eidenk

I am using Ram Idle as a background task, it monitors the amount of free physical memory, dispay its value in the tray and autofrees (optional) some of it when it becomes too low as Windows does not seem to do it by itself. If I do not use this tool free memory can easily reach 0 and the system then becomes unstable. It is a well known problem isn'it ? Or have I missed something ? Sure it is not necessary to have a resident one but I am sure you are sometimes using one tool or another to free unused physical memory.

Apart from Taskinfo which is shareware I can't recall any serious free Task/Process manager candidate (PrcView, Current Process or Process Explorer) that displays memory use, but almost any resident memory manager (without which in my opinion no 9x system can be run satisfactorily) will display memory use in the tray. PS : CoralSoft's Win9x/ME Task Manager (A free clone of Win 2000 Task Manager) does display memory use in the performance tab but is my opinion too poorly featured as it does not allow setting process priorities, it does not allow to view modules loaded by processes and it does not allow to dump any information to file.

Interesting. I haven't used 98SE since some time and I was not too sure about that which is why I posted the above (I thought I remembered thumbnail view wae one of the reason I sticked to ME but I probably confuse with when I went from 95 to 98SE). Anyway it does mean that not many 98SE users have been reading this and the above soft is interesting anyway as it allows extra filetypes to be viewed as thumbnails. But is thumbnail view independent from web view in 98SE as it is in ME ?

Timezones values are stored in the registry. Here is for Auckland (set as default) : REGEDIT4 [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Time Zones\New Zealand] "Display"="(GMT+12:00) Auckland, Wellington" "Dlt"="New Zealand Daylight Time" "Std"="New Zealand Standard Time" "MapID"="78,79" "TZI"=hex:30,fd,ff,ff,00,00,00,00,c4,ff,ff,ff,00,00,03,00,00,00,03,00,02,00,00,\ 00,00,00,00,00,00,00,0a,00,00,00,01,00,02,00,00,00,00,00,00,00 [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\CurrentControlSet\Control\TimeZoneInformation] "ActiveTimeBias"=hex(3):C4,FF,FF,FF "StandardName"="GMT Standard Time" "DaylightName"="GMT Daylight Time" "Bias"=hex(3):00,00,00,00 "StandardStart"=hex(3):00,00,0A,00,00,00,05,00,02,00,00,00,00,00,00,00 "DaylightStart"=hex(3):00,00,03,00,00,00,05,00,01,00,00,00,00,00,00,00 "DaylightFlag"=hex(3):02,00,00,00 "DisableAutoDaylightTimeSet"=dword:00000001 I don't think SP2 has wiped those values off the registry but as it replaces the Date/Time Control Panel Applet there might be possibly a problem with it though I do not think so as I have just tried it on my ME system and it displays correctly the Timezones stored in the registry. There is a GUI tool in the Windows 98 Resource Kit called Time Zone Editor with which you can edit or create time zones. It is called Tzedit.exe and should be on your 98SE CD. You can get it here if you haven't got it. Try merging the above registry file anyway and see if it helps.

Just a few comments about ASPI. I haven't tried ASPI 4.70 on 98SE (I always used 4.60) but I have tried it on ME and I have ditched it quickly for 4.60 as it seemed to me it was a sucker. What I mean by this is that with 4.60 the rest of the system remains very responsive when accessing or rather working with optical drives which I find is not the case at all with 4.70.

This japanese freeware utility called Thumbnail Extension (Screenshot) claims to add thumbnail view to explorer in Win98 (or replace it in upper versions. I test it under WinME at the moment). It supports bmp, dib, rle, jpg, jpeg, jpe, jfif, png, emf, wmf, ico and mag as well as a customisable list of text files. It does not support gif, html, url or other file formats natively but supports Susie plugins which allows to add any file format for which a Susie input plugin has been written. Here is gif support. And here is html support. There is even a url catcher plugin called axurl.spi that apparently allows to view web pages urls as thumbnails (provided the corresponding pages are in the TIF cache) but it seems unavailable for download anywhere (I haven't got it myself). There are plenty of other input plugins available. Searching google for ax???.spi or if???.spi (where ??? stands for the graphic file extension you are looking for) should easily yeld a download for the other common graphic filetypes such as tif, tga, pcx, pcd.... I cannot be sure it works properly under Win98 as I haven't tested it on this platform (It works very well so far under WinME) but it is surely worth a try.

I have found an easy to use Windows GUI soft that does this (between other things). It is a professional grade forensic software and it is apparently free. FTK Imager

If your physical keyboard is a British one, then go in Control Panel\Keyboard Properties\Language. Add the English (British) keyboard and set it as default. Reboot.

Here

Acrobat 5.1 is alright for me. It loads significantly faster than version 6 and does not GDI crash the OS like 5.0. after 5 or 6 uses. Only problem is that it displays a compatibility warning box before displaying documents that have been created by Acrobat 6 and upwards. I haven't found an option to disable that.

Nor does it work with K-Meleon.

Hi azagahl, I think I remember reading you are not using the standard IDE controller for your disks because of some hardware you have. Speed Fan and HDD Health both display SMART information for my two IDE drives but my SATA (SCSI) drive is not even listed by them. It seems SMART tools don't support SCSI drives. Anyway I am not sure SMART technology is any accurate as no physical measurement is made on the drives. So far as I know, SMART technology has been develloped notably for accurately predicting the failure of high speed, always on, rotary pumps and thus be able to use them for the maximum possible period of time while never suffering an unexpected failure. This technology relies for making its predictions on acoustic and vibratory monitoring and analysis and takes into account the acoustic and vibratory environment of the measured object. Unless I am entirely wrong, no such measures are made on hard drives by SMART monitoring tools, everything being interpreted from disk events. So I suppose that after measurements have been made in a clean environment, algorythms have been written to equate hard disks event patterns with the vibratory state of a spining object. In a computer case, there are many spining objects, all resonating with each other so that a problem with a fan might translate in a false SMART warning on one or another of your drives or a real problem with a drive might not translate into a SMART warning because its vibratory symptoms are cancelled out by another object resonating with it. I believe that for satisfactorily using SMART monitoring tools on a computer hard drive, it recquires some tweaking of the box as to vibratorily isolate objects from each other.

A nice little tool : PEiD

I think it is a false alarm as well. Some of Nirsoft's excellent utils seem to be falsely detected by one antivir or another as viruses. I emailed him sometimes ago about it (to which he kindly answered) after someone I recomended his utils to complained that Norton was finding it was a virus. It seems the situation is slowly improving. For example his latest nircmd is not detected as virus anymore by Antivir I use. For my part it is the only false postive I have had myself with one of his softs.

That's more of the exact symptoms I had when using Regseeker to clean the registry. In fact Regseeker removes several apparently dead entries under the HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Setup\VarLDID key. Those corrrespond to path to MS programs folders that do not exist on my machine such as Outlook, Movie Maker or Hyper Terminal that I do not use and I normally remove through the add-remove programs. I took me some time to figure which out of around 300 MS related entries containing the words Setup that Regseeker removes were responsable for the Add-Remove programs applet crash. As all registry cleaning engines work more or less the same (they mostly remove entries pointing to non-existant folders or files on your disks), you might have removed similar values under this key with another Registry cleaner you use if this key is not on that cleaner's exclude list.I don't think removing any programs will cure your problem. I don't see how it could. Reinstalling windows on top of itself should but I am not 100% sure about it. So I suggest you look into all backups generated by registry cleaning engines you use to see if there is any removed values under the above quoted key and restore them back to see the functionality of the Add-Remove Programs back after rebooting. In case this is not possible (You haven't got backups anymore), I suggest you download RegDat This is a slightly crippled nag shareware but is the only soft I know who can read and export data in REGEDIT4 format from .dat registry files (such as the ones routinely archived as rbxxx.cab as backup by scanregistry at startup and present in the C:\WINDOWS\SYSBCKUP folder) or .1st registry files (First copies of your registry generated during the Windows Setup process and normally present in your root drive as hidden and/or system file.) You should compare the values under the key HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Setup\VarLDID of your system.1st file (and which contains for sure all the right entries (provided it is the one generated by the initial Windows Setup and not one generated by a Windows reinstall, in which case the original .1st files are replaced by new ones reflecting the content of some of your old registry including possible errors)) with those in your registry and correct accordingly. You may not have this very usefull initial system.1st file anymore as many people delete it at some point or another of their bloat cleaning. If so you can look for the oldest scanregistry backup you've got but bearing in mind that this system.dat file might already contain the error. As a title of example I give my own Setup\Varldid key ( As a title of example only as I am on ME and the values are slightly different in 98 and ME if only for the reason that Movie Maker does not exist on 98). REGEDIT4 [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Setup\VarLDID] "28700"="C:\\PROGRA~1" "28701"="C:\\Program Files" "28702"="C:\\PROGRA~1" "28710"="C:\\PROGRA~1\\ACCESS~1" "28720"="C:\\PROGRA~1\\ACCESS~1\\HYPERT~1" "28730"="C:\\PROGRA~1\\COMMON~1" "28732"="C:\\PROGRA~1\\COMMON~1" "28740"="C:\\PROGRA~1\\COMMON~1\\MICROS~1" "28742"="C:\\PROGRA~1\\COMMON~1\\MICROS~1" "29000"="C:\\PROGRA~1\\INTERN~1" "29001"="C:\\Program Files\\Internet Explorer" "29002"="C:\\PROGRA~1\\INTERN~1" "29400"="C:\\PROGRA~1\\INTERN~1\\CONNEC~1" "29401"="C:\\Program Files\\Internet Explorer\\Connection Wizard" "29402"="C:\\PROGRA~1\\INTERN~1\\CONNEC~1" "30000"="C:\\PROGRA~1\\OUTLOO~1" "30001"="C:\\Program Files\\Outlook Express" "30002"="C:\\PROGRA~1\\OUTLOO~1" "30100"="C:\\WINDOWS\\system" "30400"="C:\\PROGRA~1\\Plus!\\Themes" "30801"="C:\\Program Files\\Windows Media Player" "30900"="C:\\WINDOWS\\APPLIC~1" "30901"="C:\\WINDOWS\\Application Data" "30902"="C:\\WINDOWS\\APPLIC~1" "30910"="C:\\WINDOWS\\APPLIC~1\\MICROS~1" "30911"="C:\\WINDOWS\\Application Data\\Microsoft" "30912"="C:\\WINDOWS\\APPLIC~1\\MICROS~1" "29800"="C:\\PROGRA~1\\NETMEE~1" "29801"="C:\\Program Files\\NetMeeting" "29802"="C:\\PROGRA~1\\NETMEE~1" "30600"="C:\\PROGRA~1\\MESSEN~1" "30601"="C:\\Program Files\\Messenger" "30602"="C:\\PROGRA~1\\MESSEN~1" "30800"="C:\\PROGRA~1\\WINDOW~1" "30802"="C:\\PROGRA~1\\WINDOW~1" "30810"="C:\\PROGRA~1\\MOVIEM~1" "30811"="C:\\Program Files\\Movie Maker" "30812"="C:\\PROGRA~1\\MOVIEM~1" If I remove any of those entries in the registry (even those pointing, as I have said above, to non existant locations such as the Outlook folder) the Add-Remove Programs applet crashes with aproximately the following error message : Rundll32 caused an error in SetupX, Rundll32 will now close. It is only by restoring the deleted entry and rebooting the machine (A quick reload of explorer.exe will not do) that the full functionality of the applet is restored. Maybe this will help you sort out your problem .

Does this work on 9x ? I have never tried it as it is labeled as NT, 2000, XP only by its makers Sysinternals.

Are you using Regseeker to clean your registry ? If you choose to autofix all errors it finds, the above systematically happens. To avoid it you need to add this line to the exclude list : 2|SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Setup\VarLDID Not sure of course this is the cause of your problem. PS : I am a Win ME user.

Two freeware utils who can do that from within a batch file : LaunchKey and Send

Where is the Microsoft ESDI_506.PDR Hotfix for enabling large drive support ? Who must I ask for it ? This is the most critical bug affecting Win98 SE and Win ME and Microsoft does nothing at all about it though the problem is known to them since quite a long time and potentially threatens millions of end users worldwide who currently upgrade their hard disks on 98 or ME systems with huge data losses. The OS allows you to format those disks to their real size (at least Win ME does) and if you are unaware of the 48bit LBA adressing bug like most people are you''ll lose much if not all your data as soon as the OS will try to write on the disks beyond the 128 GB mark, regardless of partitioning. Years ago, Microsoft proudly announced when they introduced FAT32 that the 9x familly of OSes was supporting partitions of up to 2 TB in size (and therefore Hard Drives up to something like 40 TB). Microsoft has corrected this bug in Windows 2000 in which it was present as well several years ago with SP3 but not in Windows ME which is no older than Windows 2000. A certain Rudolph R. Loew has apparently successfully written a patch ON HIS OWN for addressing this bug. It has apparently been tested positively on drives of up to 400 GB. Can I suggest Microsoft to take contact with Mr Loew to buy his patch and issue it in emergency to their customers who need it as they seem unable to solve the problem themselves despite their billions and expertise ? Or has maybe someone the address of a good lawyer so that I and others can successfully sue Microsoft for the sudden and huge data losses they have or will suffer solely for the reasons underlined above until Microsoft support officially ceases for the 98SE and Me OSes ?

I have now erased the files which appeared to be corrupt and it resulted in the apparition of absurd folders and files with gigantic size on the first partition of the same drive as well as the destruction of all the data that was on it. Sorry I could not edit my previous post to add that.

Taskbars data is dumped from memory to the registry only at normal shutdown or logoff. Set up a taskbar environment and make sure to shut down or logoff before Explorer crashes (Unregister webcheck.dll if you don't want explorer to always crash before you have finished setting up a complex taskbar layout) so that the relevant data gets written to the registry. After restart or Login, export the following registry keys : HKEY_USERS\.DEFAULT\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\Streams HKEY_USERS\.DEFAULT\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\StuckRects2 Restoring the taskbar layout is now just a matter of merging the saved keys to the registry and then kill and restart explorer.exe. They can be exported on another computer as well and will exist even if the folders they point to do not exist on that system. They just will be unusable but as soon as the folder they point to exist they will be fully functional. Loads of fun and possibilities starting from there.

PS : I lost only about a few thousands out of hundreds of thousands files. Mostly but not exclusively files very recently added to the volume. No file has apparently disappeared nor any absurd directories or files appeared but damaged files have a slightly wrong size and are often damaged even in the first cluster and always totally wrong in the following ones. They can't be copied to other volumes with normal copy tools nor can they be deleted and the recovery software I have tried to use (Drive Rescue, Unstoppable Copier, Restoration) recovered exclusively corrupted files. The only type of damaged files I have managed to sort of recover are small ASCII files as they tolerate small errors that binaries can't.

It would seem that despite apparences I might be wrong (I haven't posted earlier, sorry I was very sick in bed for several days). I have found out that many of the tar files are internally corrupted. Their size is alright, they can be copied on other volumes or deleted but their content is crap. I will test again as I believe the damaged files may correspond to the moment I began to simultaneously copy three files at once on the volumes with Total Copy. I did so with the aim of generating heavy fragmententation. I wanted to test the performance of Diskeeper versus Defrag on such volumes.

Not Diskeeper. I have just stupidely tested defragmenting a 233 GB SATA drive with 190 GB of data on it under Win ME with Diskeeper Lite 6 and the result is widespread damage on the data. Then Scandisk only badly corrected (did further damage) five errors before throwing out "out of memory error messages. Never had any sort of problems problem with Diskeeper or scandisk on small volumes.

Thanks, I very much appreciate. But don't invite me in Texas (that I'd like to visit someday) before chimpy is behind bars.