Christianb

I use Virtual PC for software development mainly so I can test compatiblity.

Ya I emulate windows 98 in my Virtual PC 5.0 program.

I used to thave this Pentium II/III BX motherboard that had a default setting in the bios of cache video ram (which by the way is slow and stupid) and it gave me all sorts of video problems. Check and see if that's an option in your bios and make sure it's turned off.

Video Acceleration lowering Slideshow: http://www.rawsacramento.org/~christian/misc/video%20acceleration/

I don't see why you shouldn't try disabling that stuff. You sould also try monkeying with graphics acceleration and see if that doesn't help. Write me back if you don't know how to do that.

Go into their desktop settings and if they use the words "enhace", "improve", "change", "enlarge", "customize" or anything to that effect turn it off. -Christian

Yes of course, this is the perfect opportunity to sell it. I can see everyone lining up: 8) . I think you should provide a link to your eBay auction right here: . By features I mean they do things with the windows interface, like having a virtual desktop that extends beyond the viewable screen area, aka emulated multi-mon. I would start by making sure their tray app isn't running. How long have you used windows? You ought to be able to tell what's standard behavior and what ATI decided to "improve" if you can call it that :x . -Christian

You might try a different version of DirectX, and or updated video drivers. Also you might try turning off any special features that come with your lousy ATI drivers. ATI loves to add all these enhancements that don't work right and lower the stability and compatiblity of your system.

I would try a video card from a company that doesn't have a 7 + year track record of completely horid drivers. Matrox and NVidia make quality cards. -Christian

Thanks for your Help Tomay, Christian

Pmistry is absolutely right, the using the dosstart.bat and Creativeloads little util for loading drivers after the system has already been booted is the way to go. I know I have it somewhere, but you might offer to e-mail that utility to the guy who needs it. Of course this will violate Creative's EULA, but somehow I think we will all live happily ever after just the same . Pmistry you are however wrong about the TEMP file setting it will not keep your windows\TEMP folder clean, that's why I was trying to tell you. Most programs don't even check the environment variable or restiry to see where to place temp files. They just go to %WINDIR%\TEMP and drop 'em. Go ahead check on your own system I bet you have files there if you install programs regularly.

On a single OS system HiberFil.sys is always present. I have to take a look a the start of the HiberFil.sys file, thanks for your help. The HiberFil.sys is also always = my ammount of ram or not there if I deleted it.

Whoever agreed with me about the RAM is absolutely correct . However I'm wondering did you check HKEY_Current_User\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Run ...munOnce HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\......\Run ..munOnceEX...munOnce...munServices...? Win.ini, system.ini (check for run= and load= sections)

Sounds good. You might add a Set Blaster Variable to your autoexec for legacy apps. Creative Labs cards pretty much all work flawlessly in Win2K, I have no experience with 8-bit versions, but I think anything 16-bit ISA or better should do you just fine. -Christian

Hi I'm trying to find out if there is a replacement for Lotus ScreenCam, because it would seem Lotus is going to drop their best product. Win2K has been out for almost three years and they still don't have support for it. That's ridiculous! What is screencam? It's a program that records a video what your doing on the screen complete with your voice from a microphone or you can type comic book type text boxes. It's really groovy. Once you've recorded and or added your comic book text boxes you can save your video into the native .scm format or a self-viewing .exe to distribute. Cool no? It was great for showing somebody how to do something via e-mail. -Christian

Hey Gang, Check out this Reuters (New York) article on 43 US states and Commonwealths suing the US recording industry. Basically there's a 67.4 million dollar penalty and then they'll be required to donate 75.7 million dollars worth of CDs to public entities and non-profit organizations. While I think it's great that they're in trouble, paying a penalty of 143.1 million dollars is a drop in the bucket for the companies involved (AOL/Time Warner, Sony, Universal, BMG, EMI, Tower records, Musicland, and TransWorld Entertainment). Is it just me or could these guys afford a couple billion in penalties for decades of price fixing? Furthermore they only have to pay 67.4 million dollars in cash, the rest is going to be 75.7 million dollars worth of CDs. Now who thinks that they'll give the latest and greatest, best-selling CDs to these organizations? Anyone willing to believe that they'll just be disposing of CDs that they overproduced and couldn't sell in the retail market? (like those Spice Girls CDs that came with a case of Pepsi in Europe). Now I wonder will this be 75.7 million dollars worth of CDs at their price fixed MSRP 15-18 dollars for a new CD or will this be 75.7 million dollars worth of CDs at cost? Hmmm... that's a tuffy. Let's do some more math shall we? 143.1 million/43 states = 3.33 million dollars per state. In the past +/-20 years (CDs were patented in 1983) does anyone believe that the citizens of any state in the union were taken for more than 3 million dollars by this powerhouse list of companies? Seeing how the average state has 5+ million people in it I'm willing to believe that every last citizen was overcharged by more than a dollar over the last 20 years related to CD purchases. Who thinks they were personally overcharged by 10 dollars, 50, 200? So in summary the music industry suffered a minor minor bug-bite and won't be in need of hospitalization any time soon. -Christian Blackburn

;( You what's really giving me the creaps is all the energy waves that suround us now. I mean there's Radio, Cell-Phones, TV, Sattelite, Porta-Phones, Wireless Networks, FRS Radios, the Airport Channels, Military frequencies. 8) I can almost feel my DNA recombining -Christian Blackburn

I fail to see why a Jazz SCSI wouldn't be better than this? Or a USB/Firewire removable HD? My guess is this is just a poor overpriced solution. I'd sell it and buy something usefull.

It may depend on which version of Windows 9X, but I know that on Windows 98SE you do not need to load anything. I seem to recall not needing to load anything on Win95 OSR2, but can't speak about earlier versions, because while I've used 95 gold plenty in labs I haven't ever tested dos games professionaly. I was a hardware tester in the Windows Consumer Hardware Lab for Win98SE at Microsoft. Rather than copy what ever these other helpful hearted individuals have sent you why not figure out what you need. #1 for maximum speed and stability don't use any real mode drivers, or dos memory managers (even Microsoft's). Win98SE loads like a dream without anything in either file. You can still run most dos games without issue. If you have a particular Dos application that requires something special then you'll have to account for it. One of those guys wrote: Quote: @ECHO OFF PROMPT $P$G SET TEMP=C:\TEMP SET TMP=C:\TEMP SET PATH=C:\WINDOWS;C:\WINDOWS\COMMAND Definetly use @ECHO OFF if you're going to have any settings. The next thing Pmistry did was Prompt $P$G which is absolutely meaningless. That's the default settings so all that's happening is autoexec.bat is larger and slower to process. After that PMISTRY used set temp and set it to C:\TEMP. That's fine if you have a compatibility issue related to that otherwise it's highly illogical. First off if you don't specify your temp dir, windows automatically chooses %windir%\TEmp. Which is fine, all that usually winds up there is garbage from installation programs and compilers. Specifying C:\ will just cause confusion, because then you wind up having gunk in both C:\Windows (or wherever) \Temp and C:\TEMP. Whereas if you just KISS (keep it simple stupid) there will only be temporary files in C:\WINNT\TEMP. Personally I love to use C:\temp as sort of a testing bed. I will extract programs to C:\TEMP and install from there or try them out at that location. If they are any good then I'll put them in a permanent folder. Then once I'm doing trialing something I'll just empty C:\TEMP. If you do it the PMIStry shows you'd have a bunch of garbage files in there too and it'd be hard to delete the programs your evaluating if there are a bunch of read-only & in use files in the folder. This "SET PATH=C:\WINDOWS;C:\WINDOWS\COMMAND" is also default so there's no point in specifying it, because once again all you're doing is slowing things down. My advice is leaving that thing as close to empty as possible. Things you might want to add would be a set blaster statement if you have a sound blaster compatible sound card EG: Set Blaster=A220 I5 D1 T4 another good one is SET DIRCMD=/o which will automatically sort your files alphabetically when you type in DIR at a commmand prompt. In terms of the memory settings unless you're running a dos app and it actually says memory of specified type not available you won't need to load Himem or Dos=High, UMB. Windows probably does load dos high anyways. If a dos game needs EMS or XMS or something start by settings those options in the Shortcut, before you even touch your Autoexec or config.sys. Good luck. Also running SysEdit from a command-line is the best way to edit those two files. Happy Camping, Christian Blackburn :x

Are there any RAID solutions for laptops aside from installing Linux?

Wow that's an extremely fast removable drive. Too bad it's it's proprietary and not of a larger capacity. Oh well I'm sure you'll put it to good use just the same . -Christian Blackburn

You did mention Norton SystemWorks and Ram utilities. For performance disable all NAV auto-protection, and systemworks tray applications from starting automatically. Look at your startup group and in the registry. Also uninstall any RAM utilities that stuff is garbage, like crash defenders, and screen savers. These applications all do nothing and typically have the opposite effect (okay screen savers used to be helpful 10 years ago). Good Luck, Christian

Naturally, there are a plethora of possible reasons, but based on the information you gave me you need more RAM. Windows 98 is more than happy with 128, Win2K is not okay with so little of something so integral.

I haven't had one single problem with the game pad (gameport/classic version) in Win2K ever. My guess is that your sound card driver fails to properly support the Win2K gameport interface. Have you tried any other sound cards on the system. -Christian

Hi did you just select your gamepad in the the controllers applet in control panel or did you install the Win9X/NT drivers? If you had to install any drivers then you should uninstall them, because they aren't necessary on Win2K. Are you sure you selected the correct game pad? Have you tried up[censored] DirectX? You might also poke around here: Microsoft's Game Controller Site Good Luck, Christian