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Given that somebody clearly took the trouble to make Unofficial patch sets for Windows 98, we can fully expect unofficial patch sets for Windows XP

http://www.mdgx.com/upd98me.ph...

Windows 98 does not require activation. XP activation can be backed up for a particular machine, and survive minor updates like a hard drive.

But, much like 98, I am sure a support community will emerge. See the Windows 98 Forever campaign . No joke, and you can run 98 today still get support, and with fairly recent hardware and some support. Recent security updates, updates so that you can run 2k/XP software, usability and reliability updates, hardware drivers for new equipment, available programs, etc.

"So basically, with 95B the whole game changed, since the underlying DOS was only a bootloader, but the 95A version was not."

No. Even 98SE has full DOS underneath its graphical interface. By adding BootGUI=0 under [CONFIG] in MSDOS.SYS, you will boot into a pure DOS environment.

http://www.mdgx.com/msdos.htm#TAB

I will agree on your correction in (2) but not for the rest. DOS was already getting too old and WinME was meant to pave the way for Win2000. The crapware was easy to remove, system restore was better than reinstallation and hibernation did work well. As for general midi emulation of course you wouldn't need it in real-mode DOS if you had a card with wave table synthesizer vs FM.

When you say "it was slower to use than 98SE" you are wrong. In fact one of the most diligent Win9x tinkerers, Axcel216, states that by replacing 700 Win98 system files with their newer WinME versions one would

"improve/speed up/fix your Win98 SE(U) GUI, OLE, DDE, GDI, Dial-Up Networking (DUN), TCP/IP, Winsock, LAN/WAN, Multimedia/Audio/Video, Virtual Cache/Memory, USB/FireWire components [and others I don't even recall off of the top of my head :)], without putting up with the notorious WinME annoyances"

The annoyances were the crap which could be removed during installation with 98lite...

I'm much more interested in WinXP SP3 or Win2k SP5...

Win2k SP5 will never happen because MS wants people to think that Win2k is obselete abadonware, even though they've promised to support it until summer of 2010. They refused, for instance, to make a public patch for Win2k's Daylight Saving rules. I doubt they'll even do another post-SP4 patch rollup -- probably just the same trickle of IE6 and DirectX patches we've seen for the last couple of years.

(Of course, you can make your own SP5 and use third party time zone updates. There will probably be a lot of third-party patching as MS continues to drop the ball, pushing the new shiny stuff instead.)

I was one of the beta testers for Vista and tried to like it,but when your 3Ghz 2Gb of RAM gamer rig runs like a sloth and can't even play Far Cry with an acceptable frame rate,no thanks. Vista actually stayed on my machine for less time than WinME did back in the day. At least with WinME you could drop into DOS and Frankenstein WinME with Win98SE into a Win98SE with better USB support,something I still do when I come across someone who has a machine too old to run Win2K acceptably,or who have a legacy app that still requires Win9X.Here is the link for those with an old box lying around-http://www.mdgx.com/ Listed under Win98 tricks/Win98SE2ME.

Maybe in time they'll fix the bugs,but with all the DRM and bloat it'll be at least SP2 before I'd be willing to give it another try.Until then a dual boot WinXP/Xandros on the laptop and XP on the gamer rig does everything that Vista does,at least as far as eye candy. And with XP my games actually get a decent framerate without throwing out my single core rig.

http://support.microsoft.com/?id=914387

Can be manually fixed, or daylight savings change can be disabled.
There are tools out there that add reg entries for the lazy.

http://www.mdgx.com/files/KB928388.EXE

(warning- reboots computer without confirmation)

Spy Hunter easter egg in Excel 2000 (non-SP1 or SP2 only)

-Zorilla (Anonymous due to IP temp-banning from too many +3 Funny, -2 Overrated posts)

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ON this (and shoot me if you will after I say what I use) WinME box, it rarely swaps stuff out. And the only time it ever does swap out is when I'm using a memory-intensive application.

In your system.ini (I do not know if this is still valid under XP, so if you use XP, apply this tweak at your own risk) go down to the 386enh section, and add the line "ConservativeSwapFileUsage=1". This will make Windows use all available Physical RAM before using the Swap/page file.

Also, Windows usually allocates all of the memory to itself, but it doesn't use it until it is needed. You can control this if you tweak your Vcache. You can get info on that here and here

...

ON this (and shoot me if you will after I say what I use) WinME box, it rarely swaps stuff out. And the only time it ever does swap out is when I'm using a memory-intensive application.

In your system.ini (I do not know if this is still valid under XP, so if you use XP, apply this tweak at your own risk) go down to the 386enh section, and add the line "ConservativeSwapFileUsage=1". This will make Windows use all available Physical RAM before using the Swap/page file.

Also, Windows usually allocates all of the memory to itself, but it doesn't use it until it is needed. You can control this if you tweak your Vcache. You can get info on that here and here

Somewhere on this website i fouind out you can BYPASS the product activation: you apparently copy a file with WPA in the name from an already-activated machine, copy it to an un-activated machine, and viola??

May need to check that one.

(I use Linux - slack 9.1)