Drugwash

Unfortunately Wim's BIOS doesn't list Epox EP-BX3's among the patched BIOS versions they offer. But you could at least try to place a request in the forum, maybe someone could take a look at it and get it fixed... if the gurus are still around and the issue is in the BIOS.

My bad, missed that part. If it weren't Win95B as you said, could it have reformatted the partition at install time to FAT16? But that wouldn't yield a 4GB partition but a 2GB one. I'd go with the Setup having pulled a strange/bad/old FAT copy that changed the partition size. Could've been the partitioning tool's fault. Try with another tool and/or on another system, as Nomen said.

Please read this: MS KB118335

Current business model is "my way or the highway". They know people are [insert your preferred bad word(s)] enough to accept any compromise since they've already been "convinced" through aggresive (and subliminal) advertising that they want and need the latest, the newest, the best-est-est-est... Too much to discuss on this subject. Nice movie scene there, bizzybody! However I wouldn't purposely destroy such a gem as the Model M keyboard. It hurts enough that I have another two of them defective that I can't fix - one has had a certain amount of vinegar from a pickle jar spilled inside and many of the the tracks are destroyed, the other one just got old and pieces of tracks got faded out. A few of those steel plates inside could make a decent body armor though. One'd feel like... Iron Man!

Ah, finally I get the recognition I deserve! Oh and I've also been given recently a used creamy-white Dell keyboard model AT102 (internal board says 'Silitek') with keys that resemble the 'Cherry' ones in first picture here. Unfortunately some of the keys are defective, most likely oxidated. I've managed to fix one of them, the Escape key, but it's darn hard to open them and clean the contacts, especially with my bad eyes.

Yep, Total Hardware 99 it is! I have just found one of my old bookmarks from the early 9x systems and - expectedly - the original site doesn't exist anymore, but there's traces of it at Web Archive here. Apparently it's a mirror which also lists the original here where there's a longer list of mirrors. These company guys don't think of a simple fact: people need choices! They want to ponder themselves whether to use an old thing or a new thing, based on their own needs, personal preferences and other factors. But choice seems to have been deemed dangerous by "someone" up there. I still have a couple of 286 motherboards and related hardware (IDE controllers, video cards etc.) and at some point I may just want to play with them, just for fun, for old times' sake or whatever crosses my mind. Is that a crime? They sure think so, because information regarding that hardware is long gone (or would've been if it wasn't for the Wayback Machine, but still we don't know how much exactly of the original content is cached in there). I also still have four IBM Model M keyboards, massive, heavy and clunky, but they never miss a keypress. All built around 1989-1991. Luckily they don't need some weird fancy drivers because definitely they would've pulled those loooong time ago, tu push the use of "modern" keyboards that break within a few months and are way too unreliable. What I call my main machine is a 667MHz Soyo SY-6VBA 133 board with Win98SE that's been running 24/7 (!!!) since 2006. It's doing all I need it to except for browsing, because they purposely changed standards and everything to push the 9x systems out of the Internet. But I use that machine because it does what I want it to do, not what IT wants to do behind my back, as the new systems do. Well now, a month or so ago I bought a second-hand LCD monitor (Hanns-G Hi221) to replace the heavy 21" CRT I had. Thought it was a bargain. But there you go trying to get the native resolution on the digital input - wouldn't budge. Went to the manufacturer's site, or at least I tried - it wouldn't open for me, probably because they didn't like my region. I managed to open it through a proxy and took me a while to find my particular model. Of course, it was in the 'legacy' (read 'forget about it') section. But funny enough, while a very similar model had a driver and manual to download, this one had nothing available (or at least wouldn't display it for me)! So besides shipping it with a bad EDID EEPROM they wouldn't even offer something helpful for the !d!ots like me that already bought it! I had to waste two days, tinkering with different driver versions and custom resolutions just to get that darn thing to reach its native 1680x1050 resolution. So it's like you said, that manufactures simply hide under the carpet any bad/old products, ceasing to provide minimal required help or completely denying having manufactured those products. And I'm not including here forgeries. However, on a few, very few occasions, I managed to find drivers, manuals or other related information on very old products on their respective manufacturers' sites. "Here you are, no guarantee or warranty, don't come crying if your box explodes, blah-blah", all fine by me and I got what I wanted, thank you. I respect those guys. Gives you a feeling of trust. Just as you said. Sadly the world forgot what trust means... (fixed a minor typo...)

Oh yeah, I remember those days... Original manuals were hard to impossible to find out here and we were looking at those jumpers wondering what they do and how to set them properly if anything failed. There used to be a site, mirrored in a few other places, that listed many old ISA cards of various types with their jumper settings - that was gold, at the time! I forgot the links long time ago and I doubt they'd still be online. I used to have an ISA ESS1869 sound card back in the day, on my 486. It did have the IDE controller which saved me big time. Considering the BIOS limited the native hard drives to 528MiB, there wasn't much space left for data when Win95 was installed. With that controller enabled, I could use a 1,2GB Quantum hard drive for data storage while the system was booting off the smaller, native drive. I still have that 486, it's still working, but that sound card got fried long ago. How I wish I had another one like that! It used to work with most (if not all) DOS games at the time and no issues with it in Win95 either. Your particular issue may well come from the fact that the card is an OEM. They like to tinker with the settings in such a way that the device most likely wouldn't work (properly or at all) on other systems but their own. Won't work with other drivers but their own too, many times. I had such issue with a Creative Labs sound card manufactured for Dell, which - for the life of me - I couldn't find a driver for. Anyway, for old OS versions such as Win95, the setting 'Plug'n'Play OS installed' (or similar) in BIOS should be disabled and resources be manually assigned. But it greatly depends on how well the BIOS implements resource management. It may take a long time to tinker with all settings in order to get the system to work properly, but hard work gives great satisfactions. And it may also depend on certain OS updates being installed (or not). I know there is an update for Win98 that fixes such hang on shutdown so maybe there is one for Win95 too. It's a common hardware and software effort. But it's fun... or at least used to be, back in the day. Well, whatever you choose to do, I wish you good luck.

I don't get that behavior here with sndvol.exe 4.10.1998 on 98SE. All the calls are original as mentioned in first post. However I had edited the GUI many years ago to display a horizontal slider instead of the original vertical one. Theoretically this shouldn't affect the behavior but M$ works in mysterious ways... If you want a hotkey-driven OSD volume application, check out VolOSD at my repository (see signature below).

Some ISA cards used to have jumpers that allowed changing some parameters. You'd need the manual to find out how to operate them. If (and only if) you have an AWARD BIOS, you may try to press Ctrl+F1 at the main BIOS screen. If the screen flickers for a split second, you'll see a few hidden settings in certain sections and maybe - just maybe - it will allow you to change the USB and/or ISA IRQ so that it won't be shared anymore. The motherboard manual may also show which IRQs are shared and how, so that moving the card(s) to other slot(s) may fix such issues. Sound cards also used to come with (DOS) configuration applications where one could set up Memory address, IRQ, DMA. Such application would automatically configure autoexec.bat with the BLASTER environment variable required by DOS applications/games. if you don't have the configuration apps and/or drivers, please offer more details on the sound card so that someone here could provide them for you. As a last resort, try to find another sound card that would (hopefully) use other IRQ or would at least have the configuration application.

I do have a Diamond Xtreme driver and it's actually installed on my 98SE machine. Apparently it also works for generic C-Media CMI 8738 sound cards, because mine is one of those and the driver works just fine. Actually I have a whole bunch of drivers from Diamond Multimedia, downloaded sometime in April 2009, one of them (Diamond DT-588) listing NT4.0/95/98/ME/2000/XP compatibility.

Maybe the video driver (the .inf, more exactly) can be edited to add nonstandard (at the time) resolutions such as 16:9, the way it was/is with the unofficial 82.69 driver. A 64MB video card should theoretically be able to go as high as 1866x1050x32bit with the proper driver but it's always a matter of native monitor resolution. Ironic how the newest technology keeps crippling the abilities of the devices - put two monitors side by side, a CRT and an LCD/LED,throw the same 640x480 picture on both and see which one displays better. Can't help with the other issues but LoneCrusader seems to be on the right track. Good luck!

Tried to compile the code in the Easy 7-zip source package under VC6 but got a lot of errors. Some may be fixable but I'm not sure about the ASM ones, that's a bit beyond my rusty knowledge. No idea what's x64 conditions doing in a supposedly x86 code section (folder), for example.

Have you tried the others, older, uploaded with 9.31 at my repository? Anyway, I just tried opening a couple of text files from an XPI archive (a Firefox addon which is actually a plain zip archive) with 9.31 alpha and they opened fine in Metapad (which I installed as Notepad replacement by renaming it to notepad.exe). Right-click file > 7-Zip > Open archive. Also it opened an XML file from a 7z archive in the same Metapad by choosing 'View' from the context menu after opening the archive the same way as in previous example. So it may depend on archive type, text viewer or even system files.

OK, you got lucky. 7-zip v9.31 alpha is here, along with other "missing links", but they're only for historical purposes, since alpha versions may be unstable/incomplete/buggy (as stated in the README.txt). Enjoy! EDIT: Heck, this is what happens when one doesn't refresh the page before posting... No problem, the more the merrier - I hate it when a file is available in a unique place and all so-called hosts do nothing but link to that file, which when pulled by the manufacturer leaves the people in complete blackout.

That might be a little hard. I've lost my main machine twice and the HDDs that stored the downloads (including the 7-zip versions) are now scattered around the house, unconnected. I'll try to find the right one, maybe I manage to connect it to a secondary machine and grab the file. It may take a while. Will post back.

No crash here with Firefox 9.0.1 on wunderground.com. However, a few icons at the bottom-left are not displayed (Like, +1, Tweet, Pin, Follow), neither does the icon in the Search button or the two in the top toolbar and a few others on specific pages. Possibly those on icons.wxug.com that don't get loaded when webfonts are disabled. Loblo's fonts are all installed here. So apparently it's more of an Opera+fonts issue. But the more reports, the closer to the truth.

Yeah... about 7-zip, that was known a while ago already. 9.31 was the very last version compatible with 9x. AFAIK it has been officially released for a while, I do have it installed on my 98SE machine, but I never got the corresponding sources. I've also built an updated version of the Total Commander 7-zip archiver plug-in, an ANSI version based on the 9.20 beta sources that allows (de)compression using LZMA2. It can be found at my repository (see signature below).

Apparently the guys at Seagate, after having bought out Maxtor a while ago, decided to use the old technique that has failed certain Maxtor series long time ago, most notably the N40P: part of the firmware in the chip and part on the platter(s). Incidentally I had a failure with a N40P recently and turned to the HDDGuru guys for help, which I obviously never got. For ATA drives there were a few tools (I used HDD Repair 2.0) but I know of none that can work with SATA/II/III. Anyway, what I wanted to say is that - as noticed by some users already - replacing the PCB would be useless since the firmware's modules on the platter(s) would not match those on the PCB. Unfortunately I don't have the knowledge to help in this case, as I couldn't even fix my N40P (which belongs to a friend, actually).

I'm glad it works for you too. Welcome at MSFN!

Which msvcrt version exactly? Is it a regular one or a renamed msvcr70?

Yes, I noticed their internal name is missing/garbled. However, I wonder how the site recognizes them for a regular operation - only by link? Type Light (which I installed earlier thanks to your links) can rename a font internally so we can fix them. Indeed, the shape is important to some extent but the contents is the most important, after all. EDIT: Those DDG ProximaNova fonts look like ¤% when size is under 18pt, no matter what I try (gfx.use_text_smoothing_setting disabled/enabled). I must force 'minimum font size' to 18, which blows everything out of proportions. well, back to using own nice fonts...

Yes, I know all of this, I understand it at a very deep level and it kills me that nothing can be done by the regular people (like you and I) to change things for the best. We could talk forever about standards, options, openness, choice, whatever but those in charge will only do what their narrow minds tell them to do, regardless of our opinions. And you know what happens when one pi$$es against the wind...

Thank you for your efforts! I went ahead and based on the names I had previously gathered in EOT format I downloaded the corresponding TTF versions. There are six of them: ddg-serp-icons.ttf ddg-static-icons.ttf ProximaNova-Light-webfont.ttf ProximaNova-RegIt-webfont.ttf ProximaNova-Reg-webfont.ttf ProximaNova-Sbold-webfont.ttf After placing them all in the Windows\Fonts folder and refreshing its contents (important!), everything looks fine now. Nevertheless - what are we supposed to do when each site will use its own (maybe proprietary) version of a font that we don't have a local replacement for? This is getting out of hand!

Thank you, Charles, I had read that topic before but not very carefully. After disabling downloadable fonts (and installing the fonts in loblo's package), the text on DuckDuckGo's results page is displayed correctly and so are the glyphs at Font Awesome (had that font already installed but wasn't working). Unfortunately there still are a few elements on the DuckDuckGo page that won't show correctly, namely the magnifiying glass on the 'go' button at the top, the X on the 'stop' button that appears when hovering the 'go' button and the menu button at the top-right (see screenshot: above XP, below 98SE). Those are also glyph fonts (DDG_ProximaNova). There are a few replacement families in the CSS but the optimum ones (ProximaNova) are not free. The widespreading usage of webfonts is making browsing more and more difficult. The EOT fonts that could be grabbed from IE's temporary folders are unfortunately not convertible, or at least I couldn't find a way (read: offline application, at least) to do it. I also tried to copy the EOT fonts to <FF profile>\extensions\font as I read somewhere long ago, to no avail (haven't restarted Firefox yet). (fixed a minor typo)

Just state the requirements and we'll see what we can do. I already got a test machine with the new KEx and it also has FF 9 and 10 installed.