdown" in 98SE that I recall was regarding Icons on the Desktop...has been a few months, but I don't remember ever having a taskbar lock in regular 98SE. Theres more than likely a way to do so...but would require an active/background process, might be a nice option though. I know it takes quite some time to get it back to "normal" after accidentally moving a piece of the taskbar or the whole thing.

Well tommyp or fdv (or even saugatak or olek II) might be better suited to answer (I'm much newer to this project), but I've not had any problems with hotfixes thus far, even ones that Nlite chokes on. I'd just recommend not installing that hulking fix en-mass, choose ones from it selectively is all... HFSlip isn't quite as automated as some of the other SLIPpipng options around here, when you want to differ from some of the presets some minimal editing of the inf's used is required, but really FDV's site and the files themselves are very well commented and they make it quite easy to use. And FDV generally will add more inf's to add in if there are things removed from his defaults that you'd rather keep. With a small amount of work HFSlip can take place of $OEM$ and even preinstall software, but as its main design isn't the latter, again it does require some end-user work. Again from what I have seen from this project, most everyone is very helpful (unlike some others where posts just go unanswered). Maybe if the posts here got out of hand like some of the others that might change, but lets hope not I try to help out on the boards, as I haven't been as helpful as olek or saug as far as testing goes yet, hopefully when I get my system setup properly for backups et al, I'll be able to participate more in that

Well that IS pretty much what I said, the second drive ~1.5x memory, and not w/ system files. But thankfully some ppl have sense here *grin* My secondary drive is basically stored multimedia, program downloads & backups. Program files and regular data (users) are on partitions of the first drive.

Well Via has to be one of the worst...I haven't had any problem whatsoever w/ Athlon 64 (s739) and an ASUS board. Some difficulty getting the Sata drives up and kickin' but that was due to that Microsoft crap Update Rollup

ASUS A8N-SLI Premium ATX S939 NFORCE4 SLI DDR 2PCI-E16 2PCI-E 3PCI SATA RAID Sound GBLAN Motherboard (A8N-SLI PREMIUM) http://www.ncix.com/products/index.php?sku...anufacture=ASUS $231.76 (CAD) ASUS A8N-SLI Deluxe Motherboard NFORCE4-SLI S939 DDR 2XPCI-E16 2PCI-E 3PCI SATA RAID LAN Sound 1394 (A8N-SLIDELUXE) http://www.ncix.com/products/index.php?maj...&minorcatid=107 $210.90 (CAD) Just for a price comparison, yer basically paying 70-90$ more for SLI --> ASUS A8N-E MOTHERBOARD ATX S939 NFORCE4 ULTRA DDR PCI-E16 PCI-E4 2PCI-E1 3PCI SATA RAID GBLAN SOUND http://www.ncix.com/products/index.php?sku...anufacture=ASUS $142.02 (CAD) If you go to ncix.com, and just click motherboards on the left, will get a list 7 of the top 10 are ASUS Course I did a lot of research before buying mine, ASUS was one of the first to do NFORCE2, due to financial reasons by the time I actually bought my box I had to re-research...Still went w/ ASUS but was the ASUS K8N-E Nforce3, instead of a similiar deluxe board for the barton chipset.

Yes and its always good to let windows do what it WANTS, because Windows knows best, especially in management of the Registry, Uninstalls, Default Windows installs, hotfixes. We wouldn't ever want to not let windows do exactly what it WANTS.

Uh why would you want to? If you look at what it is... Or perhaps even read some of the user comments before downloading, or perhaps go to: http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20051015-5438.html or: http://www.broadbandreports.com/shownews/68515 I'm sure there are others. Good luck w/ that.

I didn't recommend the "middle", But I have read a lot about swap, and just stated there are varied opinions And I listed what I do, which is the first partition on the second drive. Also its doubtful if the 2nd swap done your way will ever even get used. I suggested 1.5x ram, as when I let windows handle it, it sets my SWAP to 1.5 gigs. SWAP in NT5 tends to be very different from win98, as far as size and usage goes.

for example, on a 160 GB Drive (150 gigs) Depending on how you want to split the drive up or not. Make Partition 1, 75 gigs Partition 2: 02 gigs Partition 3: remainder

Theres various opinions, some say the middle of the harddisk, as less seek to and from (on average) other data on the drive. Others say the beginning of the drive. I've not done enough testing to say one way or another. But what I have been doing is putting the swap on my 2nd drive's 1st partition, sized 2.0 gigs I set the min/max to Ram x1.5/maxDiskspace The benefit of its own partition, be it at the beginning of a drive, or the middle, is easily defragmenting the swap. Move the swap to another partition. Reboot. Delete the old file. Move it back. Reboot. Swap is now defragged - in minutes. And your swap isn't getting mixed in with all the other files. Of course I keep my "Data" on its own partition. Programs on their own. And windows on their own. Now adays w/ NT5+ systems they don't even need to be annoying drive letters showing up in "My Computer" you can just Mount a Drive to a folder. The benefits I have found is that fragmentation is much more infrequent. Defrag can be done periodically. And your system (Windows) drive almost never fragments after initial install/defrag.

Seen this one: Update for Windows 2000 (KB908506) You may be unable to print to a network printer after you install security update 896423 on a computer that is running Windows 2000 with Service Pack 4 http://support.microsoft.com/kb/908506 http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details...&displaylang=en

From what I have read/seen & heard from friends, be it fact or no. Is that the Nvidia drivers aren't anywhere near as stable as ATI's releases. I'm sure someone here will counter that. And if you don't need "top of the line" just go 6mos-1yr old, and get the best or top-range from those. Personally I've been very happy w/ the Radeon 9800 Pro (150$ USD) that I got in April. But then I couldn't justify paying more for a Graphics Card than the motherboard, cpu and ram combined, which is what the reality is if you approach top end current models.

As a reg-cleaner its useless, it found almost no "crap" entries. As a FileCleanup, Opera can clean its own cache, and can easily run a couple clicks in TotalCommander to clean out temp files older than a specified amount of time, or search for duplicate files, or specific "junk" extensions. It just strikes me as another useless app. But to each their own The best reg-cleaner I used was nortons, JV-16's wants to delete far too much stuff that is important, and if you aren't a hardcore tweaker it will serious F your registry. There was one other I don't recall, but again it wanted to delete stuff that it really shouldn't. I'd rather have a little bigger registry than one thats screwed.

Theres actually a pretty cool loadscreen in MDGx's 98Se2ME, would need to be modified as it displays 98 Second Edition, -- could possibly ask him about that if anyone was actually interested. Seriously check out MetaPad http://www.liquidninja.com/metapad/Unless you already have, I've not noticed any problems whatsoever in 3+ years, and I wind up using it more often than multi-Tab Editors, like ConTEXT

FYI: I was doing some reading COM was previously the name for ActiveX, and prior to that it had some other name that I don't recall atm. From a few quick google searches it doesn't appear too many programs need it, was mention of Spyware blaster.