eidenk

Two such core features, System Restore and System File Protection, were in their infancy, did not work very well, and were too much of an overhead. Successful, stable operation of Windows Me, is possible by disabling (not so easy) these 'features' and applying all updates. Yes, some people have had a good run with Windows Me as is, but generally it was not as reliable out-of-the-box. Actually it is very easy to remove System Restore and System File Protection from Windows ME with Oppcomme which you can still grab on the wayback machine : http://web.archive.org/web/20060829073935/...es/oppcomme.exe http://web.archive.org/web/20060829073935/...om/oppcomme.htm If you choose not to remove that, you need some Microsoft hotfixe (KB290700) to have System Restore to work correctly (perhaps) on ME as otherwise it won't work with any restore point made after September 8 2001.

It was web pages with java applets. For example, the Sun Java test page shows a blank space where the java information and test animation should be. See: http://www.java.com/en/download/help/testvm.xml It works well with Opera 9.64 and Java 6 update 13 here. I can't test with another browser as I don't have Firefox and my IE does not have Java installed.

Currently Java 6u7 works with or without KernelEx: http://www.msfn.org/board/index.php?showto...st&p=779193 Download from here: http://java.sun.com/products/archive/j2se/6u7/index.html With KernelEx, it is possible to install Java 6u10 and newer, but there are currently problems with applets not running. I am running, and have been since it's release, Java 6u7. It works very well and is faster than Java 5. I have tested Java 6u10 through 6u13, but the current limitations on Windows 9x make them unsuitable for many Java based web pages. Hi RetroOS, would you mind sharing a few link with applets not working if you can remember any. I have installed java 6 update 13 over update 7 since a few days and I have not encountered any problems with the java apps I have installed on my computer.

Are they right or wrong those conclusions ? What happens on your system if you move the dependency of an application to the destktop and try to run the app ? What happens if you move a dependency somewhere, specifiy its path in the shareddlls key and then try to run the app that needs it ? I did all this on my system and the application refused to start in both cases, saying the dependency was missing.

Try this, it is a very good icon extractor : http://www.becyhome.de/becyicongrabber/description_eng.htm

That's all great news Tihiy. I might be wrong but I don't think rloew is into an heap expander at all as he's mentioned ongoing research into 512 MB graphic card and multiprocessor support and did not answer a question aboit a heap expander I made to him sometimes ago.

Are you certain of that ? It does not seem to work like that on my system. Are you certain of that ? It does not seem to work like that on my system. AFAIK apps look for dependencies in their own dir as well as in directories that are in the "path". Directories that are in the "path" are the windows dir and the system dir as well as any directory specified in autoexec.bat under the PATH entry. As for the purpose of the SharedDlls key, there is an explanation here that is completetly different than yours : http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/forum/page-24675_35_0.html

Details please I have both KernelEx and RP9 installed and all I can say is that I have little to no problems with them. (wimpy flv player 2.5 and some) I have just downloaded wimpy 3 (there is no 2.5 to download anymore). It runs fine here. What are the others ? Explanations, examples please. The little problem I had was with one single program, a 16bit one. It has been fixed in KernelEx 3.2. I don't have any other problems and I run literally tons of "native" 98 apps of all sorts. What a tone man!

You need to undo all the changes to your system that have been made by this update. You should be able to find out what those changes are by unpacking the downloaded installer and examining its contents.

The Opteron 154 is also clocked at 2.8 Ghz and the rare Opteron 156 seems to be the fastest AMD single core at 3 Ghz. Just like the FX-57 they are socket 939 CPUs but I am unsure whether they would work on my motherboard (see my sig) as they are not in the list of supported processors. I did not buy a rather cheap Opteron 154 on eBay last week because of that uncertainty.

Details please I have both KernelEx and RP9 installed and all I can say is that I have little to no problems with them.

Yes there is a (quite obscure) IE extension which adds tabs to IE 5 and 6. It's called IETab. http://www.tooto.com/ietab/

If there are no localized versions you could easily do it yourself with Reshacker I guess. http://angusj.com/resourcehacker/

In case this is of interest for anyone, I found that Glass Windows Library to implement transparency on 9x systems. Page is in Japanese so you'll have to use Babelfish or Google Translate. There are compiled examples of executables along with the source code and the transparency appears to be extremely fast. http://www.ksky.ne.jp/~seahorse/libgw/ There is also some source code to implement transparency here but it seems much less performant. In english this one. http://www.cylog.org/sourcecode/transparent.jsp

Nope, it's not. I had this on Windows 98SE as well. Thanks for the info. Glad you've enjoyed the scoop.

None of that proves ME runs on top of DOS. To me it's just like hearing something like, not saying this just for you, look that diesel engine, it runs on electricity because it use an electrical starter.

The 137GB barrier is very real on many 9x systems because esdi506.pdr, the FAT32 filesystem driver, has a bug in it. If you attempt to write above 137GB on an unpatched system you'll crush the data at the beginning of the disk. As for the 32GB barrier in Win95 I dunno because I am not knowledgeable enough with 95 but BenoitRen will be able to tell us probably if you are right or wrong.

You shouldn't need to restart your pc each two hours normally. Maybe you've got a buggy program running in background or a shell extension that creates problems perhaps.

Well I don't think io.sys is the DOS kernel on top of which ME runs. As you say it has for mission to load vmm.vxd which is THE operating system. Nothing from io.sys remains after VMM has been initialized I think. The fact that io.sys uses embeded DOS technology to load VMM does not mean that VMM relies on any of that code once it has fully loaded and taken over the computer.

Windows ME runs on DOS, regardless of what the folks who think otherwise have said. Look at the Windows ME filesystem after install with a boot CD and notice things like command.com, autoexec.bat, config.sys, etc. Windows ME hides the DOS shell, but it's still there and it's still used to bootstrap Windows. All the files you mention aren't needed to boot and run ME as I have stated in what you quote and I don't need a boot CD to see that those files are present after installing ME as I can just boot into ME and see them as well. As I have said the only place where this DOS could be, if one, is entirely embeded in io.sys.

Could well be an issue with how your ISP handles your connection and bandwith. See their website for details on how and why they may cap your bandwith.

You can't get rid of io.sys as this is the operating system loader. So if there is a hidden DOS it is entirely in there but I highly doubt that. 2K and XP have a a loader whose name is not io.sys so you won't find one on those systems. The "debate" was in another thread some time ago. I don't have a link for it unfortunately. Sorry about that.

There has been a heated debate about that subject already and it has been conclusively proven that you are wrong on that. Windows ME can boot and operate normally without any DOS file being present at all. I have tested that running ME in a virtual machine (QEMU) during that debate. If you have a conclusive proof that ME runs in fact on top of a hidden DOS layer, please let us know what it is.

95 and 98 have in fact two different operating systems, DOS ans Windows. ME has just one, Windows. I would not think that the absence of real DOS in ME affects its stabilty negatively. You seem to have the belief that Windows of the 9x series run on top of DOS which is erroneous. 95 and 98 allow you to boot into either operating system and switch from one to another. ME does not as there is no real DOS in ME.

Well I dunno, I certainly removed lots of stuff from it and updated other stuff. I have removed System Restore, System File Protection, WIA, WMI, Webcheck, Protected Storage, UNPNP, Netbios (not sure if I forget anything else I have removed). I feel it is essential to update certain files such as msvcrt.dll and the ole automation runtime for stability. Every time I reinstalled ME (on different hardware) I could not launch control panel without crashing explorer for example before those updates were installed. Other than that I think my system is pretty much what some would consider as bloatware. I never upgraded IE to version 6 because of bad experiences I've had with it on 98SE but this might have been early unstable IE 6. I have noticed recently that installing old commercial program from the 1998/2000 era often leads to system instability because of the apparently buggy (and generally quite useless) shell extensions they install along with the programs. Lately I installed Lotus Smart Suite Millenium and Corel Ventura 8 (which I bought for £1 each .). In the days following that I noticed an outburst of odd crashes, apps which were behaving well were now sometimes crashing on exit in Kernel32, hanging subsequently in memory without being possible to kill them with a process manager, etc... First I blamed that on RP9 I had installed at around the same time because it made sense to me that it could have a bug on exiting programs as it is supposed to have some code running that cleans up resources when program exits. But no the problems were all down to those shell extensions it seem, as those problems don't occur anymore since I removed them. Dunno if this is ME specific. I found out as well since some time that the Sun Java BHO (any version I can recall) for IE was a bugger on my system so that if I upgrade Java I immediately remove this BHO afterwards not to suffer from slowness in opening folders in explorer. It turns out this BHO also hooks into explorer and each time I open a folder it parses a large number of its own keys in the registry, considerably slowing down explorer. Dunno if this is ME specific or not either. That's all I can think of right now. Something else I forgot to mention is that ME seems more stable and recovers better than 98SE when going into a very low resources situation.