pmistry

Quote: ur right, when i had 98 the ps/2 port was so slow, then i upgraded to ME and my mouse movement was smoother but ME just sux ***. I formatted and went back to 98 but the mouse smoothness and some other features stayed. how i have no idea :\ but it was pretty cool Usually after installing an OS on freshly formatted disk everything seems smooth, but the effect wears out. 98's mouse is slower than ME/2k or XP

Redstar, I believe you can update your System Files, by simply using a 9x boot disk to boot to DOS and manually copy over. If you are using NTFS, close all running programs, hit ctrl-alt-del and kill explorer.exe and then run command.com and you can copy the files over in the DOS box. Restart afterward by using ctrl-alt-del.

What's interesting is that OEMs still offer 98 SE instead of ME and XP, around here anyway.

This is a NT buff forum, everyone here is gonna say either 2000 or XP. I like 2000 but it has some minor compatibility problems with older 9x exclusive games. XP is decent but all that bundled crap and buggy issues that I and some others have experienced drops it. NT4 has no plug and play, usb, fat32, full directx, agp, acpi, and all of those other cool things which make it a no-no. Windows 3.1 and 3.11 are not OSes like someone else said. DOS is dead. Finally that brings us to Windows 9x. 95 was decent, so was 98 and so was ME. Yes ME, I never had a problem with it so don't start jumping on me because of this cuz I know a whole crap load of you guys had problems with it. As a secondary OS 98 or ME is fine, but I like Windows 2000 as my pick. 9x is ok if you're uses are for light computing. My only question is why didn't you opt to post a poll?

I could never get NT4 to install on a hard disk that was larger in size than 2 gigs or so even if I partitioned it.

ME was better for USB than 98 for me anyways, since being newer I guess. 2000 was fine and XP is fine.

When the password box is displayed on startup in Windows 2000, it uses the Windows Standard theme, is there any way to change this to another theme? There must be some registry hack.

By any chance does your detonator driver cause 2 monitors to be installed? Some of the Detonators have multiple monitor install on the cards that don't need it. When I tried playing some game with these drivers the game would flick back to the desktop like yours is doing. Consider trying an old detonator for the heck of it and see if it works. Detonator 7.52 is what I use and it runs fine with Jedi Knight.

That's a DOS game right? Sound may not work and thus hang the game. Try disabling sound and see if it works.

Its interesting to use Winamp as an alarm clock. I went through the wizard to schedule Winamp, but I don't know how you could get a file to run with it. Unless in the command line box, you can modify it so it loads a file.

Try the VIA PCI Latency Patch it boosted my chipset performance under XP by roughly 20 FPS in Quake 3. Go to http://www.viahardware.com http://download.viahardware.com/vlatency_v019.zip

I installed Windows 2000 on a Pentium 166 MMX with 32 MB of RAM. It was pretty damn slow, due to lack of memory. With 64 megs it probably would be better, but still slow. I also installed Windows ME on this system and it was horrible too. Windows 98 runs fine on it. I installed Windows 95 on a 486 DX2-66 with 8 megs of RAM and that was crap and slow.

I'll take a peek, thanks.

I have the Asus K7V, runs rock solid stable and is probably the best VIA KX133 board out there. Bought an Asus A7V133 for my friend's uncle a while back, running rock solid still. My uncle has an Asus P2B-S with integrated SCSI for his old Pentium 2-350 again another rock solid board. My school has a fleet of P4's running on Asus P4T boards and they run just fine. I had an Abit KA7-100, it died on me, so I dislike Abit for now.

Just wondering if its a wireless, are the batteries low or something? Anything dirty like sensors, the USB plug? Defective mouse maybe? If its newly bought, exchange it. Try reinstalling the software that came with the Intellimouse.

Some more Windows XP rants and raves: http://www.ntcompatible.com/vb/showthread.php?threadid=19735

I am really starting to dislike Windows XP. I've been running the Professional edition for about a month or so, and its starting to get to me. The integrated ZIP support is highly annoying. I tried the trick to unregister the ZIPFLDRS [or something].DLL trick but still when I click a ZIP file or try to open up the properties page for it, I get near 100 % CPU use and a long delay before it comes up. I use Winrar 2.9 Final for my archiving purposes, forget WinZIP and I dislike WinACE. With the same setup in Windows 2000 I got faster gameplay with Quake 3, 80 FPS to 68 FPS, Same setup, and everything else. I have a 750 Athlon with 512 megs of RAM and GeForce 2, and 7200 RPM hard disk with latest 23.11, but also tried 21.81, 21.83, 21.85, and a bunch of others. Maybe my PC is getting a bit old, but others report great performance on P3-500 or Celeron systems with 256 megs of RAM. The new interface is getting to me so I switched back to classic view with the classic start menu. I tried to go back to the bubbly interface but I just couldn't do it. I am afraid in future revisions MS may get rid of the classic menu/look. I hope not. I hope hard disk companies get on the ball and update their boot disks to support NTFS partitions so that I can use Maxtor's MaxBlast directly with NTFS. I had trouble getting rid of an NTFS partition so I ams sticking with FAT32, but really for my use I see no real advantage in using NTFS. Working around the OS seems sluggish, I don't know why, things load quickly enough but still the mouse and other things just don't "feel" right to me. Take that for what its worth. My only gripe is that companies may ditch support for 2000 in favour of XP, mostly game companies. But I hope that XP support will backwardly work with 2000. What are some of your thoughts, praises, and criticisms of WinXP vs Win2k vs Win9x/ME?????

I doubt 2000 supports ATA133 yet. Maybe SP3, it should still top out around ATA100, but maybe your chipset drivers need to be updated. If its VIA based grab those. Sometimes the VIA IDE chipset driver sucks, unistall it.

I too use to install every damn beta detonator out there, but now I really just don't care that much and use my old favorite the 7.52 det's. They work fine for my GF2MX. Its not like Nvidia is making any REAL performance optimizations for GF2 and GF1 chips anymore.

I have gone back to Windows 2000 now, just finished reinstalling this morning. I will try XP again when SP1 is out. But things are running really smooth under 2000 right now, and I forgot how great it feels.

Impressive. You certainly have alot of topics available. Beats the hell out of jumping from web site to web site to talk about stuff. Like I jump to Nvnews.net for Nvidia discussion and then come here for OS discussion. You just need more people....

I've got a fairly recent computer and ME and 98 and 98 SE all run the same. I stopped using 98 because it would always crash while running one of my games, Need For Speed: High Stakes, and I have no clue why. It would install and load fine but while running it would just bomb out. Tried every single driver release too. So I updated the install to ME with the same drivers and it never crashed again. I reformatted with 98 to see if the problem would persist and it did.

Strangely enough I find that Fast Writes helped my GF2MX a bit under 9x but under 2k/XP it didn't. I have no idea why.

Yeah for simple uses 98 is ok, but realistically it is getting old, and MS will discontinue its support for it next year. You might as well get ME or try to learn 2000 since all Windows will be based on 2000 and up.

98 SE is really getting old. I mean a 4 year old OS on new less than 6 month old machines is not worth it. Get Windows 2000 as a minimum. There is no real reason not to anymore.