Drugwash

Well, it depends on the meaning of "required"... A month or so ago, my neighbor came to me, desperate, saying he needed a monitor as his 15" IBM G54 started acting up - gone blank upon restart (that was an old issue we were expecting). I gave him my spare 15" Escort (LiteOn brand, apparently). He came back saying the image is desynchronized and he can't get it back to normal, so I went over and realized the videocard settings were giving a 85Hz vertical frequency, while my monitor could only accept 70 at most. Well, his XP had no driver for my monitor, I had no XP driver for it (could barely find a 98 one for my needs), couldn't get on the Internet to search for one and also couldn't change any display settings in safe mode (dunno why). So I would call this a case where a monitor driver was desperately required, as well as the ability for the OS to recognize the monitor and install the driver automatically. He ended up moving his huge and heavy 21" Nokia 445 monitor from his other machine and connecting it to the problematic one. Not to mention that XP did have the correct driver for it, but it failed to automatically recognize it, so a manual setup had to be done. Basically, a monitor driver would only be required to cap the maximum resolution and vertical refresh rate, so that accidents wouldn't happen (operating a monitor with a refresh rate - vertical, horizontal or both - higher than supported will eventually fry it). That's true at least for CRT monitors; LCDs are based on a different technology that I don't know, so I can't say what the risks are, if any.

Heh, the harm has already been done: I had Flash 8 already for some time and recently I put Flash 9 over it. Just for kicks (and for some animation that required it). Indeed, the 9 build is slower than the 8 one, but as I only have 64MB of RAM (4 x 16MB - can't find 32MB EDO RAM cards anywhere), it doesn't really matter too much - it's crawling anyway. This machine is already doing much more than it should, sometimes (did I mention the 98SE OS on it is about 22 months old?). Funny thing is that, when I went to the Adobe site for the update, it downloaded build 9, said everything went OK, but the verification box said "8.0.22.0 was installed succesfully". The same thing happened when I tried to upgrade from build 7 to build 8; apparently Adobe as many other software developers lately, try to rule out Win9x from the news. Well, I just went to the temporary internet files folder, extracted the files from the cab (or zip, whatever it was), right-clicked the inf and chose "Install". That did the trick with v8 and also with v9. I saved the archives on CD, so I would have them at hand if needed. Unfortunately I have no Sun Java installed currently (I only miss that and .NET to bloat my 98SE completely), so I can't give an opinion on the topic issue. But personally I wouldn't reinstall the whole stuff - OS included - just for this minor issue, considering a simple workaround is one click away.

Ah, that's it! Apparently there's a third file inside, a dll. My bad, I installed it a couple of months ago and forgot the details. Anyway, so much for the "no drivers needed for monitors" theory. I wonder how long until someone will create a driver for the Power button...

I tried to run Knoppix on a friend's Dell Optiplex (can't remember the model) and I got "unknown videocard" and "unknown soundcard", although they were both pretty popular. Obviously, Knoppix didn't run. Thing is some hardware manufacturers, for some weird reason known only to them, try to be fancy and "protect" or "hide" the hardware IDs in a way that no other software but theirs can detect and configure it properly. After (unsuccesfully) playing with Linux, I installed XP Pro on that box. Couldn't get any reference on the two either (not to mention about drivers) until I downloaded and installed specific drivers from Dell. Needless to say, I would never waste my money on such POS. You might be in a similar situation. Try installing your videocard in another box and run a live Linux CD on it, see if it gets detected. Oh and something on topic... I got 4 machines: a Pentium 166MHz, 2 x PentiumMMX 200MHz and one Pentium III 800MHz, all home made. Which one do you think would support Vista best?

I recently stumbled into a monitor called Horizon 7002D, obviously manufactured for the eastern-european market, that I wanted to install properly for a friend of mine. After a painful search I found only one link in a forum post that lead me to a hungarian web page that hosted the respective driver. I manage to download the zip, somehow, and inside I found two files: an inf and a sys. So I guess that's one of the (still) rare cases when monitor drivers are not simple inf files. Don't ask me for that link, because I didn't bookmark it on this machine and Google couldn't find it anymore.

Not as a solution but as a workaround for anybody that might have a similar issue and wouldn't have the time or will to mess with the registry and stuff, I would recommend Nir Sofer's TurnFlash 2.10 in one of its versions (GUI or command line) to quickly enable/disable the Flash on their system. I use it to temporarily enable Flash on sites that really require it, as there's no fun to watch my 200 MHz CPU crawling when there's some #%#%¤" Flash advertising on the pages I try to browse, so I usually keep it off. I hope somebody finds this helpful.

1. The eMule installer, the SlimBrowser installer... They're NSIS installers. 2. The result is the following, along with the &1 file in the source folder this time: 3. It says "Extracting file from zip archive", opens/closes a DOS box but nothing can be found in the destination folder. It appears that it calls PEiD 3 times (in this particular case; for other files it only calls it once or twice). After that, the error message box appears. Most likely it's a Win9x issue, as the Dependency Walker log reveals missing functions in some modules (log attached below).

I tried both 1.2.1 and 1.3 (no-install versions) and I can't seem to be able to extract (at least) NSIS packages. It appears to detect package type as NSIS, it opens a DOS box and then closes and creates a file called &1 with no extension and length zero in the destination folder. I'm running Win98SE with some upgrades (USP, KUP and others). What would you advise me to do?

In first post, links appear to be pointing to old 1.2.1 build, although they show as pointing to 1.3. Could you please fix it? Thank you.

Try EtherDetect (shareware). It also needs WinPCap on Win9x, but it works to some extent, at least for me on (a slightly upgraded) Win98SE. You might consider upgrading some system files on your operating system (as I did), but that's a risky business if you don't know what you're doing. The only advice I would offer you in this matter is to use Dependency Walker to run a profiling on the application(s) that won't work and see what functions/modules are missing and then try to upgrade accordingly. I repeat, this is very risky!

Sorry for barging in, but reading the above made me think of either a HDD defect or a BIOS bug.A clean install on C: would have absolutely no reason to fail booting, unless a hardware failure occurs [HDD sector(s) defective] or the BIOS has a bug in the HDD parameters translation routine. I would do a surface scan of the HDD on another machine (if possible) and also a BIOS update/reflash (careful with that one!). Someone please correct me if I'm wrong.

I don't know blade's situation, but in my case it was a fresh XP-SP2 installation. Unfortunately, I can't remember which application I ran when I got that popup, but AFAIR it wasn't a "heavy" one. However, the machine had 256MB physical RAM, and the original dynamic setting for virtual memory was min. 384MB and max. 768MB as default. I changed it to a fixed value of 1024MB as both minimum and maximum, to prevent HD fragmentation. Considering that the fixed value set was much larger than 1.5 x physical RAM amount - as Andromeda43 said above - what would be the reason for Windows to pop up that warning message? Needs mentioned that there was plenty of free space on the hard drive.

Any explanation of why that happens and an alternate solution that would allow keeping a fixed size of the virtual memory? Some guides say it helps preventing drive fragmentation. Freshly installed, XP has a range of ~320MB to 768MB. Setting it to a fixed 1024MB - which should be more than enough, theoretically - still pops up the warning balloon.

This issue should have its own topic (I hope I didn't miss it if it already exists). There are several patched versions of certain files, but there are no patchers. So if one wants/needs two or more of those modifications applied to his/her file... surprise.Not to mention that patchers could be feasible for files in different languages than English, when the patch creator can't/wouldn't waste time with patching each file version individually. As for GetRight, I'm not at all familiar with it, but a wild guess would be that if it's set to move the file from a temporary location to a final one, it may require 2x file length of initial HDD free space.

If you have enough HDD space, you might try the following: download and install FlashGet (adware - banner - unless registered), go to Options > Other > Advanced (branch) --> "Allocates disk space after get filesize" and then add a large file to the list (the same Vista one or similar). Upon starting the download, FlashGet will get the file size from the server and will try to allocate the same size on the HDD as a file called <filename>.jc! prior to starting the download (a very good anti-fragmentation method used in some DC clients too, only that it doesn't move the file, it only renames it when download finished, unless you specifically chose to move it into a certain category). If there's any problem with the patched kernel, something bad should happen at that point (hopefully it won't).

Ivan, I'm by no means a programmer but merely a nosy user. However, I can tell you that I recently installed StrongDC++ 2.01 on my 98SE system and it works just fine. Of course, it's not a vanilla system, but one heavily upgraded, first with the Unofficial Service Pack (an old version), then with the Kernel Update Project patch (both found in these forums), but most of all with various system files from several other operating systems, from ME to Server 2003. Maybe I've been just lucky, but whenever some application crashed on me or functioned improperly, I profiled it through Dependency Walker, noted which modules were missing functions or were not found on my system and upgraded accordingly. Speaking of DC++ clients, unfortunately there are only a few that work correctly on my system, which means that most (if not all) of them will probably fail completely on a vanilla 9x system. The ones currently working for me are: CZDC++ 0.6.6.6 (nasty version number), DC++ 0.689, oDC 5.31 and StrongDC++ 2.01 (older versions crash). I also tried iDC++ 2.0.1, an italian branch, which I found surprinsingly feature-rich and nice looking, but unfortunately some controls in the Options panel will not work at all (the sharing list is the most important of them). I could not get it to work properly no matter what I tried, and the posts in its forums did not yield any working solution. All this said, I think the best thing would be running the compiled DC++ client through Dependency Walker, noting the missing modules/functions and then trying to replace them in the sources with older, Win9x existing modules/functions and maybe using VC6 or MinGW to compile the sources instead of VS2003 or newer that link to VC7 or newer runtimes that usually do not exist on Win9x systems unless they've been manually upgraded. Also the compiling options and optimizations should be carefully considered.

OK LLXX, thanks for some clarifications. So, to get things straight once and for all: if I partition that HDD as described in post #158 with the exception that partition #5 would be FAT32 (not necessarily, as there is possibility to access Linux partitions under Windows) and I would use your patched driver in Win98SE, would I be able to access partition #5 from within Win98SE without any problems whatsoever? I just need to be 101% sure about this before starting messing with the HDD. [EDIT] Oh and Eck, you might wanna check Wim's BIOS forum board I linked to in post #156, as there's chance you might find patched BIOSes for your boards. Check the users' signatures, they'll lead you to a page with patched BIOSes. If you can't find your boards listed, you can make a request in the appropriate forum.

Are you referring to Petr's post or the "wrong gender assumption" one above? If it's the latter, I apologize - I only found out after posting there. I will correct it. As for Petr's post, I couldn't say, because he didn't mention what the respective BIOS reported and furthermore, I haven't tried to install anything on that HDD yet. It's brand new and I'm still trying to find the proper solution, which includes trading it in with a smaller 120GB one that would have no problems with the BIOS. As far as I've read in all threads around that deal with this, all Win9x versions rely on the BIOS' report regarding HDD capacity, unlike NT versions. So I assumed (correctly, probably) that even with the driver patch installed, any Win9x installed on that HDD would mess the primary boot partition if it would have to deal with anything beyond 137GB. The weird thing is that the BIOS is an AWARD 6.00PG which - at least theoretically - should support 48bit LBA, so I thought it might be an easy job to find a possible bug in it and patch it accordingly. Unfortunately, I'm no specialist so I can't say how hard it would be to do that, or if at all possible. It may even be a SiS630 chipset limitation. So if no BIOS patching would be possible, I might settle for a partitioning scheme as follows: 1. 30GB FAT32 - Win98SE 2. 30GB FAT32 - Win2003 3. 30GB FAT32 - data 4. 30GB NTFS - data 5. 40GB (EXT or whatever) Ubuntu Linux I hope the above will work with no problems. (This board has a weird way of formatting the posts when smileys are involved. Every CR adds and etra LF or something; it's probably an ANSI-Unicode thing, since I'm using Win98SE. I had to edit the post text in notepad and paste it back.)

Here's a discussion that should offer all the needed details. What I was thinking about is a BIOS mod - nothing more, nothing less. Any commercial solution is out of discussion. I'd rather set up a Linux partition in the unusable space (which is what I most likely will do anyway).

Hello everybody. I've been following the topic with great interest throughout the threads, as I'm a Win98SE addict. I would hate to hijack this thread though, so I'll only say this: if anybody feels able/willing to help me, please PM or IM me. My problem is that the BIOS wouldn't see the whole capacity of the HDD (only sees 136GB out of 160GB) and there's no other place I can get help from - neither from the manufacturer (replies like "mobo's been out of phase long ago") nor from the guys at Wim's BIOS board. Any details in private, to spare the thread from off-topics. Thank you in advance, and most of all thank you LLXX for your excellent work.

Guys, those of you making super/extra/mega/power packs, why don't you gather in some chat room or something and agree on who/what/when/why puts in his pack? It'd much more elegant than having the same applications throughout all packages or having useless/buggy/crappy ones in any of them. For applications that would be good and usable enough but are either shareware, adware or too big to include into the package, just make a list of links that point to the apps download pages, together with some (brief) descriptions of each application, for those who might not know them already.

I've been reading the whole thread, I've been wandering through the Internet, but I couldn't find any answer to my problem: how do I edit sysdm.cpl in Windows 98Second Edition? ResHacker won't budge; it keeps telling me the file is not a valid Win32 PE, and the guy's right, because quickly looking into it's properties with Total Commander's FileInfo plug-in, I see it's a 16bit New Executable (NE) file, meant for (!!!) Windows 3.x (can you believe that?!?). So dear knowledgeable people here: how do I get around editing that file, to be able to customize the look and feel of that window? One thing: please do not recommend shareware tools. Thanks in advance.

• Install date: November 2004 • Operating system: Windows 98SE • Planned reinstall: when HDD crashes

That is exactly my reason too. Correct, but that is only if the scanning has been triggered. Most antivirus software do a smart scanning as real-time protection; this includes executables -- self-extract archives fall into this category --and some types of documents, but rarely usual archives. Also, most times, even on a powerful machine, the system chokes when a massive file is being scanned, be it only when you explore the folder containing it, which is unpleasant, to say the least.Having the package as a simple archive would allow the user to unpack and scan the desired modules only, which would obviously take much less time and would eliminate the choke(s). If the level of paranoia would reach that high, nobody would ever install any application and probably even the operating system itself wouldn't be installed, in the first place. Being cautious is not a bad thing. It is possible that one has a yet unknown infection, and having the executable package infected on his system, storing it on an optical medium and possibly distributing it around could unknowingly infect other users. Bottom line is - if possible - try to distribute it in both noob form (that is, executable installer) and power-user form (that is, simple archive, whatever type). If I may, personally I use Total Commander as my file manager of choice, and the external commandline archivers linked to it plus the 7zip, ISO and other plug-ins, allow me to handle a vast variety of archives as if they were folders: just a double-click on the file, select the desired files/folders from it and drag'em to the other panel. SFX archives also supported by menu item File > Unpack.

MDGx, do you really think that people who don't know what 7zip is, should handle jimmsta's package? I think that's just asking for trouble. IMO, one must really know what he's doing, or things might just get screwed up (see the guy that hates Revolutions Pack).