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Between the devil and the Deep Blue

M

Micom 2000

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Joined
Mar 6, 2004
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Manitoba North of 50 degrees Latitude
I have a many problems wth my newer(?) Win computers which would be tedious and off-topic on this forum. The devil is Win 98 and the deep blue sea is the MS OS's up to just before MSXP. Is there any forum which deals wth this era. To me "dual core" is an oil-rig term.

In a way I'm similar to some of the younger members of the forum who on occasion ask questons which seem absurd to those of us who grew up in the 1970 to 95 era. I find myself on this side of Win 3.1 and Win 98 stll frustrates me regularly. Similarly my Apple life tends to end after OS7.5. Altho Next 3.3 and Open Step was the beginning of OSX.

I can work my way about Amigas, Atari STs and their 8-bit predecessors or Commodores and DECs but the distance between that and much of the central IT era tends to baffle me.

Which is why I need a forum which focuses on the period after the Pentium evolved and before XP appeared on the scene. MS$ does tend to put out a new OS (of sorts) every couple of years, and that is the nature of the merchantising beast. Not for scientific advancement but much like Detroit's games with the appearence and disappearence of fins or horsepower. It delights me to see them all writhe today.

Of course any such forum would also have to put up with my loquationess occasionally as exemplified in the above discourse.

Lawrence
 
If the "deep" part is:

Why can't I access XP file shares with Win98?

or:

Why can't I access Win98 file shares with XP?

I have trouble remembering the fact that follows:
Win98 uses "in the clear" unencrypted passwords, XP encrypts them. I have ZERO success getting a Win98 PC to open a XP share. Don't think I have tried it the other way around in a lot of years, meaning I don't think that works either.
 
Dunno about forums specific to NT 4.0 or 2000, but I ran 2000 for years until more modern apps demanded XP (why?).

I thought 2K was extremely stable and remarkably trouble-free. I still run it on several systems.
 
Micom, how about computing.net? Win 95+ sections seem fairly active, I've gotten good advice over there in the past. The forums at OldOS.org are deader than dead, but there is a lot of great info archived on there.

chuckcmagee said:
If the "deep" part is:

Why can't I access XP file shares with Win98?

or:

Why can't I access Win98 file shares with XP?

I have trouble remembering the fact that follows:
Win98 uses "in the clear" unencrypted passwords, XP encrypts them. I have ZERO success getting a Win98 PC to open a XP share. Don't think I have tried it the other way around in a lot of years, meaning I don't think that works either.
Click to expand...

I've never had this problem with any* 32-bit version of Windows. Right now, I have an NT4 PC sitting behind me playing .mp3 files in Winamp off my shared XP Home hard drive upstairs. I just checked Windows 95 in VPC and it worked fine too. I might be totally wrong about this, but for password protected shared folders on a Win98 machine I think you may need to log in using the Administrator user account name/password, even if it's running under another user.

*=Can't seem to get Vista to talk to anything but printers....and I have no idea how to go about accessing shares in NT 3.x.
 
nymetropolitans said:
Micom, how about computing.net? Win 95+ sections seem fairly active, I've gotten good advice over there in the past. The forums at OldOS.org are deader than dead, but there is a lot of great info archived on there.



I've never had this problem with any* 32-bit version of Windows. Right now, I have an NT4 PC sitting behind me playing .mp3 files in Winamp off my shared XP Home hard drive upstairs. I just checked Windows 95 in VPC and it worked fine too. I might be totally wrong about this, but for password protected shared folders on a Win98 machine I think you may need to log in using the Administrator user account name/password, even if it's running under another user.

*=Can't seem to get Vista to talk to anything but printers....and I have no idea how to go about accessing shares in NT 3.x.
Click to expand...

NT is in the same family as 2000, XP. They all use encrypted passwords on shares. Which is why you have no problem there.

Going thru VPC, it is doing the conversion work for you. The host pc is likely acting as a bridge. At least, that is my educated guess as to why it is working in a virtual machine.
 
chuckcmagee said:
NT is in the same family as 2000, XP. They all use encrypted passwords on shares. Which is why you have no problem there.

Going thru VPC, it is doing the conversion work for you. The host pc is likely acting as a bridge. At least, that is my educated guess as to why it is working in a virtual machine.
Click to expand...

Check out this article, I think this might be the cause of your troubles!

You could be right about VPC, but it also seems that XP Home (which I have) isn't picky about what username and password are used to access it's shared files and printers, unlike XP Professional and Win2k. In any case, that whole process outlined in the link above seems extremely tedious and unnecessary. Perhaps there's some way to just turn this "security feature" off completely...
 
nymetropolitans said:
Micom, how about computing.net? Win 95+ sections seem fairly active, I've gotten good advice over there in the past. The forums at OldOS.org are deader than dead, but there is a lot of great info archived on there.

I found "computing.net" just too extensive and difficult to navigate. "OldOS" appears to predate 32-bit computers, which I have a pretty good hold on.

The "newest" OS I have is Win 98SE and it's usually been pretty reliable, but getting into newer hardware can be troublesome. I've intended to get into Linux as my next OS rather than continuing to play the MS$ upgrade game, but so far my forays into it have been problematic. My latest attempt was with Ubuntu on a Pentium 3 Gigabyte board which appears to choke on Win 98. Alas, each CD (of 4) came up wth flaws in the install. Casper and Thunderbird would not install.

It does run fine off the cd , but can't finish the installation. So back to Win 98 and finding a forum like this where I can pose questions and browse it for other helpful tips.
And later find a route into LInux that is less troublesome.

I find it a bit troubling on this forum that so many cannot concieve that someone here can still be using Win 98 as his main OS. Reminds me of an earlier time when many where still using Win 3.1 rather than 95, 98, Me, or 2000, or Linux for that matter.

Lawrence
Click to expand...
 
It sounds like you have hardware problems, not operating system problems. If you can't complete an installation from CD the CD is either badly scratched or the CD drive needs cleaning.

I used Win98 SE for a long time, but it has many liabilities:

  • Hardware support - if you have to replace a printer or add a digital camera, you are out of luck.
  • Stability - it is nowhere near as stable as Windows 2K, Windows XP or Linux
  • Bug fixes - there are none. No security fixes either. Microsoft ended that 2 or 3 years ago.
  • Software - a lot of software (free software included) is not being updated for Win 98SE

I want to use my main computer to be productive, and to save my creative time for the old machines. At this point Win98 is 5 to 7 years past it's prime.

On a related topic - my main machine just died. It was an Athlon 1100 running Windows 2K. The dead was subtle - the hard drive controller would slowly fall back to PIO modes, and then fail outright. I wasn't noticing the degraded performance most of the time because I web browse, read email, and run quicken. But this weekend it just gave up.

Since I had to get a newer machine and reinstall anyway I went to XP. The target machine isn't even good - it's a step backwards. (A Celeron 1100.) But Windows XP installed flawlessly on it, recognized all of the hardware, and didn't flinch when I upgraded from the crappy onboard video to a Matrox PCI card.

My point? There are advantages to moving forward. Windows 2K will run on this machine with enough driver updates, but Win XP just does it right the first time. I'm productive and happy again, and probably looking for a real upgrade in the next few weeks. You staying on Win 98 is probably a hindrance to your productivity and you don't even realize it ...
 
I found under a moderate load, Win98 would last 2 to 4 hours before needing to reboot. It got to be a running joke "Oops, be back in a sec guys. Have to reboot my computer again." We won't count the number of times I tried ctrl-alt-del only to be required to turn the power switch off, so badly locked up. Always great fun in Win98 because it is somewhat likely the registry database files will be hosed because you powered off the machine.
 
L,

I have to concur wholly with the above comments. You'll be much happier if you do just one more upgrade, to Win 2K. I've had it running nearly 24/7 on this DuctTapeDell for over 2 years, and it has not yet required the wipe & reinstall ritual necessary semi-annually with 98. It very rarely crashes, and when it does, it's usually the fault of some nasty webpage or malware, not the system software.

--T
 
I don't usually join in these 'discussions', but in my opinion anybody whose computer has to be rebooted every few hours or have the disk wiped semiannually is definitely doing something wrong and it says more about the user than the OS; business users wouldn't put up with it for very long if the OS were that unstable.

My main system has been running W98SE since March 2001 and has never been wiped and reinstalled even though it's had all sorts of obscure software loaded on to it over the years; until I started conserving electricity recently it was up 24/7 and generally went more than a month or two between reboots. Similarly I have two clients still running Office & DOS apps in W98SE 24/7 without any problems whatsoever.

Incidentally, in summer I take the (removable) hard disk back and forth between my home office and the cottage and stick it into two quite different systems with never a hiccup (something I don't think you could do with XP or Vista).

If you're going to use old software and/or peripherals (scanners, cameras etc.) or interface with classic computers or their disks then I wouldn't go past W98SE; for video, audio etc I have a second system running XP Pro. I've found them both equally reliable and generally use whichever OS has drivers for that obscure device or which one the software runs on.
 
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Most of what Mike S. says mirrors my own views. I've went many years without any problems until the HD failed on my main computer, an IBM PC300PL w/P3-500, 192meg. One of 3 on the LAN, the other 2 being CPU-upgraded 3xx mhz 64meg boxes. I had been able to install a Linksys WRT54G wireless router with 4 direct link sockets, admittedly with some difficulty, but was happily running my little LAN with no problems untll the HD failed. Most of my programs and peripherals are obsoleted and I deal mainly with even earlier equipment. 5.25 floppies for example and Dos and Win3.1 programs. My productivity problems are pretty mundane and don't require most of the newer whiz-bang programs needed by IT professionals. Before downloading an upgrade(?) for my regular programs I check the requirements and then if it doesn't work well, go back to the earlier version.

I guess I'll have to bite the bullet and get a newer OS to put in this newer 1.7mhz Athlone CPU Gigabyte box which is choking so hard on W98. But just on my way to eventually use Linux as the main OS. Perhaps there is a divide between OS such as Win2000 and up and those ME and below just as vast as that between the 16 and 32bit machines. Oh well.

Now, I only need to find a compatible forum to deal with my hardware problems using W98 in a post-W98 era. :^)

Lawrence
 
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As noted by me in an earlier post, My Asus mb with 1Ghz PIII does XP extremely well. If I had more space available in the single wide mobile home, I would likely still use the PIII all the time. Granted, the 20 year old exhaust fan on the power supply (Gateway 2000 full tower 1991) does need to be replaced. It was always noisy but it is like hitting your foot with a hammer, you only notice when you stop.
 
The link that all of the nymetropolitans sent should be the fix. The problem is that 98 by default doesn't do different user names and mapping a drive it defaults to your logged in user name or guest access. So you can either create a user on your XP system with the same username as your 98 account and then grant that account access to the share you made on XP, or you can enable the guest account in XP ***Note: Allowing guest access to a share allows ANYONE who can see your computer access to that share. Make sure you have a firewall between you and the internet if you're doing this!*** and that will allow whatever access you set for "everyone" on the share also.
 
Windows 2000 is really the best version they've released so far, IMO. It's rock solid stable, still runs almost all software meant for XP and can be made to run on pretty minimal hardware.

This is a clean boot of Win2k Pro SP4 running one of the Dell Dimension 2400s I have....

taskmgrdell1-1.jpg


Since I've decided I don't really need antivirus software anymore, there is typically 85-95MB free on a clean boot with 12 processes running now.....that means the entire OS is using 35-45MB of RAM, and fully functional. Amazing!

I'm with Micom 2000 and MikeS on the Win98 issue. It's far from perfect, and NT-based Windows is en enormous leap forward in stability.....but with a proper install, regular maintenance and lack of downloading porn or questionable e-mail attachments, it will rarely give you any hiccups.
 
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