Dave-H

I hope "$763.45" shipping was a joke! I agree, there shouldn't be any problem skipping BIOS versions.

Strange, the webpage says it doesn't! This is off-topic of course, but perhaps it does on some sites but not others, although I don't see why that would be.

The jack which feeds a simple pair of stereo speakers is normally coloured green. If you connect to that and hear nothing, I am very afraid that the hardware could be dead. I thought the audio hardware being on the PCI bus was quite normal, but I'm not an expert on the architecture of motherboards.

Thanks!

FWIW it works fine with Firefox 52.9 ESR on XP, except for the map, which it says it can't display because there is no WebGL support in the browser.

I'm pretty sure that the codecs are listed anyway, even if there is actually no functional audio hardware to take advantage of them. Do try the speaker test, as if there is no sound at all from them, even a faint click or pop, when the machine starts up I think it's very likely that the audio hardware is non-functional.

My experience with motherboards with Intel chipsets and Realtek onboard audio is that the the analogue audio hardware appears in Device Manager as a Realtek device. Did you try the "speaker test"?

Ah yes, I've just seen that now! Very strange. So what's the point in publishing it if you're not going to let anyone download and use it?

VEN_8086 indicates an Intel device. It doesn't look as if there are any Realtek devices there. It is still possible that the on-board audio hardware is physically disabled, or faulty. Try connecting some speakers to the audio output, and turn the volume up on their amplifier. With your ear right up to one of the speakers, boot up the machine. If the hardware is working, it would be very surprising not to hear at least one click or pop from the speakers, however faint, when the hardware starts. If there is complete silence, I think you have to assume that the hardware might be dead, or physically disabled, by a jumper perhaps rather than just in the BIOS. If you have the manual for the motherboard, it should detail the functions of any physical jumpers on the board.

The link's still serving 3.65, not 3.66.

BTW, the Service Pack download link still seems to serve version 3.65, not version 3.66.

I must say FWIW that I never had any problems with the 2008 update to Auto-Patcher, but of course it's now 12 years old, and the Service Pack must be far more up to date now!

Ah yes, I do remember that now! I seem to remember thinking that it wasn't actually worth the trouble as 261 only needed one file substituted with an earlier version, but going up one more version needed much more work. Since then, and I hadn't made the connection, I've actually been using the Azul Zulu version of Java 8 Update 262 on Windows 98SE, to run a Burp proxy server!

I don't think Java is still alive on XP is it? I thought that versions beyond Version 8 Update 251 were completely incompatible.

I would check the hardware IDs of all the unknown devices. If any of them contain VEN_10EC they are Realtek devices. You've enabled the onboard audio in BIOS, but still check that there are no jumpers on the board to physically disable the hardware.

The onboard audio hardware may be disabled, especially if it's a used machine. The previous owner may have had it disabled as they were using a plug-in sound card. Check the motherboard manual for relevant jumper settings. It would be very strange for it not to appear in Device Manager in some way if it was enabled and working.

Have you tried doing a search using the device ID? That's usually the best way of finding drivers in my experience, especially for older hardware and/or operating systems.

Five more updates today! KB4486698 - Office KB4486742 - Outlook KB4484372 - PowerPoint KB4493140 - Office KB4493148 - Excel The updates still keep coming!

Indeed, I was surprised too, but very pleased! You can of course install KB4486698, but you will have to restore the older version of MSO.DLL afterwards. I would personally recommend doing that, as it may contain other updates.

No I haven't. Although being 32 bit I can obviously only access 3GB of my installed 8GB with XP, it never seems to show any sign of running out of RAM.

I didn't switch to XP until 2010, updated from Windows 2000, as 2000 was getting harder and harder to use as so many things had become incompatible with it. I therefore went straight to Professional Service Pack 3. The UIs were very similar of course between 2000 and XP, and could be made to look pretty much the same, and it's still my favourite UI to use, still set to this day to look like the Windows 98 UI, which I still use as well! I have Windows 10 on the machine as well (the specs are in my signature) and I've got used to the Windows 10 UI, with the help of Classic Shell (now Open Shell), but it will never be as good IMO.

When I surf using IE8 with the Chrome plugin, I can see activity in the ProxHTTPSProxy console, so I assume that it's still using it. I suspect I would be getting a lot of certificate errors if it wasn't. Just to add that I was amazed to be able to use my online banking site with IE8 using the Chrome plugin. I never thought that would work ever again!

These are the results of the first two tests - When I tried going to the YouTube login page without the Chrome plugin, it was a terrible mess and unresponsive so I couldn't enter anything.

No difference I'm afraid.