Dave-H

Just got a card to use SATA drives on my system. It's a Silicon Image 3124 card. Works fine in XP of course, but the driver doesn't actually work in 98SE. It appears to install OK, and appears normally in Device Manager, but no driver files are loaded and needless to say it doesn't work! I've combed the web but can find no evidence that a Windows 98 driver was ever issued for the card. Does anyone know of any generic SATA interface card driver that might work with it? Thanks, Dave.

I have a pen drive I can boot from into Windows 98SE, but as with rloew earlier, I can't use any other USB devices in that configuration. I have to use a PS/2 keyboard and mouse for instance.

That's interesting to know. In fact by chance I had already re-ordered the options to make them more logically arranged in the list offered. "Windows 98SE SP" is in fact number 3 in my list, and "NOHEAP" is number 11.

Sorry I'm not sure what you mean by "comp. mode". If you mean the download completion message that pops up bottom right, as I said it doesn't work at all for me in the "Windows 98SE SP" KernelEx mode. Also a lot of menu entries are missing for me. Some of them are just missing their text, but in some places the menu structure seems to be corrupted too. All this comes good if I revert to Windows 2000 KernelEx mode. I'm sorry but I really don't think Opera is usable like that, especially if you're a power user as I am.

I've done some more tests, and I'm afraid the notification at the bottom right of frame for when downloads end is definitely not working for me with that configuration. I assume this applies to all these notifications, e.g. for blocked pop-ups. If I set the KernelEx mode back to Windows 2000 it starts working again. I certainly can't use Opera without access to the settings menus!

Great, and it does what it says on the tin schwups, but I'm afraid I immediately saw problems with Opera 12.02 using this setup. The first thing I noticed was that the pop-up at the bottom right of frame when downloads completed was not appearing. I then looked more closely, and found that large chunks of the Opera tools menu were missing, including all the settings options! Setting the opera.exe KernelEx compatibility mode back to Windows 2000 put all this right again.

Opera 12.02 works fine on Windows 98SE (and I assume Windows ME) using KernelEx. There are a few anomalies, for instance you can't drag bookmarks around on the personal bar to re-order them as you should be able to do, but they are mainly cosmetic.

Welcome to the forum! Firstly, you haven't "fried" your video card. If it works OK under Windows 2000 the hardware must still be OK. You may well have corrupted the Windows 98 drivers though. Have you tried removing it in Device Manager and just rebooting and letting it reinstall itself? If that doesn't work, and assuming you have the driver disk for the card, or can download it, try removing it and cleaning the driver completely off the machine in Safe Mode. Remove the driver in the Add/Remove Programs list if it's there. If it's an ATI card or a nVidia card, you can use Driver Cleaner Pro to completely clean the system of all references to the driver. Then do a fresh install from the disks. Don't ignore warning messages in future, they're there for a reason! Hope this helps.

Fair enough! I've been using Opera as my main browser for many years, and never had a serious problem with it, but maybe I've been lucky!

Opera 12.02, the last version which will work on 98SE with KernelEx at the moment, is probably the best you'll do for now. It does have its idiosyncrasies when running under 98, but is perfectly usable. Of course many people on the Opera forum say that it's a resource hog too, although I personally haven't found that to be particularly the case. I don't use extensions, just an ad blocker which works very well indeed!

Well here's a revised order version of the changelog, done with good old-fashioned copy and pasting! Glad to make some small contribution, I'm afraid my technical knowledge isn't great enough to do more. Whether people think it's better this way around or not, you'll have to ask for feedback on. Cheers, Dave. changelog.txt

Looking good! One minor cosmetic thing is that the red text on dark grey used for the headings is a bit unclear to my eyes. Also, I personally think that it would be better if the changelog list showed the most recent changes at the top rather than at the bottom. Great job! Cheers, Dave.

Thanks PROBLEMCHYLD!

Well I've had this banner on Windows 98SE for many years now. I can't remember where it came from, but I suspect it was part of Gape's SP2.1a! Never felt the need for anything different.

The latest Flash plugin version is now 11.6.602.168 I believe.

As an aside, I think you should always have disk caching enabled on any browser, no matter how fast your internet connection is. If you don't, you will be re-downloading things from the web un-necessarily, which increases net congestion for everybody.

There are plenty of posts on the Opera user forum from people suffering poor performance even with the latest version under supported operating systems. Others always come back saying they have no problems at all! I guess there are just some systems that Opera doesn't perform well on. It would be good if a common cause could be found, but I suspect that's unlikely. I've been using Opera for years, since version 7, and never had any major problems with it (touch wood!)

I've never had any real problems with Opera 12.02. I consider that it will probably be the last version that will work under Windows 98, and therefore the most secure. There's odd niggles like not being able to move things around on the toolbars, but in actual use it seems to be stable and fast.

That is normal behaviour for Windows 98 network setup in my experience. It is very annoying but isn't a symptom of any problem AFAIK.

And to you too PROBLEMCHYLD! Thanks for all you've done for us.

I think you're absolutely right to make this decision. Trying to produce a service pack with full up to date USB support for all possible hardware configurations must be impossible, so it's best not to include it at all. People who want better USB support in Windows 98SE can easily investigate other solutions which they can try.

thanks for the confirmation that this works Yes it does, and I just noticed I said "Task Manager" when I meant "Task Scheduler" of course! I've corrected it where I can to stop anyone reading this in the future getting confused! One thing I forgot to mention is that if you have a Windows 8 CD like mine, it may well have two versions of Windows 8 on it, the normal version and the Pro version. If you look at the contents of the CD there will be two folders, called "1" and "2". Windows 8 Professional is in folder 1 and Windows 8 is in folder 2 on my CD. You can conform this by looking at the contents of the XML file which is with the folders. It probably doesn't matter with the tasks, although some may only exist in the Pro version, but other files you may extract should be the ones for the right version of Windows 8 of course!

Hi Mark! You do need access to the "install.wim" file on a Windows 8 CD, or another source. MS seem to have abandoned CAB files in favour of this, which I didn't know not having used anything later than XP! This compressed file seems to contain the Windows system files. It can be opened with 7-Zip, at least that's what I used, just Google for it, it's free. Note that you will need version 9.30 of 7-Zip though, which is an Alpha version, but seems OK. I couldn't open the .wim file with the current release version, 9.20. There were a couple of error messages when I opened the file in 7-zip, but it all seemed to still work OK. Open the Windows 8 Task Scheduler, and identify the faulty tasks from the error messages. Make a note of their names. Look in the Windows\System32\tasks folders on your machine and find and delete the files that correspond to the faulty tasks, whichever sub-folder they are in. Make a note of the names and which folder each one was in, to make sure you put the replacements in the right folder! Then reboot and go back to Task Scheduler. There should now be no error messages. Go to Windows\System32\tasks folder in the install.wim file using 7-Zip, and browse for the task files you want to replace. Use 7-Zip to copy them to your desktop. Now you need to replace the files with the good ones. The vital thing to do is that you must put an ".xml" extension on the new files, or Task Scheduler won't import them! The extracted versions on your desktop won't have any file extensions at all, so you'll need to add them. Once you've done that, go back to Task Scheduler, and look for the folder(s) in the tasks library where you want the files to go. When you have the folder open, right click and select "import". Import the appropriate file from your desktop. Its parameters window should open, and just click OK. It should appear in the list, but the entry will look very sparse. This should come good when you re-boot. I did mine one at a time for safety, re-booting each time I added one. Fortunately I only had four to do! Once you've done that, the entries should be complete again, and no error messages! I'm off to bed. Good luck! Cheers, Dave.

Just found this thread when trying to fix a very similar problem. I had three tasks that were complaining that "The task XML contains an unexpected node" when running the Windows 8 Task Scheduler. One of the tasks was also generating huge numbers of errors in the Windows event logs, which is why I investigated the problem in the first place. I fixed it by just re-importing the tasks from the Windows installation CD, as has been suggested I see. I guess the originals must have got corrupted somehow, and it is the fix. Longtime on MSFN, but my first post in the Windows 8 forum. I've only just got Windows 8 on my new second machine, and never had Vista or Seven, only XP and 98, so it's been a bit of a steep learning curve!

I don't think that toughcustomer's Opera version (10.63) need KernelEx at all to run. That version works on Windows 98 anyway IIRC. It is a mystery why installing KernelEx (if indeed that was the cause) should have corrupted it.