Norman L. DeForest said:
Norman L. DeForest said:
On 25 Oct 2005, badgolferman wrote:
yar, 10/25/2005, 1:16:34 PM,
this is a little off topic ,but i respect the opinion of those that
post here. is windows updates and patches a good thing? i see all
sorts of problems that are generated for users by doing this. the
solutions are just about as bad. in fact everything that MS does
seems
to be very , how should i put it......not done very well.
I administer 30+ computers at work and am required to install patches
and updates Microsoft releases. In the 5 years I have been doing this
on W2K and WXP machines I have only had a problem on two computers.
One was my own, which has so many installations and registry tweaks
that I would expect something like that to happen more often.
I have had two problems with updates, both easily solved:
1. One update changed some of my settings back to the default ones,
including changing the Windows swap file back to my overcrowded[1]
C: drive again, causing Windows to slow to a crawl (15 minutes to
open something, 3 hours for shutdown). Changing the swap file
back to my D: drive fixed things.
That I never heard of. Basically needs to edit System.ini. I'd like to
know
what update that was, as it's only ever happened to me due to Symantec.
It was quite a long time and several updates ago. I also had some updates
mess around with my directory displays. I prefer *most* of them to show
"details" but after a couple of updates I had to change my preferences for
a lot of them (virtually all of them; I still open up the occasional
directory I haven't looked at for a long time and find its display set to
"large icons") back to "details" from the "large icons" setting.
I admit I do tend to do stuff like test installations or extracting the
files and looking at the infs therein, more out of boredom than a genuine
desire for that much control. And while I do prefer to have some extensions
hidden I have not seen those I make visible, reverting. What strikes me msot
though, is that I tend to use (at least these days) post-98 versions of
Windows largely because I don't like the user-unfriendliness the earlier
ones have by comparison. For example, I could change the 98 shortcut overlay
easily on a new 98se, but after updating it it's reverted and in order to
get my own overlay back I have to edit shell32.dll itself! Not something I
have to do post-98. Same with other little user-friendly features, so I can
well imagine the problems you report on Windows 98, but not Millennium or
XP.
I've had one piece of software add a "NeverShowExt" entry to the registry
for *.url files after I had changed all "NeverShowExt" entries to
"AlwaysShowExt" to unhide *all* extensions.
Yes, though I haven't seen that, I can see it happening.
^^
You have a funny way of spelling "at".
Apparently I have a number of funny ways
Nvidia also has a *terrible* website for getting drivers. It should *not*
be necessary to have a JavaScript-capable browser to get drivers.
Yes. Though I have just noticed that with my Mass Downloader extension and
Javascript enabled but all the checkboxes cleared, I can download drivers
fron nvidia.com using Firefox with less trouble than I can using Internet
Explorer.
[1] Rant: Why do so many programs have installation routines that
installs automatically on drive C: without asking you where you
want it to install. The latest software guilty of that was the
Real Player plugin for Firefox needed to display something I wanted
to see. 22 [bleep]ing megabytes downloaded with a 14.4 modem and
it finally announced that it couldn't install because there was
insufficient room on my C: drive. I would have to uninstall half
the software on that drive (most of which also gave me no choice of
installation location) to make room and then download the Real
Player
extension all over again. [...]
[snip]
Have you tried
http://www.free-codecs.com/download/Real_Alternative.htm?
They're where I go for Real and Quicktime viewers without the bloat of
the
originals. Not sure you can choose different drives, but the size (and
following pita) sure is smaller!
I'll have to have a look. Thanks.
I have an older version of Quicktime but Apple seems to have discontinued
support for Windows 98 in the latest version needed for some files.
Again, doesn't surprise me. Enough people are abandoning support for *all*
9x versions.
Is there anything you can recommend for playing *.mp4 videos on a
Windows 98 machine?
I forget what I used most recently, but as BoB observes,
http://www.free-codecs.com is a good place to look.
ObACAV: and it is getting harder and harder to create emergency boot disk
sets with F-Prot. The last fp-def.zip file I downloaded broke the 3MB
barrier (using decimal megabytes). *Everything* is getting larger and
larger. (My current tactic is to use CARVE.EXE[1] to cut up the
definition files into pieces, have the first boot disk create a RAM-disk
and then have the autoexec.bat file (on all of the floppies in the set)
copy the pieces to the RAM-disk and reassemble them there.)
As some here will be aware, this has become largely irrelevent to me,
although it *is* always a good point. Personally I use bootable cds now and
have well established how to put multiple AVs on it to run in a variety of
different ways, meanwhile Dave Lippman has done something similar with USB
sticks.
[1] They Slice! They Dice! They puree! -- utilities to get selected
parts of files or to cut files into pieces:
http://www.chebucto.ns.ca/~af380/Tips.html#carvers
Haha! 'Bout time I checked that out again!
Shane
