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Windows 98 revisited

Caluser2000

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Jan 3, 2010
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The XP install on my main rig for some reason packed a sad. I tried a few times to repair the installation but no luck. Also tried a couple of live linux distros but was getting kernal panics so I suspect some hardware issue. Luckily the XP installation was on a FAT32 partition and using an old Dell Optiplex restore cd I could boot to a command prompt and access the drive ok.

Her in doors was in a bit of a panic that she'd lost some family pics. Most are backed up elsewhere but some recent ones aren't. After a bit of pondering I decided to fit the drive, as a slave, to my old tower 300GL Celeron 400 with Windows 98 original installed on it. My thinking was it would be a damn sight quicker than trouble shooting the newer machine. This win98 machine was the main family computer for the longest time. It's been a trooper really but retired, only coming out on the odd occasion for the grand children to play dos games on our over sized flat screen telly. Needless to say this went without a hitch and wifey is happy, crisis over etc. While I had the machine out and running I thought I'd see what enhancements, if any, are out there on the interweb. Turned out an unofficial service pack was made for win98 Gold, as well usb mass storage software which works a treat and wonders of wonders a free for personal use NTFS partition management tool was available. All these gotten using Opera as the Firefox version on it was a bit slow on some pages and coming up with script errors.

So now the XP box has been replaced by a Win9x box, who'd have thought that would happen?

Welcome back in back into service old friend....................
 
Which version of Opera did you use? I have a P200 64meg running Windows 98SE that is updated with package called U98SESP3. I use the system as a sort of tweener/bench mule rig and I was testing some old 10base2/10baseT PCI NICS. Thought I would give the web a go as I had heard it could be done with Opera. I downloaded the latest version that listed Win98 compatibility, ver. 10.10 and installed it.

If I wait for an hour for a page to load, most of it will do so. Not in the least practical. I was seeing file transfer rates across the network at about what I expected, so the NICs seem OK.
 
v9.02 You'd get better performance using a faster nic obviously. The Celery has 128 megs of ram. I've got the same version of Opera on a P200mmx machine with 256 megs of ram running Red Hat Linux 7.3 using Window Maker as my window manager. I was running that though the win98 box and dail up internet connection at one point :)

It seems the SP I got updates win98 gold to SE by replacing some crucial files as the "My Computer-Properties" detail now lists the same version no. as SE.which I found interesting. Getting decent USB mass storage support was well worth the effort. There is KernalEx which allows the use of NT based windows drivers as well but I don't need that as yet but might be worth it on say a 800-1ghz or higher system. A project for the future possibly. There's also some tweeks to make use of more ram.

Basicly don't believe everything you read on MSs knowledge base.
 
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