Wijono

Not trying to deny that Revolutions Pack Lite is a great work, but it has also very broad spectrum. For those people that just want to see XP toolbar icons in their IE6 under Win98SE, i.e., using icon matrix of 24x24, can you recommend something to achieve it Tihiy? It could be a small tweak or patch in the IEXPLORE.EXE maybe?

The reason of the split is: Win98SE and WinXP are using different bitmap image sizes. For example the toolbar icon of IE6 in Win98SE is Bitmap 265 and 266 in BROWSEUI.DLL, the size is 320x20 and it has 256 color depth. Whereas the equivalent toolbar icon of IE6 in WinXP is Bitmap 204 and 205 in SHELL32.DLL, the size is 384x24, color depth 16M. True you can resize the bitmap from 384x24 into 320x20 and change the color depth to 256, but the result will be very poor, like the Back and Forward buttons will not be so round anymore. There must be a better way of doing it, i.e., to force IE6 in Win98SE to use 24x24 icon matrix instead of 20x20. Any clue to that sort of tweak?

I appreciate charles’s help. Those MSKB articles certainly shed more light on the subject. However, I would be grateful if someone could help me to get information on what each line is doing in that TELEPHONE.INI. For example, in my Win98SE PC, I once had following line (I don’t know what program has done it): NumLines=33 After running Tapiini.exe it becomes as follows: NumLines=1 But according to MSKB 120221, that value NumLines=1 is meant for WinME, for Win98 it should be NumLines=2. Therefore I am very curious to know, e.g., what that line NumLines= is for, certainly also on the other lines in the TELEPHONE.INI.

To the question of LLXX, the telephone.ini file (resides in %windir%) is the actual Windows file where the settings for the Dial-Up connection are stored. As far as I know, it is only used a.o. in Win98SE, it is not found under WinXP. It is a very short file containing following lines: [Providers] NumProviders=2 NextProviderID=3 ProviderID0=1 ProviderFilename0=UNIMDM.TSP ProviderID1=2 ProviderFilename1=WAN.TSP [Provider1] NumLines=1 NumPhones=0 [HandoffPriorities] RequestMakeCall=DIALER.EXE

I am desperately searching the net for “TELEPHONE.INI” to no avail. What I would like to know is the purpose of each parameter in it, and whether there is a need to tweak it in order to improve the performance. Can somebody help please…

Plug in your USB storage device, open “Device Manager”, expand “Disk drives”, click to select your “USB Flash Disk”, click “Properties”. Then click “Settings” tab, down below under the “Reserved drive letters” enter the driver letter you want, for example H: for the “Start drive letter” and “End drive letter”. Click “OK” to close the “Device Manager”, next time you plug in that device again, it will be drive H: (for this example).

You are welcome Maximus. Glad to be able to contribute. BTW, the smaller file that you meant should be usbstor.inf, right? Good luck with you great project!!

From hardware point of view, USB storage device is designed for hot swap. That does not mean that we may unplug it by force, there is still software matter to consider. I must support Petr statement. If you unplug a USB device while in the middle of something is being written on it, you may lose some part if not all of a file. The worst case scenario is if that something being written is FAT, if the FAT is damaged, there is a risk that all the content of the disk is unreadable. True, there is a software to recover the data… but that is not so easy. Hence, I would strongly recommend to stick to either of the following ways: 1. Right-click the USB drive, either in the Windows Explorer or in My Computer, then in the drop-down menu click “Eject”. If the unplug process is successful, the LED in the USB Thumbdrive will go off, and the directory tree of the drive in the Windows Explorer will collapse (if it was expanded before). Note: You will get an error message if you do not patch the SYSTRAY.EXE as I mentioned in the beginning of this thread. 2. Click the Hotplug icon in the system tray. A message “Stop USB Disk – Drive(X:)” will popup, just click that popup, it will take a while until another message “The ‘USB Disk X:’ device can now be safely removed from the system.”, you need to click “OK” The drive letter “Removable Disk (X:)” will disappear from the Windows Explorer, but the LED in the Thumbdrive will stay on. 3. Click the Hotplug icon in the system tray. A message “Unplug or eject hardware” will popup. You need to click that popup, having done that the “Unplug or Eject Hardware” box will popup, showing what disk in connected, e.g., “USB Disk”, with the “USB Disk” you want to unplug selected you need to click the “Stop” button followed by “OK”. The next process is like in Point 2 above. I personally like method 1, it is faster but safe. Which ever way you prefer, the final choice is yours.

To my knowledge there are two ways to safely unplug USB device, first is by right-clicking the drive either in the Windows Explorer or My Computer, then click "Eject" in the drop-down menu. Secondly is by clicking or right-clicking the Hotplug icon in the Systray. Could you enlighten me, what do you mean with "remove usb sticks without having to end them through the systray."

Sorry PROBLEMCHYLD, I have no access to that version 4.90.0.3002, as such I cannot comment further. Maybe someone that has access on it could possibly be helpful.

If you want to change the toolbar icons in Windows Explorer as well as in Internet Explorer, and if you have also implemented the patch against freezing Explorer as I described here: http://www.msfn.org/board/index.php?s=&amp...st&p=452384 Then you need to patch both BROWSEUI.DLL. For the one with version 5.50 in the %windir% you need to replace Bitmap 265 with the one from Bitmap 266, also Bitmap 276 with the one from Bitmap 277. Whereas for the version 6.00 in the %windir%\System folder, you only need to replace Bitmap 265 (gray-scale) with the one from Bitmap 266 (color). You certainly can replace those files under DOS, but I would prefer using SFC instead.

Once you have installed Maximus Decim Native USB and like to have it behaves like WinXP, then see my hint here: http://www.msfn.org/board/index.php?showtopic=77423# Hope that helps.

As I mentioned in my following post: http://www.msfn.org/board/index.php?showto...605&st=116# The SYSTRAY.EXE I patched is Version 4.10.0.2224, file size 27,648 bytes. If you use different version, I am not sure whether you can find the same pattern, i.e., 75 1B 52 68. In that case a deeper look is needed. What version do you use then?

Sure you can use it with the NUSB from Maximus-Decim. BTW, NUSB is an UNOFFICIAL patch.

Thanks a lot Drugwash, it is a deal, I will wait. Cause Microsoft is not supporting Win98 anymore, I have a big hope that SlimBrowser will be one of browsers that we may rely on. As it uses system files, it starts faster then say Firefox or Opera.

Thanks guys for the info.

If you are using "Maximus Decim Native USB", and somehow like to have it behaves similar to WinXP, such as able to unplug with "Eject" but no error warning, and nicer XP like icon in the tray, then please see the following: http://www.msfn.org/board/index.php?showtopic=71671# Still in connection with WinXP, it has much smaller filesize of USBSTOR.INF and hence more efficient. It can also be implemented in NUSB, see the following message to know how: http://www.msfn.org/board/index.php?showto...id=526480 Good luck!!

The logical step to enable the detection of as many as possible USB devices is to add the VID and PID of new devices into the USBSTOR.INF, but doing so will quickly fill up the 64 kB limit that Win98SE can handle INF files. In spite of using abbreviation “DD” instead of “DeviceDesc”, Maximus-Decim has reached 62 kB in his NUSB 2.2.1! To work around it I use another approach as it is done in WinXP. Most of the USB storage devices, such as flash disk, thumbdrive etc. are compatible to the generic driver, hence for the detection of those kinds of devices I rely on the following lines in the USBSTOR.INF: [Generic] %GenericBulkOnly.DeviceDesc%=USBSTOR_BULK,USB\Class_08&SubClass_02&Prot_50 %GenericBulkOnly.DeviceDesc%=USBSTOR_BULK,USB\Class_08&SubClass_05&Prot_50 %GenericBulkOnly.DeviceDesc%=USBSTOR_BULK,USB\Class_08&SubClass_06&Prot_50 [strings] Generic.Mfg = "Compatible USB storage device" GenericBulkOnly.DeviceDesc = "USB Mass Storage Device" We need to specify the VID and PID only for the devices that do not fall into that generic category, e.g., digital camera, USB IDE Hard Drive and so on. With that done, we can have a small USBSTOR.INF of only 17 kB, giving ample of space to add those non-generic devices. There is a tradeoff though, if you plug in a new device to the system for the first time, Windows will ask you to click “OK” to proceed installing the generic driver. But that should not be too much a problem, right? With this solution implemented it can detect all my thumbdrives of different brands, it can even successfully detect card reader, the most recent I use is a Neodio based 45-in-1 card reader that I tried already for CF, SD, MMC and MS Pro flash cards. For those of you that like to follow my way but do not have access to WinXP, I attached herewith that small USBSTOR.INF to try (at your own risk though). USBSTOR.zip

Thank you RainyShadow for your effort to help. As I mentioned earlier, I can adjust brightness, contrast and gamma setting from the control panel, under the Intel Graphic Controller Properties. But then I need to leave Zoom Player in order to do that, inconvenient. What I would like to see is adjusting those parameters directly from within Zoom Player, as it is possible from Windows Media Player. I hope the developers will one day be able to solve that problem in the next version of Zoom Player.

Thanks Drugwash for your information. I followed your advice and sent an email to support@flashpeak.com, no reply, not even an acknowledgment. I tried to register to their Online Forum, the last webpage mentioned that an email has been sent to me for the account activation, but then few days have gone by and that email never comes. What can we expect .....What a pity!!!

Under WinXP SP2, the "Sounds and Audio Devices Properties" control panel does not have "Hardware" tab. Can someone please help me, how do I find out what codecs are installed in the system? Thanks a lot.

Wow... that is a lot of hard disk space!! According to the theory of probability, the bigger the volume, the bigger is the chance of bugs too!! In the following website: http://www.microsoft.com/technet/windowsvi...e/vistarpc.mspx Microsoft mentioned a.o. about the hardware Minimum Supported Requirements as follows: Processor 800 MHz 32-bit (x86) or 64-bit (x64) processor2 System Memory 512 MB GPU SVGA (800x600) Graphics Memory (empty) HDD 20 GB HDD Free Space 15 GB Optical Drive CD-ROM Drive In one of my PC with Pentium III running at 800, the WinXP is VERY slow, let alone with Windows Vista, so I doubt the statement on the "Processor" above. Someone with 800 MHz Processor would be better off to stay with Win98SE. I do that!!

Dual booting between Win98 and Win2k should not be a problem, provided you installed the driver for the PCI USB2 card properly in both systems. I also use a PCI USB2 card (NEC chipset), and have USB broadband modem and USB webcam connected all the time with no problem at all. I understood in your case, that any USB device plugged before boot up will not be detected, that includes a simple USB thumb drive for example. If that is the case, the possible explanation is that the hardware detection process took place before the PCI USB2 card driver is fully loaded into the system during the boot up process. I would suggest that you try to get the most recent driver for your PCI USB2 card. BTW, what chipset is in your PCI USB2 card? If that does not help, you may consider doing the "Cleanup Windows Device Manager in SAFE MODE" as it is described here: http://www.usbman.com/Guides/Cleanup%20Dev...Safe%20Mode.htm You must pay attention though, that completely removing USB creates problems for users who have both USB keyboard and mouse connected. When you reboot to Windows Standard Mode, NO input device is recognized making it impossible to continue. To prevent this from happening, you must have PS/2 input device, at least until you have completed the cleanup. Hope this helps.

Today I started to try the SlimBrowser Version 4.07 Build 100. True it is IE based browser, hence it launches as fast as IE 6 that I have, and in the contrary to IE it is highly customizable. It has pop-up blocker, tab browsing etc. More importantly it works with Win98SE. I am a person that like simplicity, talking about browser, what I like to have in the Tool Bar is just: Back, Forward, Stop, Refresh and Home. That I can achieve with SlimBrowser. What I wish I could do is customizing the Menu Bar, like it is possible with Avant Browser. Does someone perhaps know the trick or hint on doing that? BTW, the reason that I stop trying Avant Browser with my Win98SE are following 2 bugs: 1. It keeps on “stealing” the default browser status even when asked not to. 2. From time to time it brings up “Mprexe Caused an IPF in Kernel32.dll”

It has been quite a while now, and I still got no clue on how to bring up the Hardware tab in the “Sounds and Audio Devices Control Panel”, would it be possible with a registry hack perhaps? I am getting desperate .... Can someone please help ....