LLXX

"The software expands to fill up the available hardware." It definitely seems that way. Software manufacturers are deliberately making their products more inefficient to try to force consumers to buy the latest hardware, creating revenue for the hardware manufacturers. It seems so unethical to me. Windows Vista being the latest example of this.

Your HDD is dead, or very close to it. Your CD-ROM is dying too. I think you should've bought a better laptop.

Are you using a CRT or an LCD monitor? LCDs are particularly sensitive to changes in resolution, as they were designed to only display one fixed resolution. Running them at any other resolution causes sub-optimal display.

Given my strong detestation of all things advertising, which many others probably share, I don't think it would be too long before we start ripping out the ad components.

I just use the clock that comes with Windows. It works just fine, so why change it?

There is an executable calld PIDSET.EXE which appears to do something with the DigitalProductID key in the registry; the following strings of interest are found in it:

BootVis, as its name implies monitors the boot process. The thread starter is asking about shutdown. What part of the shutdown process is taking the longest?

So it seems to not care if ProductID and DigitalProductID are present or not? Then I guess you could write whatever values you wanted in them... what does it show for a product ID in the system properties page then? 31300 and 12000 are OEM releases by specific manufacturers. It'd be much more informative to provide the description of the Win98se distro those pids were found on. 50807-019 looks like a special distribution version (beta? pre-test?)

Make a note of what processes are running in the task manager and how much memory they're using. After several days, compare and see which one(s) has/have grown. That is where your memory leak is.

If you're not too concerned about appearance, find an empty space inside the case and mount the drive there with whatever method works best (I have a drive mounted via screws through the ventilation holes on the back of the case near the bottom), the orientation doesn't matter as today's HDDs are designed to work in all positions.

From a little searching of the Internet, it seems that deleting DigitalProductID will result in it being generated again from the ProductKey; the product key is actually a base-24 integer, and DigitalProductID contains the multi-byte integer representation of it, among other things such as ProductID. ProductID has fixed part and dynamic part, eg. aaaaa-bbb-ccccccc-ccccc The aaaaa will always be 50578 for 98se, bbb is the install type: 000 : Other (includes some retail, upgrade and evaluation versions) 011 : Upgrade OEM : OEM 270 : Volume License 335 : Retail 640 : Volume License The c part is dynamic and depends on the product key.

You may want to "compress" your registry. Export the whole thing to a text file (don't open it, it'll be very large), backup your old Registry files, then boot to pure DOS and use the regedit Create ( /c ) option to create a new set of registry files from it. I have Office XP on my machine, and it hasn't caused any problems yet.

Prepare a virgin install of your desired OS on a secondary hard drive or partition, then run the NSIS under the supervision of a Regmon and a Filemon to see the files being copied and the registry entries being added or changed. Currently this seems to be the only way to do it as there is no unpacker available for NSIS - yet.

I tried it too, and it also reports No Vulnerability. This is with a stock gdi32.dll, v4.10.1998, 155648 bytes. I do have the "Paint" program installed.

That's why you don't load a whole lot of unnecessary stuff at startup. Another reason to run 98: Unaffected by WMF Exploit! http://www.msfn.org/board/index.php?showtopic=64332

IE: Asked me to download or open it. Chose Open: "Open file with..." dialog comes up. I choose to open it with IE. The "save" dialog comes up and closes immediately. Chose Save: Downloaded the WMF. Double-clicked it and "open file with..." comes up again. Right-click and view Properties: Standard property page comes up, nothing else happens. Turned on Thumbnails: Nothing happened. Tried various Image-editing programs I had. All of them refused to open the file, claiming the file was invalid. I guess I'm immune... OS: 98se customised.

On my drives, if only one bad sector appears, it's time to retire it. They're signs that the platter surface is failing.

I was also wondering whether or not WMF vulnerability affects 9x systems... maybe I'll assemble a "sacrificial" machine for testing purposes. However, I don't think it would be too difficult to make an "unofficial" patch for it, depending on the exact details of how the vulnerability is exploited. edit: Interesting test to see if you're affected: http://www.msfn.org/board/index.php?showtopic=64332 I wasn't affected at all

They are completely different, that is true, but the performance of the 9x series OS is in fact much better than the NT series. Just take a look at the underlying architecture, and most importantly, how system calls are handled. In 9x, the VMM32 subsystem runs at ring0, and what most would consider the kernel, i.e. kernel32.dll, gdi32.dll, etc. run in usermode (ring3) and applications programs call directly into the loaded DLLs of the kernel. In contrast, NT systems run their kernel at ring0 and instead of simply calling into the kernel like any other DLL, many NT system calls go through two priviledge level transitions - down into ring0 to enter the kernel code, and back to ring3 usermode to go back to the application program (KiServiceDispatcher does this, if I remember correctly...)Because of this additional overhead incurred by system calls, NT systems do not have any performance advantages over 9x - only certain security advantages.

There is nothing wrong with the hardware. The problem is with the driver.

I think the Mach Speed mobo is just a rebranded Jetway one, especially with them both using the identical BIOS.

Change your icon spacing. It can't display longer otherwise it would run into the space of the icons beside it.

Doesn't seem like putting the CPU in will make it work...

I don't think that's a good idea, since 9x and XP are totally different architecture. Have you used any program that uses the functions in ntdll yet?

In the Internet applet of Control Panel, under Connections tab, click LAN Settings and look at "Use a Proxy Server" checkbox - you can disable it from there.