Drugwash

It's about two different concepts: first is building from a bare old version up and the other is chopping off unwanted "features" from a mature product while trying to make it run natively without system "improvements". I suggested the second as the features that would remain would have already been tested through time. Reimplementing them from scratch, especially for a one-man task, might be too difficult. But it's just a suggestion. Whatever works is fine.

Can't remember now, it's been a long time, but I vaguely recall a bunch of my favorite add-ons having stopped updating at this version back then, which made me stay with that version. I'm not saying it's the best or whatever. Actually someone really knowledgeable with web technology should assess the best browser version to be picked. Indeed, such application as a browser can be critical for a system and it should be able to run without any additions. However, it should be thoroughly tested so that it should also run correctly when any (and all) possible (un)official packages were to be installed on a given system. That is, full compatibility with or without (un)official upgrades. The link you pointed to is about a modified version of Firefox 7 that still requires KernelEx (or has a problem with). I do have Firefox 9 on my 98SE machine and I know some 10 ESR version would work too (I tried such version for a very limited amount of time on another system, with some bad behavior). If someone managed to get Firefox 10 (or even 9) run on 98SE without needing KernelEx or other updated (ME/2000/XP/etc) system files, then that would be perfect.

Personally I think it would be more useful - and maybe easier in the long run - to take a more recent version of a browser that already has certain much-needed options implemented and patch the code so that it can be run on 95/NT4/98/98SE/ME (without the need of KernelEx or other unofficial fixes). I myself am running Firefox 13 on XP-SP4 and not going to move away from it ever. If that version (and compatible add-ons) could be made to run in 9x it would be perfect. Actually it would be perfect if it didn't require that much memory in the first place. (typo)

Android is nothing but a massively crippled Linux, so why not a real, full-fledged Linux…

When given a chinese choice I'd rather settle for StartOS 5.1 (6.0 beta is only 64bit if I'm not mistaken). Or its earlier predecessor Ylmf 4.0. But Windows is no way in he!! a choice anymore. Because the World is getting colder every day and we can't live in a house with broken Windows!

What if actually God is playing an online game with the Devil and we are only fictitional characters in that stupid game…?

I saw a bunch of old versions of Trout on some site recently, but they all sport crappy search engines - most google-based - and I can't find it anymore. Anyway, Jody already said long ago he wouldn't support Win9x anymore despite continuous requests (and help) in the DonationCoder forum board so I guess that's it. Another one bites the dust. (added link to DC forum board comment)

DOS is a limited OS. M$ are not afraid of it. It's also used in many embedded devices and whatnot so there probably was a huge demand from solid clients to keep compatibility. On the other hand Win9x family is extremely capable and - most importantly - very hard (if not impossible) to control, so M$ wants to get rid of every trace of that OS family as soon as possible. My strong belief is that they somehow coerced each and every hardware manufacturer to stop producing 9x drivers for their newer devices although that might not have negatively impacted very much- if at all - those manufacturers. That is why I strongly believe that M$ should be put to sleep forever as soon as possible before we lose every single bit of privacy and sanity. And the rest of them should remember that the world is actually about people, as in human beings, not robots or garbage such as Cortana.

It's only when one gets a severe warning on their TV screen from their doctor for not following a certain diet and then a fine (or worse) from the police for ignoring doctor's advices that we wake up to realise what a sick, demented world we got to be living in. And some dare say we did it to ourselves! Hm, maybe by ignoring the signs and accepting (tiny) compromises…?

You meant 'Ghostery' on first line. There is an issue in the old version of Ghostery (2.9.6.x) that the guys in the forum at getsatisfaction.com try very hard to obfuscate by asking everyone to upgrade, even though that is not possible for older Firefox versions. The fix is rather simple, involving editing a javascript file in two places to increase the number of cached entries. I've presented the fix (based on a previously reported issue and fix by Eric P. Scott) in a cumulated replies-post here, but - very conveniently! - it is hidden under a "view X more comments" spoiler link (or something of that sort). Basically the fix goes like this: In Firefox profile > extensions > firefox@ghostery.com > chrome > content --> ghostery-common.jsline 1095cis.init(fis, "UTF-8", 0, 0);becomescis.init(fis, "UTF-8", 32768, 0);and line 1108cos.init(fos, "UTF-8", 0, 0);becomescos.init(fos, "UTF-8", 32768, 0);I agree that WordPress has been destroyed recently by the changes and additions that users just don't want/need. Those emoticons are horrible, I've disabled them altogether on my blog and instead I'm manually replacing the codes with Yahoo! Messenger emoticons as close to the original as possible. Too much bloat everywhere! @ Kelsenellenelvian: You may increase the tempo value for that GIF instead of removing it, if you consider it being of some value. Maybe 7000 ms for each frame would be optimal.

Please forgive my barging in. Tommy, if you want a real-time observation of RAM/swap/CPU/System-load usage, you may try my MemPanel tool (see correspong folder in repository from my signature). Select the lowest available polling interval from tray context menu > Options for a more accurate observation.

Actually we should demand all hardware manufacturers to publish their products' specifications and open-source the respective drivers' code.

Well... you could just write your own... Surely such things aren't required. Wordpress itself is a mess. One of the first cookie-cutter builders where I noticed the totally un-needed linking to multiple stylesheets AS WELL AS having styles in the HTML. Blogs hosted on public wp.com cannot load private themes - only blogs hosted on private domains with full access to the wp software can load such themes, plug-ins and whatnot. But that was just an example. Try to limit your bandwidth to something ridiculously slow and then test a few known sites - the browser should continuously report what's loading (usually at bottom-left). Analyzing the page code might not show the full extent due to javascript or other obfuscated elements. From my point of view, using content delivery networks and distributed payload is just a way to invite unwanted third-party to breach a connection. If - say - one googleapis server were to be infected with malware, dozens, hundreds or much more innocent domains would get red-flagged in an instant. An attack on a site/domain would contain the infection to that domain only. And I'm not even thinking as the real villains think. So, why should one - whatever page/site - retrieve (unwanted/risky/etc) content from dozens other domains? Why does everything have to be centralized in an overtly-communist way? Why does everything have to be the worst way possible instead of the best way possible? Is it because we, as human beings, are defective by design…? EDIT: And related to jaclaz's link above: why do all those images on Troy Hunt's site have to be hosted on googleusercontent.com? My RequestPolicy add-on rightfully blocks them as they're not served from the same domain the page is.

That is precisely the reason I parted with Google forever since 2012. Somebody tell me how much of a resemblance does "LCPRI_ constants" bear with "hotel Capri Constanţa": screenshot But that's an entirely different matter. Problem is, Google now owns and controls a very large part of the web through its font dispatcher, its formatting scripts, its so-called search and whatever else. The screenshot above belongs to my WordPress blog. I don't think there is one WP theme that doesn't at least call for Google fonts. That's merely the first example that popped into mind. Talk about privacy? Google knows everything we type here at MSFN, on our WordPress blogs and pretty much everywhere else on the web. AOL mail - the bastards that keep sending MSFN notifications to spam - use Google search on their page. Why should Google know what I'm searching for within my private e-mails?! There may be much, much more to say on this subject but it's late here and I'm tired of playing Don Quijote's part anyway. I'll just list the Firefox add-ons I'm using that relate to restoring sanity: QuickJava, NoScript, Ghostery, Request Policy, YARIP (Yet Another Remove It Permanently), Redirect Cleaner, Greasemonkey with a few scripts, Simple Site Blocker, Google Disconnect, Facebook Disconnect, Twitter Disconnect. These are the versions that run with Firefox 13 on XP because that's what I'll stick to. Most of them work (with modifications or not) in Firefox 9 on 98SE.

Nobody mentioned about **** Google infiltrating most of the web. A lot of sites/domains - this one included - depend on certain "services" provided by them - be that text formatting, fonts, in-site search or whatever. Too bad, because I banned Google from all my computers years ago following a blatant "F you" slapped in my face upon a search. Now try to block everything Google-related and see how much this or that page would look like, if search still works or how fast it would load. Truckloads of javascript that nobody knows what it does, some loaded from third-party domains - that's another reason for slow loading. Bad browsers keeping things cached even after closing pages/tabs. Advertising being blocked only after being downloaded. Most of the time I'm on 15kB/s. Links time out/expire much sooner than I can download whatever that may be. The web has become a mockery.

That ATK0110 that apears as an unknown device has a driver in some package at the ASUS site but I don't know if it's 9x compatible. I have a few old packages in my CD collection: one for a M2V-MX SE board, another in ASUS Probe II v10405 for the M2NPV-VM board and another in Cool'n'quiet v21706 for the K8V-MX-S board. May be available for other boards too. It's related to ACPI. EDIT: Files in my packages say ATK2000.cat and ATK2000.inf so I'm not 100% positive it's the same thing but it may be.

As far as I know Win9x is unable to power on/off USB hubs programmatically. At some point I wanted to search deeper into this issue as I do need such function for the bluetooth adapter which stops working after one device is unpaired and requires physically unplugging/replugging but never got to do it. In your case there would be 23 combinations for the USB settings. Have you actually tried them all?

I think legacy support for USB means assigning permanent resources for USB so that it can be "seen" in DOS for devices such as USB keyboard and USB mouse (and also - or more important - for booting from USB devices). This could mean that these resources are fixed and cannot be changed (and possibly accessed normally) when a plug & play OS kicks into action. This may be the reason for no/slow USB access. When that setting is disabled, the resources are free to be reassigned as the OS sees fit. Or I may be wrong.

Your particular setup is probably seldom used, hence the lack of replies. Reading from floppy is most likely triggered by a request not only for enumerating all the present drives but also for their total/used/free capacity. The fact that this happens only sometimes may indicate that the check is performed only when at least one of the drives' used/free space has been modified since the last enumeration. Unfortunately I can't tell exactly who is doing this, when, why or how to disable the behavior. What I can tell is that many, many years ago I had disabled one drive in that list of drives presented by TweakUI - it may have been drive B but I'm not sure - and subsequently I experienced a weird behavior which unfortunately I do not remember what consisted of but was bad enough to carve into my mind "never disable a drive in TweakUI". So please do keep this in mind in case your system starts behaving abnormally. Off-topic but related to your last remark: depending on your BIOS brand/version and your skills you may extract/save the current BIOS image to a file, edit it with a dedicated application to change the defaults exactly as you want them to be, save it as a modified file and flash it to the CMOS. This way your settings will always be the desired ones even when battery fails or while it's being replaced (although if you're quick enough the settings won't get lost). I did that to a couple motherboards in the past. The tricky part is finding the best and most compatible version of the BIOS editor for your particular brand/version. And please do keep in mind that (re)flashing the BIOS is always risky if power failure occurs, floppy drive/disk errors out or a bad/wrong image is being flashed.

Instantly, this line from the "I, robot" movie popped into mind: "Now, this is the right question!"

Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays to everyone!

FlashGet (1.9.6) can navigate/download FTP, Total Commander has a built-in FTP client…

Yes, it's OK to install it on any number of computers as long as the installation is done through the official installer. I've skimmed through the EULA just earlier while installing v5.4 and that's what it read. I find that license quite large for an application of that type. Probably they're trying to protect the 'paid mode' files (and/or registry keys?) from being copied over to other computers. Dunno, I'm not familiar with such legal stuff nor am I affiliated with Brightfort or anybody else - just stating my findings, hopefully it would help others not to get into trouble.

Well, technically this may well be possible, but I was talking about their EULA or whatever it's called. I read about that some time ago, can't remember when or where, but it did strike me that they explicitly prohibit "migration" of the update files. I haven't tried such a migrated update from XP to my 98SE so can't tell if it works or not.

According to front page the range of supported OS is Windows 2000, XP, Vista, 7, 8, 10. (32/64-bit) Latest version compatible with Windows 9x is 4.6. I've been using this for many, many years. Sadly, their policy appears to be extremely restrictive in that the updates cannot be ported from one system to another (say from XP to 98SE). Too bad. Still, it's one valuable piece of security that everyone should have installed and up-to-date (at least on supported systems). Thanks for the heads up!