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Muhahaha ..... posting this from what is probably the PC equivalent of a 1-litre.

Old P120 laptop that i've finally got working on TEH BROADBANDZZ lol

why? because i can and i think it's fun

this site certified 640x480 friendly by the way! (thats all its LCD does..) sweet!

oh, bugger... no battery left! seeya!

haha

how long does it take to load windows?

Calâ„¢

CalvinGTI wrote:haha

how long does it take to load windows?

Calâ„¢

Bout an hour if you repartition your hard drive to clean the boot sector and format it properly before attempting to load windows but IMHO thats never been the issue......

Its loading up

- Wireless Keyboard and Mouse
- Nero DVD/CD Writer Software
- Setting up your BB or dialup connection
- Word
- Excel
- Adobe
- Firewall
- Anti Virus
- All the drivers for other stuff (scanners, printers & camera comunication)
- All your files (which of course you have an up to date back copy)
- Loads of stuff I've forgotten

Last time I did it it took me about 8 hrs to get the PC back to where it was before the crash

JM2pW

hardly any time!

well it did until i installed.........

Calmira II v3.31 (interface freshener thing)
Win32s, video for windows and WinG extensions
Network card with IPX/SPX (yowza, talk about oldskool - still worked as a file sharing / copying device though. floppies are so 2003, darling)
Internet explorer 5 with outlook express and some gubbins
TCP/IP stack

now it takes, hmmm, a while. slower but not drastic.

still a damn sight faster than mum's 2.4ghz toshiba laptop loading winXP however, or my own duron booting 98se, and uses a lot less battery power to do so. I can get a good 2 hours out of it if not more (i got lucky - it's at least 7 years old but seems that it's always been run off the AC adaptor... hence battery is in sparkling condition)

the biggest slowdown however is loading the network card and it's drivers (or, trying to load the network card and finding its not plugged in). kind of ironic seeing as that was the entire raison d'etre of WfWg...
(maybe it's just the IPX stuff - i can drop it now that TCP is installed, might make a difference)

pre- all that stuff (ie little more than dos 6.22, win 3.11, truecolour graphics / audio / power management drivers, and office v4) it zipped into life faster than a whippet with a stick of dynamite up its you know where

however considering now giving it a 2+ Gb disc upgrade (for speed rather than space! 800mb is fine for typing...) and as much memory as i can both afford and it will accept... and putting either 95 or 98-lite in it. i beleive it will be faster and more stable that way. time may have added nostalgia to windows 3.1 but it hasnt removed the severe resource drought or the dreaded GPFs!


Re-install of this stuff would take about five minutes flat after formatting, if it had a CD drive (get basic system files & CD driver copied over from floppy disc, then have CD spin the rest of it back to the HD lickety split). As it is, it would probably take days - floppy discs, homeboy. I remember installing this same version of office onto a 486 desktop. There were thirty five discs. 35. Damn.
Took next to no time to backup over the network.

Quite impressed by how well it handles the internet, too, though the 16mb RAM is a total liability (im not ever gonna take it anywhere near Porka!)




AHEM............................... PS cant beleive anyone replied, i was techno-drunk at the time

With you all the way - but for the support element for Win 98 I'd still be with it XP on both my althlon XP2000 with 512 mb of RAM and 120 gig hard drives take ages to get into gear

I have a Dell insperion Laptop running XP - used to be 98 and it's slow as a slow thing compared to my old Compaq running win 3.1 window for workgroups

The newer the version of windows the slower the boot up and operation

Thanks Bill!!!!!

To give it credit a properly set up XP seems to be rocket fast. Full 32bit coding after all. The ones at work are a 90% shining example --- from POST finishing through to password log on is somewhere in the region of 15 seconds. I've had win3.1 installs that were quicker but i was truly pushing the minimalist envelope with them, so its pretty impressive. Logging on takes about 10 secs if that, noticably quicker than the win98 system further down the desk from the PC in question, even though they're on the same hardware.

Thats where it all falls apart though - they've concentrated on making sure the core OS is set up and installed right and forgotten the little details - such as there's some bug with outlook express (ha! two carriage railbus...) that makes it take a whole MINUTE to load (on the win98 one i could load it, read three mails, write a two line reply to one of them and exit in that time). The office software is set to US english and wont save the change (ie its locked to the retarded settings chosen at install) and can you print? can you buggery....

Least there's no spyware however --- found part of the reason why the laptop was so slow a short while ago --- was called into where mumsy was internetting with it, wanting to know what the internet window was that had popped up, whether her computer was overrun with spyware (there was a flashing internet popup window telling her that! it must be true! she must be foolish not to click it's red and yellow link!), and why her "updates" were taking so long. Yep. I think you can guess what's happened to it. This after I installed firefox and told her to use it if she valued her online life.... nope... still using a totally unprotected internet explorer, a "nail me" target like a convict reaching for dropped soap with his legs apart.

All that and somehow she hadn't noticed the XXX porno searchbar now seared into IE. This is a home teaching laptop for kids from age 11 up, by the way.

Spybot needed three passes to clear everything it could find (over 60 items, all of them pretty hardcore in more ways than one) and two to fully immunize internet explorer. Adaware detected 288 critical malicious items including several running processes - two of them being false windows update loaders - and crashed very hard. Gave up on it for the night.

This after she gave it to her school's tech bloke in order to "have its virus checker updated", determine whether it had a wireless card and to get it set up suitably for home broadband (he failed miserably at both of the latter as well - not that im surprised). I think I might write a letter reccommending he be sacked.

BTW people, adaware has a new version out, if you're running version 6 still, it's time to upgrade to the latest free version ("SE") as they'll be discontinuing updates for it soon.

My XP seems fast enough! Certainly a vast improvment over the boot-up speed of Windows 2000 Pro anyway!

And I've just this week started using Firefox as my default 'net browser, simply due to tabbed browsing and customisable plugins IE still exists as a backup tho.

As for spyware, part of my job is to receive client's knackered virus/spyware/malware etc infected PCs and recover them - mucho fun. Kinda scares them when you tell them AdAware picked up over 300 instances of spyware... thats a great bit of software

yeah boy

its amazing the amount of crap it finds

think i found well over 2000 on each of the first 2 pcs i installed it on -- made a point of getting it in place early from then on simply because it spooked me. standard part of the software compliment when reinstalling from scratch, now.
as is spybot - maybe not for diagnostic purposes when installing, but CERTAINLY for the internet explorer "inoculation" routine that stops you being host to a bunch of nasties. those two plus a decent virus checker and the lastest set of windows updates are things you should "regularly" make an install CD with... get the protection in place before the PC even gets to the internet!

firefox is pretty good but theres a few silly little things it cant do or has trouble with, that start to annoy after a while. the slowness of the download dialogue for one, refusal to load/display certain pages or plugins for pages properly is another. though possibly thats a sign that said page is not all it appears!

hah theres nothing you lot can say that wud compare to the speed at which my x086 with a 40mb hard disk used to load DOS !!!


Bwaaaaaaaaaaaaaa oh yea and i had a CGA monitor

Oooooooh feel the wrath of the 8 colours !!!

Calâ„¢

four colours surely cal? one of them ALWAYS being black?

dark red, dark green, brown, cyan, purple and murky white being your choices

something like that

non-woot for CGA (bloody stupid idea, what were they thinking?!)


woot for anyone who can hook me up with the name of a GOOD, nuclear-napalm wielding anti-virus/anti-spybot/etc program for windows XP. i did everything i could with that laptop, but a triumvirate of spybot SD, ad-aware SE and symantec antivirus on a copy of XP home (weak-ass debug tools..) with no admin account (argh!) just doesnt cut the mustard. got rid of all but one or two problems. thing is they were the most disturbing and obnoxious ones, i.e. those which brought the need for a sweep to my attention in the first place. the only thing left to do is a hardcore windows/IE update, but like i trust THAT to go off without a hitch right now!

no matter how many processes i kill, files deleted, internet explorer variously patched and protected and immunised and it's pages first altered and then locked, it keeps insinuating it's way back. i know if the processes are killed then there's no lasting risk if i can convince her to use firefox, but, schyeah right who am i kidding that she'll remember to do that - dippy bird can't even remember to cancel her indicators ever!

I'm currently using:

AVG AntiVirus Free Edition v7
Ad-Aware SE Personal build 1.05
SpyBot SD 1.3

All up to date natch. Seem to do the trick, plus Windows XP SP2 firewall is up, Automatic updates are up-to-date and I'm behind a firewall on my Belkin All-In-One router/modem. Everythings good so far - had broadband since Monday, still here!

Don't know about anyone else but the router's firewall securoty log shows up lots of attempts from "Smurf" - a DoS attack that warranted a recent Windows Update - anyone got any pevention techniques? Its not getting in, but it is infuriating to watch it pinging all the port numbers...

Cheers

Edited to add the Smurf link...

sounds similar to my own usual security install which i like to get on the disc and running before even inserting the internet cable........ spybot, ad-aware, and Avast! antivirus. i *was* using AVG, but their shareware/update policy grated a little, and it did miss a couple things / go phut at some point --- when i got to complaining about it to a geekier work pal he suggested avast, and it's been good for me.

with those three going, and the hardware firewall on my router i've been perfectly fine - so far havent even got a software firewall though i know i should. then again, i think avast covers that corner automatically? its been such a solid fire-and-forget program (even does major core updates automatically!) that i cant remember!

trying to install and run anti-spyware programs once the stuff's into your pc these days really is locking the stable after the horse has bolted - there's enough clever trick programs that are able to evade their clutches and require specialist software to remove (woe betide if you dont have admin level access i think for some of them!). much better to get it installed immediately after reformat so that the sh*t can't get onto the system in the first place. Spybot is now up to about 2500 different "immunisation" entries for internet explorer.

worst of all, the dodgiest one that i cant get rid of is a spammer for a (false!) spyware remover program. computers really should come with instruction manuals these days, and a thing when you first turn it on that tests you to see if you've actually read it. mum had no clue about spyware til all this happened, and it seems as if her tech didnt either.

mind you i've never yet seen a tech worth their salt in a school or college (and only a couple out of the crowd at university) ... cant make the grade to be accepted in a major company? too crap to even go freelance and do home servicing? why not work for a school!? argh.

and i really dont like the way that you cant drop to a non-multitasking command line in windows XP, even from a rarely-used "rescue" floppy or something*. how are you supposed to delete a rogue file when it's got two processes protecting it from deletion, either one automatically re-starting the other if it's killed, and you can only force-close one program at a time? thanks a lot microsoft. at least with win 98 you can start in virgin pure DOS, delete the file without protections (as DOS command line literally is the only thing running), export the registry, load it on another machine, remove the keys pertaining to it all and then load it back up... voila... instant komputer karma.

* if this actually is possible i would be very grateful to anyone who tells me how to do it...!

With regards to removing crap from your system, there are some tools you can download from Symantec's website, amongst others...

But also, got to the Run command on Windows and type "regedit" in, and take a look at HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE -> SOFTWARE -> Microsoft -> Windows -> CurrentVersion -> Run

If you have any processes listed here that you're unsure of, type the name, eg. ATICCC.exe (thats a legitimate ATI Control Center process) into either:

1. Google Groups - here

or,

2. Sysinfo.org Startup List - here - type your possibly suspect process into the search box and see what come up.

This should help eridicate those pesky spyware/virus programs along with the previously mentioned programs...

well ok i entered one that i KNOW is dodgy into it, and got this

http://www.sysinfo.org/startuplist.php?filter=winad

.... now what do i do with it?


i could alter the registry but TBH thats what spybot and adaware are supposed to be doing for me - playing with win98s reg would be a chore (well, IS a chore as i do have reason to dip in to hkey_local_machine\classes\run, or whatever it's called, from time to time), winxp would frighten me.....

maybe if it cant be fixed otherwise, i'll do it!