Dave-H

Ah yes, sorry I'd forgotten that!

I'm using Malwarebytes Premium 3.5.1 and it's still automatically updating itself absolutely fine.

I checked the system.ini file, and was surprised to find that it already said "Waveaudio=mciwave.drv 9" (probably where I left it after playing with the UI), although the UI still said 4! It appears that the UI slider was changing the setting, but just not showing it. I set it to 5 in the system.ini file, and when I went back to the UI, it now said 5. I must say that the system sounds now sound better, thanks very much!

Yes indeed. I don't have the Access component installed, which may be why I haven't been offered that update.

I found the wave buffer setting option, and it is set to 4. Unfortunately I didn't seem to be able to set it to anything else. If I change the setting, it doesn't "stick", and always reverts back to 4 again. Where is it stored, is it in the registry or in one of the ini files? Perhaps I could try changing it there? I am using Realtek drivers on Windows XP and Windows 10. R2.74 and 6.0.1.7647 (x64) respectively.

My wav music files are CD quality, they play fine. I've done a few more tests, and the system sounds when played with media players are exactly the same, that is to say distorted, when played with Windows Media Player or VLC Media Player. Strangely though, when played with the QuickTime 6 player, they sound fine! I guess that somehow plays them differently. With regard to the pops and clicks, that's interesting that the "proper" drivers mute the sound while the file is loading. I didn't know that, but it makes perfect sense if the 3.1 driver doesn't. I've noticed that even with the "proper" drivers on Windows XP and Windows 10, the speakers pop quite loudly a couple of times when the drivers are loading on boot. Not very elegant. Never had that with the good old AC97!

Thanks for the clarification @deomsh. I've done some more testing just to see if the 3.1 driver would be adequate for @tillewolle, and playing music through the driver seems to sound absolutely fine, but the system sounds sound a bit rough, some sort of HF distortion. This doesn't change with the volume setting. I did wonder if it was because they are wav files, not mp3, but I have some music wav files, and they sound fine when played too. The only other issue is that there are low level clicks and pops from the speakers while a file is loading, but once it's loaded and playing, that's fine.

Yes that is a great tool, I've had it for quite a while. It doesn't seem to have been updated for quite a while, 20.12.2016 still seems to be the latest version, but I guess that doesn't matter.

Strange, KB2986256 was apparently issued on November 27th, but as you say @JerrMSFNI can find no notification of it and it doesn't appear after a scan on Microsoft Update. Is it perhaps not necessary on all systems?

Yes, it does need configuring for each chip, which is why it's a shame that @tillewolledoesn't also have an ALC883, if he had he could just use my files! @deomshsorted all that out for me. I really only needed it to be able to get the system sounds working, as i have other operating systems on the machine if I want to listen to music or anything else serious. There is some distortion on the system sounds, but surprisingly music is pretty OK if I do play something on Windows 98.

Only just seen this. I got a driver to work on Windows 98SE for a Realtek HD Audio chipset with the invaluable help of @deomsh and others. It was an ALC883, not ALC880, but you might be lucky! See this rather large thread.

I'm not sure that the OP's problem is the same as that one which I originally reported though. I wasn't seeing the Instagram videos at all, although still images were fine. It turned out that the videos' containers were collapsed to a single line. The OP seems to be saying that the containers are visible, but are just filled with black, which sounded more like not having html5/h264 video support in the browser. In that case Facebook and YouTube videos shouldn't work either as I believe that the Flash fallback has now been removed.

I assume you mean Firefox 52.9 ESR. Do YouTube and Facebook videos work, or is the problem just with Instagram? If not, see here.

Er, OK...........

You'll find that the use of ProxHTTPSProxy has been well documented already in this thread, and others!

I'd be interested to know if it works! I did look for Java offline installers which still worked on XP when the official ones from Oracle stopped working, but never found one. It is only the installer which doesn't work, the actual Java components still work fine on XP. You may well find that when you run the installer, nothing actually happens. If it does work, please let us know! EDIT: I've just actually downloaded that installer, and it is the standard offline installer from Oracle, which I can almost 100% say will not install on XP, whatever Codec Pack say!

Thanks Den! I guess I'll wait a bit longer. As you say, XP runs fine with only 3GB or so of RAM usable, and unless you want to run resource intensive games on it or whatever, there is probably no real reason to need be able to access more memory anyway.

Just a quick aside. IIRC there was some problem with running 16 bit programs in some boot configurations of XP. Will they still run if a PAE patch is applied? Asking for a friend. (No not really, I do actually have a couple of 16 bit programs that I use! )

Do you mean 231, that's the current Java 8 version? That works fine here on XP with Firefox 52.9.1 ESR, and there are no warnings in the plug-ins list about it.

No problem! I keep wondering whether Otter should be given more prominence in the "browsers that work on XP" threads in the XP section here. I've been monitoring it for years as the intention is to replicate Presto Opera, which I used for many years and was considered by many to be the best browser ever produced before it was cruelly abandoned in favour of yet another Chromium-based browser. Unfortunately Otter's development has been at a glacial pace, I suspect because there's actually very few people working on it, and although they did finally get to an official release, it's still very far away from something I would want to use as my default browser. All credit for them for maintaining XP compatibility though!

@VistaLover This is off-topic, but there is a workaround for Otter to get YouTube and Facebook videos working on XP. You need to download this - https://otter-browser.org/tmp/otter-browser-xp2.zip Then you need to copy the "Lib" folder over from that version to the current version. I did that ages ago, and it still works. See this thread for more detail.

Just for the record, on XP both Chrome 49 and Otter 1.0.81 open the Cote website fine without HTTPSProxy enabled. Opera 36 does as well, but again without the background video. My ancient version of Safari for Windows (5.1.7) also opens it, perhaps rather surprisingly, but it's not formatted very well. IE8 doesn't want to know without HTTPSProxy of course, just producing a "page can't be displayed" message. With HTTPSProxy enabled it just produces a blank white page. Thanks for all the research you've all done, especially @VistaLover, I really wasn't expecting all that! I guess it is worth looking into though, as potentially other sites could have the same problem.

Ah right, that explains the apparent anomaly! I guess they are assuming that anyone still now using XP would be bound to have SP3, so didn't see the need to specify it.

I haven't used Windows XP's task manger for years, and that's one of the reasons why! I use DTaskManager by Dimio (I'm not associated with him I hasten to add!) It's very good, gives a lot more information, including accurate RAM usage data. It can be set to automatically replace the Windows Task Manager.

So the portable version of Partition Magic 11.5 doesn't work on XP, but the full installer version of Partition Wizard 11.5 does? How strange!