can i please rant about windows me

[willawake]

was installing a usb controller card on a clients son's computer. found the card, rebooted and "failed to load explorer.exe, you will have to reinstall windows"

what the hell is that kind of message. got it in safe mode as well. never seen a failure so bad even in 98.

anyway we are installing xp tomorrow . think he is kinda happy cos he is asking his dad for some new parts for the new pc.

remind me not to touch anything older than windows 2000 anymore. i thought those days were behind me.

[RJARRRPCGP]

was installing a usb controller card on a clients son's computer. found the card, rebooted and "failed to load explorer.exe, you will have to reinstall windows"

what the hell is that kind of message. got it in safe mode as well. never seen a failure so bad even in 98.

anyway we are installing xp tomorrow . think he is kinda happy cos he is asking his dad for some new parts for the new pc.

remind me not to touch anything older than windows 2000 anymore. i thought those days were behind me.

The message:

Error loading EXPLORER.EXE You must reinstall Windows.

That can occur under Windows 98 too if installing a newer version of Internet Explorer and the Internet Explorer installer fails.

Otherwise the client's son probably was deleting files he shan't have.

[stretch0069]

Ahhh...let it all out.....

As far as I'm concerned, Windows ME was just 98 SP3.


Everytime I have a problem, I just and nothing matters. :


Damn...TC we need one that is a Jack Daniels or Jim Beam bottle.

[willawake]

anyway we got a albatron 865 chipset mobo with socket 775. strange combo but that mobo ddr ram/albatron agp card slashed the price considerably. marvell lan on board worked unbelievably well with that intel hub they have connected to the dsl. never seen such an improvement.

albatron board had united chemi-con and some sanyo os-con type caps. i think albatron are being quite consistent with having good caps on the boards.

the albatron fx5500 agp card also has sanyo and united chemi-con caps and one dodgy looking small cap (why to spoil it with one dodgy cap?). i have the same card in my office pc. it is a pity they did not splash for a samsung 710v tft it would have rounded off the system nicely, i also have one in the office and it is a great office tft for a good price.

anyway with xp installed today i will have no probs to go to service that pc again. 1 down, 4 more 98s to go heh.

RJARRRPCGP thanks for the info. yeh i see a lot of people using registry cleaners, spyware sweepers and they choose to delete everything found, uninistalling programs incorrectly etc. that comp was packed with progs also.

first time i used socket 775. (dont see too many new pcs often) the HSF is pretty cool looking. although the proc is easy to install i did not like the stress on the board from the HSF installation. did not like also that the fan is quite exposed to cables touching it. that proc is running quite hot also.

yeah mikey i did just (on a cruise ship actually for their launch party) but had to fix the pc first and the drink tastes a whole lot better when the job is done.

[stretch0069]

the drink tastes a whole lot better when the job is done.

ain't it the truth :



CHEERS!!!

[willawake]

heh, i was checking the pc today for some minor settings change and the stock HSF of the 775 chips is indeed several times louder than a P4. I think it is a consideration if you are installing for people who mind that kinda noise. otherwise [insert newer hotter cpus speech here] or otherwise take them to see the rack cabinet. then they will understand what is noise.

i really like fan sound like you are on a commercial jet. just gotta keep adding larger fans till you drown out the whine of the cpu/gpu with the air sound.

vacation on sunday, going to Ireland. long time no vacation. left the office 22:00 after doing systems maintenance. (something always craps out on the first day i am away at 09:00hrs.)

[stretch0069]

damn. vacation????? whats a vacation?????

have fun vacation. I would say a safe vacation, but you can't have both.

"be good. if you can't be good, be careful. If you can't be careful, don't name it after me"

[Topcat]

People still use 98/me??

I skipped the whole win9x/ME phase... I went from DOS to NT4 when it came out in 96, then NT4 to win2k in 99, then win2k to XP pro in 02..... Screw winME and other DOS extensions...

[kc8adu]

looks like you too missed out on all those wonderful bsod's.
9x=

People still use 98/me??

I skipped the whole win9x/ME phase... I went from DOS to NT4 when it came out in 96, then NT4 to win2k in 99, then win2k to XP pro in 02..... Screw winME and other DOS extensions...

[Preowner]

I was stuck on 98 se until 03. For some reason I would get nightmares seeing all the crap that ran in the background of xp. I saw "me" as more of a downgrade. I don't realy acknowledge its existance.

Is is wrong to run an a64 with 98? ...jk

[RJARRRPCGP]

looks like you too missed out on all those wonderful bsod's.
9x=

Vice-versa for me, had good luck with Windows 98 SE. Hell actually starting occuring when using Windows XP. Windows XP often wasn't happy about something with the video and liked to give me a BSOD when playing one of my favourite (at the time) game. Was having the problem with getting the BSOD:

***STOP: 0x000000EA THREAD_STUCK_IN_DEVICE_DRIVER

When running a game. Usually when been running the game for at least approximately 45 minutes or approximately 30 minutes.

Many people believed that the crash was caused by a Nvidia driver bug.

Was using a GeForce 2 MX200 32 MB video card at the time.

I was thus required to go back to Windows 98 SE to avoid crashes.

The Windows NT-based OSes are more picky with 3D software than Windows 98 SE. Also had a major problem:

The Windows XP installation process locks up when it says "Setup is starting Windows" with my GeForce 2 MX200 video card thus I was STRANGELY required to insert another video card just to install Windows XP than I can reinsert my GeForce 2 MX200 video card and Windows XP
(after the Windows XP installation process is complete) will be fine with it for at least 97 percent.

Thus Windows XP definitely was somewhat flaky with the PC hardware I had at the time (back in 2002).

[Topcat]

NT4 was like that in its prime days. NT4 was pretty much unusable until SP1 came out for it. I had a few BSoD's with NT4, and when NT gave u a blue screen, it was bad news...

I havent had any trouble with XP Pro, and I've got a lot of SCSI and SCSI RAID's, and it never bitched a bit about them. I've repaired a lot of customer machines with winblows 9x/ME, and I knew from their machines, I didn't want that crap on my system.......... "this program has performed an illegal operation and will be shut down" YUK!!!!

[rugger]

I liked XP a lot more then any previous MS operating system. It just works, it is also very rare to see it colapse in a heap like older MS systems did. You can (and I do) just keep changing stuff (motherboards, CPUs, video cards) and there is very little overall system degredation, even over a long time.

Of the windows 9x systems, Windows 98 first edition was the best, with Win 95 OSR2 being only slightly behind it. The worst of them was Win ME and windows 98 SE, whoses half baked WDM software meant my creative sound card continuously crashed.

[UraBahn]

Windows 2k/XP? Meh. Gimme DR-DOS 7.x.

<nostalgia> I loved DOS when I got my first computer (a Tandy 1000 HX, waaay back in the olden days), and to this day I still love (and use!) DOS. Whenever it screwed up, it was usually because I screwed it up, not because a crappy bug in Windows caused it to crash. And performance on a DOS machine would never degrade, as long as I kept my hard drive(s) defragmented and uncluttered, and my CONFIG.SYS and AUTOEXEC.BAT well streamlined.

And back then, capacitors (as well as the rest of the computer's parts) were built to last, and last. (notable exceptions excluded) </nostalgia>

Ahem... oh yeah. I guess Windows 2000 is the best of the Windoze series for me. I just like how it's generally faster than Win XP and tends to run better on older hardware as well. However, I really don't like the 'Sharing Violation' bugs, though.