Dave-H

Thanks, glad I'm not the only one!

I'm now getting a nag banner popping up on MSFN all the time, on Firefox 52.9ESR/Windows XP and Firefox 71/Windows 10 asking me to switch off my ad blocker on the site and/or register and donate. As I already have my ad blocker (AdBlock+) disabled on MSFN, and I am a "Platinum Sponsor", I'm a bit puzzled by this! I think it started when the New Year started, does something on MSFN need to be updated?

Thanks for that, yes confirmed working fine here now on a system that it wasn't working on before, so I guess the problem was pointed out to their webmasters and was fixed!

Happy New Year to you too! Surely you would be better off asking this in the Windows 7 forum? There's already one thread at least.

@Goodmaneuver's suggestion looks fine to me!

@dencorso This discussion is now way off the original topic. The thread title really should be changed at least, which AFAIK can still be done by the OP editing the first post.

LOL, pedantic as always!

You're not called "The Finder" for nothing Jaclaz! I'm really amazed that the forum hasn't had the Christmas logo since 2015. Shows just how unobservant I am!

D-oh! Yes of course! The only lines I actually have ">nul" at the end of are - MODE CON CODEPAGE PREPARE=((850) C:\WIN-98\COMMAND\EGA.CPI) >nul MODE CON CODEPAGE SELECT=850 >nul IIRC that's to stop them printing the output to the screen, but of course they are still active.

Oh right, thanks Jaclaz. I've always used the ">nul" trick which I read about donkey's years ago. I always assumed that putting anything at the beginning of the line would possibly actually disable it, like putting "REM" or ";". I'll give that a try as it would look a bit more elegant. What's actually the downside of redirecting to NUL, does it waste memory or something?

Or if you want to hide just that line, but still display the others, add ">nul" at the end of the line, with a space before it.

MSFN always used to have a Christmas logo at his time of year, but not this year. Bah, humbug!

Sounds like the same procedure as it is for doing it over the phone. I had to activate Office 2010 on XP the same way as it wouldn't activate online (which it would on Windows 10 of course). It said that phone activation was no longer available too, but it still worked! That app sounds much better than typing all those numbers in using your phone keypad listening to voice prompts, if I ever have to do it again I'll certainly try it!

When you look at the console window of HTTPSProxy, what is it actually doing while it's using so much memory with your browsers closed? I can only think that something else on the system must be generating a lot of network traffic!

That does look a bit excessive, mine takes about 3 Mb when it's idle, and about 6 Mb while I have a Firefox tab open! Is the memory use still high with your browsers and/or e-mail programs closed?

Five updates offered today - Security Update for Microsoft Office 2010 (KB4484193) 32-Bit Edition Security Update for Microsoft Excel 2010 (KB4484196) 32-Bit Edition Security Update for Microsoft Office 2010 (KB4484192) 32-Bit Edition Security Update for Microsoft PowerPoint 2010 (KB4461613) 32-Bit Edition Security Update for Microsoft Word 2010 (KB4475601) 32-Bit Edition Tried Microsoft Update, fearing the worst after last month, and was amazed when they all worked! All seems to be OK, so presumably no MSO.DLL replacement this time. I guess last month's signing problem must have been a one-off glitch, at least I hope so!

Thanks very much, I've got the installer for 4.04 now.

Your last link seems to just redirect to https://www.realtek.cz/ which appears to only show ALCxxx HD Audio codecs, with of course no Windows 98 drivers available.

If you'd used the option to go back and install a different driver, that would have probably allowed you to over-ride that. However, as we now know that no version later that 4.04 is actually 98 compatible, there would have been no point. Obvious progress with the 3.52 driver though, which is good! Do you have the Sound Manager applet in your Control Panel now? Does Device Manager now say that the device is working properly?

Thanks @LoneCrusader, that's interesting about versions above 4.04 being incompatible with Windows 98. As I said earlier I always used version 4.00, and I do have that installation file labelled as being the last one that works OK on 98. I'll try and get a copy of 4.04 now I know that should be OK too, in case I have to revert to one of my spare motherboards which is an AC97 one.

If that doesn't work, try downloading and unpacking the archive from here, (make sure you select "Download the Driver File only"). Don't run the setup file, but instead select "update driver" from Device Manager and browse to the INF file in the extracted WDM folder and see if it will successfully install that way. It may be that the setup routine is not working properly on your system, and I have known things install successfully using this alternative method when this has happened in the past.

IIRC "Code 10" is an absolutely useless generic general failure message which doesn't tell you anything specific about what the problem actually is! FWIW, the last Realtek AC97 driver I used (for many years) on Windows 98SE was version 4.00. I only had to stop using it when I changed the motherboard for an updated version and one of the manufacturer's changes was to put HD Audio hardware on the board instead of AC97 hardware.

Does Device Manager say what's wrong? "Cannot start code 10" for instance?

The hardware ID you quoted in an earlier post, VEN_1106&DEV_3059&SUBSYS_02701462&REV_60, seems to definitely be an AC97 codec. They claim here to have a Windows 98 compatible driver (don't download their no doubt spyware "driver update utility", use the link below it.) Then click the "WDM_A406.rar" link on the next page, then make sure you select "Download the Driver File only" on the next page. That should work, there are plenty of Windows 98 drivers for AC97 audio.