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Unofficial SP 5.2 for Microsoft Windows 2000 (WIP)


tomasz86

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Testing asap! I will test on a hard drive and a Virtual Machine as well as replace the files in the old install to see if it will allow restored functionality...

OK! I tested replacing the "srvsvc.dll" & I went ahead and replaced the "mshtmled.dll" everything seems to be working perfectly stable I will continue testing and let you know if there is any crashes....

OK! internet explore is now giving the correct about info which it was not in your previous release and Internet Explore seems to be much more stable no crashes as of yet flash videos are playing smoothly as well...

Firefox is still having visual problems when used with hardware acceleration enabled if possible that would be a very good thing to fix!

Installed BlackWingCats 266.58 Nvidia drivers working perfectly

I tried installing the new BWC Kernel over the new daily install with no problems what so ever and vice verse

Installed audio drivers and they are working perfectly

Question:"Is it possible you can provide the all in one .net installer so that I may test that also"

OK! was testing around and attempted to use wind3d does not work and thought I would suggest implementing your own type of directx that will allow directx versions not supported by Microsoft for older os's on win2k such as dx10 and 11...

Finished testing without any problems what so ever which I am glad to report!! =)

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Edited by desertofunknown
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  1. Firefox - it's a known issue. I don't know what the cause of it is. Maybe BlackWingCat or someone else will eventually come up with a solution.
  2. nVIDIA drivers - it's good to know that there are no problems. I myself prepared a package of the newest 3xx nVIDIA drivers but haven't had time to test them yet. The drivers are ultimately going to be included in USP5.2.
  3. BWC kernel - the newest daily version of UURollup contains everything included in BWC kernel and much more.
  4. .NET Installer - there will be one installer but it's not that easy to make. If you read the whole topic you will see that I already prepared such a thing but there were some bugs. I need to start over and this time keep all .NETs separated until the very end, and only after that write a script which will automatically merge them into a one big package. It's necessary to keep them separated simply because it's so much easier to update such small packages when M$ releases new .NET fixes.
  5. DirectX - I don't think it will be ever possible to run newer DXes in NT 5.x. The latest version of DX9.0c is going to be included in USP5.2.

Thank you once again for thorough testing :thumbup

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Yeah thanks for the reply well hopefully we will be able to find a way to run the new directX's or later on in the future you could think about helping the ReactOS project which essentially is win2k just completely remade without lot of Microsofts crappy coding

As well thanks for answering about the .net installer and the BWC Kernel I was unsure since you said you could install the package over the kernel wither it had everything the kernel had or not

Oh and thanks for adding in the Nvidia drivers for the 5.2 release that will be very helpful maybe you should think about doing an addon for the installer so it can automatically install drivers based on your systems hardware

Edited by desertofunknown
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The drivers will be automatically installed when USP 5.2 is slipstreamed because they will be integrated in exactly the same way as Microsoft integrated all the other drivers. In case of a manual installation then I don't think it's possible to make them install automatically. I'm not even sure if such an automatic installation is desired because it may cause unexpected issues on some systems.

By the way, I have finally managed to sort and upload all M$ official updates to an alternative server! In the end I've chosen Dropbox because its automatic synchronisation is way better than the one offered by Google Drive. The files can be easily browsed and downloaded from the server and no registration is required to do so :) Please check #1 for more information or just click here:

Windows 2000 Archive

There are 8210 / 10.2 GB files related to official updates there. The updates are available to download in all languages including versions for Japanese NEC98 which cannot be normally downloaded from M$ official servers any more. I have also reorganised the layout of my website a little bit.

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Nice really nice bro your doing a great job

Love the new setup you did a great job if you ever need help with anything just let me know

and nice job with the .net installs I will test them out one by one and let you know how well it works btw I had an idea about making a brand new built in firewall for win2k as well as a open source antimalware I know a bit of C++ and Java and alot of php and html as well as data basing with mysql have quite a bit of free time for now until the baby comes in November but would love to help if I could

Edit:done checking it out

Edited by desertofunknown
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Testing these daily and weekly releases is very helpful and much appreciated :thumbup:

Those .NET releases are the ones I prepared some time ago and haven't been updated since then. As I said I'm going to prepare new ones. As for 3rd party software, I'm not planning to add any non-M$ stuff to USP5.2 itself but there is no problem in having them available as separate packages :)

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Yeah well of course im sure you want to have some boundaries on what you do with usp 5.2 try to do too many things at once and everything will fall apart but separate packages sounds nice.. if have anything else other then testing the dailys that you need help with at any time just send me a pm just want you to know that im here to help if ever needed I know how stressful doing these projects alone can be but with all the support your getting on this thread im sure you feel very appreciated ^_^ the reason I offer my help is because i admire what your doing to keep win2k alive it was and is a great and stable OS which is why the ones developing ReactOS based the UI off of win2k.... Thanks though your helping alot of people out I am working on a win2k project also right now involving web development support as win2k comes with an older less functional version of iis I am trying to work on developing something very simlar to iis but with the added abilitys of new http servers

Just so you know its going to be based of Apache but I will be integrating a iis GUI

If you could email me at godsring3000@yahoo.com every time a new daily is released I will be sure to test it

Edited by desertofunknown
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A new daily version of UURollup-v11 is available. You can find it in the new download archive (check #1 for details). There are a lot of changes in this one, most of them coming from the newest BWC kernel release (but not only :whistle:). I've got no time now to list them but I'll try to do it tomorrow. Please be very careful because this compilation is extremely experimental.

@desertofunknown

You seem to have a lot of interesting ideas :w00t: Actually there's one thing which I've been concerned about for a long time. I've got no programming skills but I wonder how difficult it would be to add a Vista style shutdown menu to the classic Start Menu. Would it be possible without too much hassle?

I mean something like this:

vista_shutdown_menu.jpg

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The answer is yes that is definitely possible just as possible as it is on winxp to replace the entire gui or even the entire explorer with a new explorer all of that is possible all the way back to windows 95 editing gui and the explorer are all possible let me do some research and get back to you on the actual details but from the knowledge I have already it would be much better to do so based on your own explorer I know windows blinds did something similar to this with win 98 but it seemed to be a resource hog but with the way win2k handles memory it might not have the same problem but with your own custom explorer so many things could be enhanced

Yes I did some research and yes it can be done in a similar way as it is done in winxp still I suggest a new explorer which would open a vastly new amount of possibilitys for win2k ...as for the graphical abilities of win2k could very well be enhanced but then your getting into the problems of resource hogging which is one reason people love win2k some much it uses such a small amount of resources... ReactOS is based on the 5.X kernel which they took it all the way to creating a brand new OS from scratch so they would have access to the source code and be allowed to release it for free in almost every aspect its identical so your best bet might be able to get involved with the ReactOS Project most of there notes would give you a good way of improving win2k since it is free to use distribute edit or take from to add to your own projects get back to me if your interested in seeing some of there notes

In the middle of testing on a hard drive install everything is great especially the new features its just wonderful as of now I am experiencing no problems what so ever and it is running very smoothly surprisingly enough it seems to run at least twice as efficiently as it did before application response time have even increased and love the TM I will post an update if any problems arise but i have already tested on VM and nothing there so I am not expecting any problems on the hardware install

Re tested graphics and audio drivers as well as gaming with very positive results the fps was raised by 6-10 fps on Skyrim as well as sins of a solar empire, WoW, Oblivion as well as a few other games I have already tested under the new Daily Windows2000-UURollup-v11d120906-x86-ENU I am very surprised at the improvements in responsiveness...as well before svchost was taking up 60-90mb of ram and now is only consuming 9mb at most as a constant very impressive...also tested internet explore again nothing really new to report but stability has remained no crashes on flash movies and games normal resource consumption....regedit is working fine as well as most other tools for some reason dxdiag is crashing out I will take a look into it I am unsure if the install of win2k just had a problem or if it has something to do with an update but games work fine just am unable to run the dxdiag tool without it crashing....shut down and start up speed seems to have improved by a few seconds as well.

It might actually help if you were to develop a system to automatically update installs as well to weekly,daily,stable via web file grabbing seems like that would be very useful I could give you a few pointers if your interested in adding that feature

I can go ahead and help you by making a install package for firefox that includes the "uxtheme.dll" and automatically sets the hardware acceleration to off if your interested in adding a link to it on your programs list

Tried using BWC's dx fix but it was unable to solve the problem strange I did not experience this with the VM I am going to do another fresh install with an alternative install disk and let you know if that fixes the problem....

Tested the Nvidia 3xx drivers and it is working great no problems what so ever so I hope that is good news for you

Doing a reinstall seemed to work to fix the DirectX problem from earlier and now everything is working smoothly with the new daily without a problem in sight

I am completely done with the testing of the new version of the daily uurollup and in my personal opinion it seems to appear you are very close to a new stable release...

Windows 2000 firefox installer is now finished it will include the "uxtheme.dll" in the install dir allowing it to run on first install without any manual editing involved hopefully this should save quite a few people some time when testing firefox on there win2k machine with uurollup as this will require less work on there part to get it working

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Edited by desertofunknown
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This is the list of changes done in the last daily version of UURollup-v11:

  • Updated files:
    dbgeng.dll 6.2.9200.16384
    dbghelp.dll 6.2.9200.16384
    imagehlp.dll 5.1.2600.6198
    iphlpapi.dll 5.0.2195.7104
    kernel32.dll 5.0.2195.7188
    mfc40.dll 4.1.0.6151
    mfc40u.dll 4.1.0.6151
    mfc42.dll 6.6.8065.0
    mfc42u.dll 6.6.8065.0
    msftedit.dll 5.41.21.2512
    msvcrt.dll 7.0.6002.22755
    ntdll.dll 5.0.2195.7097


  • Added files:
    licdll.dll 5.1.2600.5977
    sxs.dll 5.1.2600.5699
    taskmgr.exe 5.1.2430.1
    wintrust.dll 5.131.2600.6198


    Out of these the new Task Manager comes from Windows XP "Whistler" 2430.1. It's almost exactly the same as the default one but there are two differences in it:
    - the Networking tab:

    8QK9D.jpg
    - MEM Usage is shown in GBs:
    5DzmA.jpg

@desertofunknown

WOW :w00t:

1. I don't really want to add any enhancement to the main USP5.2 compilation (as I said earlier, there's no problem to have them offered in separate packages). This shutdown menu is the only one change which I'd really like to have as default. The normal shutdown menu requires at least 2 clicks (3 if you want to change the default option) and I don't really think that anyone will object against a Vista style one. If someone really wants to keep the standard one then I'll offer a separate patch to bring it back after they've told me about it. Of course everything depends on whether it's possible to add such a button to the current explorer.

A new Explorer and other enhancement from ReactOS and other sources might be interesting but that would be too deep interference in the system to make it default. Such components could be available separately for everyone willing to experiment. In one word, the only change to add to the "standard" setup which I'm personally interested in is the shutdown menu ;)

2. It's interesting what you're writing about the performance improvement. As you know, I've been doing just the dirty work. I don't know anything about programming other than simple batch scripting so I can't say anything about how BlackWingCat and WildBill modify the system files. I think that some benchmarks would have to be run in order to prove whether there are real differences between the standard Win2k setup and the one with unofficial kernel.

3. Automatic updates is something I've already thought about for some time but this is something to be done for USP5.1. Providing automatic updates for the currently released packages would be too much hassle as there are too many of them and too many other things need to be done now so no time to focus on it at the moment.

4. Uxtheme.dll is included in BWC kernel (so in the new daily versions of UURollup too). The problem with Firefox installer is that it checks the OS version and refuses to install on anything lower than XP SP2. You can read more about it here.

Thank you once again for such an extensive testing :thumbup

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To the comment about firefox I already made an install now that allows win2k as a base operating system during install so that will no longer be a problem I will go ahead and add an ability to auto update so that users will be able to update via my update packages and this installer is 100% ok I will post a link tomy website soon so that you can access it and possibly put in on the programs list with the other application downloads such as Notepad++ ....

I agree with you on the fact that auto updates would be best to wait until usp 5.2 since it is not that far off from now

As for the explorer just giving some suggestions and actually using a separate explorer would be as easy as adding an exe file to the desktop or the windows directory as well as a theme file during the install and creating short cut to the desktop or even having it be set as a start up program which would also be simple no intensive work would need to be done

As for programming I know quite a bit of C++ and Java both of which would be useful in doing what is needed

Also for anyone interested Utorrent has removed the block on win2k keeping users form installing it now it only gives a warning that it may not function as intended but you are now officially able to install it on win2k again

Well gl again please send me an email at the address i gave you before and I will test the new Daily as soon as its released I will actually think about doing a benchmark for you but it would be much more helpful if the benchmark is done across a few different pc setups if anyone else is willing to go ahead and benchmark the differences with me

Ah just as a note I can not prove it just yet but the Start up time seems to have actually lengthened by a few seconds

I am glad I can help as I said before I admire the work your doing on this USP its really a great thing

As for the start up shutdown button There is an even easier way to add the shutdown restart button without actually changing the look of the classic start menu

I will actually make a tutorial on the method for you so that you can link a quickbar icon as a shutdown option which would be even quicker

Edited by desertofunknown
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A new daily version of UURollup-v11 is ready:

  • Updated files:
    kernel32.dll 5.0.2195.7189
    ntdll.dll 5.0.2195.7098
    NTKRNLMP.EXE 5.0.2195.7385
    ntkrnlpa.exe 5.0.2195.7385
    NTKRPAMP.EXE 5.0.2195.7385
    ntoskrnl.exe 5.0.2195.7385
    win32k.sys 5.0.2195.7399


    All of them come from BWC kernel.

By the way, I've tried to transplant VSS (Shadow Copy Service) from Windows XP "Whistler" (different versions) but there's always an error when trying to use it. Even though there are no dependency issues each trial results in error.

Edited by tomasz86
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