ejsmith

Yeah, I've fought the 23.11 bug. But I've also fought a 4.37 lockup issue too. Another good reason not to *EVER* delete old driver .zip files from your driver cdrw's. I have everything from 6.0 and up, reference/nvidia/msft. And the 4n1 4.28+ as well.

Well, I got used to Win2k's taskbar. If you have 50 windows open, it just crams every single one of them into the space you have allocated. Now, Winxp throws in the little 'up/down' arrow. Will someone tell me how to get rid of the arrows, and go back to the Nt5.0 taskbar? And, no. I do not like the 'group similiar taskbar buttons' option, although it helps a tiny bit... Gracias.

1) Delete the partition. 2) Repartition. 3) Format. 4) Install.

Yeah, you can dual boot on the same partition. There's a good chance of a program mistaking the nt folder for the 98 folder, and overwriting a system file. I tried it once, but didn't like it. I use system commander now. I like to keep my os's completely seperate, so if one goes down (this *is* msft, you know), I still have a perfectly good working os on the other side. msft motto: Always have 600 backup systems (read: unlimited dll cache). nasa motto: have 600 backup systems, but don't waste space. (read: good engineering)

Yeah, default zone alarm to "DeNiEd!" Like when the post office stamps your envelope "Return to Sender"? Zonealarm rulez...

That sounds really strange. If you packed Win98 back on, without repartitioning, then you were running Xp with fat32. Fat32 is trouble compared to Ntfs. Yeah, chuck that 1.5gig of junk. You can scan through it with a hex editor, but it's only there if you have critical info to recover. I'd think about repartitioning if you keep poping errors on that drive.

Run chkdsk /f c: (or whatever). If it's your system drive, or a page file drive, you'll have to do it next reboot. And the Via drivers make a huge difference under win98se/win2k. Udma mode 3 is ata33, and Udma mode 5 is ata100. There's an idetool that will tell you if you're running mode 5 with the 4n1 drivers.

By definition, anything you chuck damages msft's installation. But you can chuck a whole slew of stuff that will never become an issue: Ever. You'll have to be more specific on stuff you want to chuck. The hotfix uninstallation stuff ($q46363284$) in the winnt folder can go. The entire windowsupdate folder can go; you'll download it again when you hit update. All the .bak files, .htm, .hlp (be careful with Office2k/2k2), .chm, .wav, .rmi, .mid, .log, .txt, .pdf, .old, .htt. The drivers.cab file can go; it's on the cdrom. There's others, but those come to mind quickly.

"Any Ideas?" Yep. Dual boot with either win98se or win95osr2. You'll get sound and music with sb support. But you'll have to manually configure your irq's for either 3,5, or 7 on the sound card.

Can't seem to get Application Compatibility Toolkit to work for me. I select a bunch of options, and Myst and Mechwarrior 3 still recognize that I'm not using win95/98. Any tips on ACT?

Uh, X-Come? I'm going on the assumption that's a typo. Anyway, the one time I've tried Xcom1, I got it to work with music, but no sound effects. It's just not the same. I did that with the VMD sound emulator. I have the old collector's editon which had Xcom1 and 2 on two seperate cdroms. I just zipped them down, and put them on a single cdrom. Never could figure out how to get the .anm movie clips to play on xcom2, but it played with the slide show just fine.

Trying to get Grim Fandango to work. It will play for about 2 minutes or 6 scene changes before it kicks me out to the desktop. I've tried everything from ACT, to APcompat, Win95 compatible layer, running it plain with SP2 integrated, running the executable directly from the folder. I'm using a laptop which will run Grim just fine under Win98 and software mode. And the funny thing is that I have a cd with SP2 preinstalled, so I don't have to install it when I crash/format/install. If I go to Microsoft's site and download all the *other* fixes, the entire AppPatch directory gets wiped out. I've compressed down a backup of the files before I update, and uncompress it back to the folder after I've updated so I get all those nifty .dll files back where they should be. But it really irks me, nonetheless...

Run down to Wally World. It's probably at the $42 level by now...

What I usually do when I have problems like that, is download the Nero Aspi update. It just an Aspi32.dll that you can copy into the nero folder, or the WinNT/System32 folder. Works with any other cd burning software out there, too. It's not the *whole* aspi layer, but it's the only thing that a bunch of programs need to burn a cd.

I'm not sure about the home version of XP. It might be a little easier to learn how to use NT than win2k professional.

Services are *REALLY* tricking under NT. Sounds like you have some other services that got changed around too. I'm not enough of an expert to help you if you end up having to use the recovery console or 'boot last good configuration' kinda stuff. I know when I start shutting down services after a clean install, I turn all the ones I don't use to 'Manual', with the Scheduler being the only one I completely lockout and disable. There's the 'start/stop/disable' drop down menu, then there's a 'enable/disable' button you can click to competely lockout the service from automatic installation programs turning it back on after you disable it. Sounds like that's what you did on something. There's a list around here somewhere of what each one does, and if you can shut it down without hampering your ability.

.nrg's are disc-at-once kinda things. You can use a rewritable, and burn the first; Copy everything off; do a quick erase; burn the second; copy everything off... That's probably how I'd do it, anyway.

I'm using a Dell Inspiron 3200 (266 p2) under win2k sp2, with a 2meg neomagic vid card and directx 8.1. I've got Application Compatibility Toolkit version 1.5. How do I get it to run well under win2k? I've played all the way through (a *long* time ago) ff7 once under win98se and this laptop, so I know it works with win98se and my sidewinder gamepad. ACT gives me a huge list of 78 fixes to implement, and I've messed around with all the ones that look like they'd do some good (72 of them). I can get to the end of the first battle and it kicks me out to the desktop, then immediately restarts the game. That intro movie is really getting annoying. I've tried downloading the haxx0red version 2.0 of ACT, but nun of the links work anymore. I've also tried using the Compatibility tab with a link to the executable, and selected win95/98/NT4.0 modes, with no joy. I've also gave both the unpatched, and tnt/riva/laptop patch executables a whirl without success. Can anyone give me a few tips?

I've been trying that approach. I looked =) before I posted. FF7 has been discussed several times in this forum. I can't seem to find the 'windows 2000 layer' option inside qfix. I get the 78 fix options that you have to checkmark individually, and I can get it to make a .reg file in the apppatch folder (which I install). I've tried the shortcut/compatibility layer win98/95 option. Should I be making a shortcut with the win98 compatibility layer, and running qfix on *that* shortcut? I've reformated sooooo many times this past week, I've not had the chance to mess around with ff7 much. That intro movie gets rather long. Thanks for replying!

Boy, I don't know. Since you've already tried reinstalling the compatibility patch and *that* didn't work. If this happened to me, I'd backup/format/install. I've spent too many hours looking for an answer to some obscure problem with windows that could have easily been solved by a fresh install. Good ole' msft is cool like that.

Try making a shortcut to the executable (drag and drop while holding down ctl-shift). Then right click on *that*, properties, compatibility, win98/95/NT4 layer. I still think ACT gives you better options...

You people shouldn't all reply at once. It bogs down the server.....

I have. It wipes out my AppPatch folder. It kills every single entry in there (including slayer.dll), and puts two folders in: backup and sources. After two format/installs, I've learned to compress down the folder before I start up[censored] on Microsoft's site, so all the .dll's are back where they should be. Anyway I got both to work. Mechwarrior 3 and Myst work after I run setwin95 on the installer, to bypass the NT check. Thanks!

Have you tried using the Application Compatibility Toolkit [ACT] yet? It might hammer out a few probs for you...

I had the same problem a week or so ago. Don't know what Windows problem was, but it just wouldn't let my cdroms work. Kept saying 'couldn't load the drivers for these devices' when they were present. Whatever. Did a crash/format/install, and everything works just fine.