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technoid

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  1. Thanks guys. I haven't done anything yet. This will be a sad day indeed if this is indeed a hardware failure. I worked a lot just to get it set up as a home theater PC those years ago, with DVI to projector to get that 1:1 sharp image quality, rather than VGA or component video which are blurrier, as well as surround sound, putting it together as cheaply as possible. I had thought of backing this boot drive up years ago but never did. I have to wonder though if this is a drive failure internally (heads, platters etc) & not the drive PCB. There is a 2nd harddrive inside that is actually the same make & model, i.e. both are same-model Maxtor IDE 40gb drives. Yes, I guess I will first try moving the drive into a USB external enclosure & will connect it to my Windows 7 laptop & see if it will find anything. I had already checked the cables & the home theater PC can recognize both drives at startup, so I guess that means both Maxtor drive board electronics are still working. But I may try swapping the drive board out using the drive board from the 2nd drive, as maybe the next plan, just to be sure, if the usb converter does not work. I did not think that letting the PC stay on overnight could have possibly done this as I guess the thermal damage just accelerated the wear & tear on these older hard disks, even when there was an internal fan blowing towards the disks. The disks unfortunately were in a metal support box housing that probably kept the wind from moving over the entire drives, but I never had issues with it before, the fan actually probably did some good anyway over the years. I will probably check the 2nd drive first & put that in the usb converter enclosure & back that up if it's still good, even if the stuff on the boot drive was more important. Oy vey.
  2. Hi all, A couple nights ago, I turned on one of my older Pentium III PC's with Win2k-sp4 to tinker with, that I rarely turn on nowadays, probably been over a year. It's worked fine for 15 years prior, I've used it a lot as a home theater setup. So I let this computer stay on overnight, maybe over 6 hours. Then I decided to do a checkdisk on it (error-checking tool) & so after a couple minutes or so, it hung, stopped & said it couldn't find operating system. Did several reboots & checked bios, but still same thing, no operating system found. If this thing is hosed, I hope I can retrieve the stuff on it. How would I first go about starting research & repair on this? Should I put the boot harddrive (IDE) into an external ide usb drive enclosure & see if I can peek inside? Would that affect boot on this if it got repaired? Or should I first try to do a recovery console with the 2k CD? I have never done that before with 2k, so I'm not totally sure what the commands are. I've done it before with XP, I think, but even then it's been years & I don't remember any details. I think because I let it on overnight, this might be due to the harddrive getting a bit hot, as it did not have any auto-sleep or some other eco mode enabled. I did have a fan internally blowing towards the harddrives, but I guess that did not help, but the harddrives were somewhat stacked too close to each other (I would have to show a photo to understand that situation). This has never happened before in all those 15 years. Now I have to find my copy of the 2k install CD, heh. Please let me know if you need more details, thanks.
  3. Is that the RWIN value? How do I check the current rwin value my computer is set at?
  4. Thanks, I actually did change it to 1440 yesterday & I noticed a nice little improvement when it came to watching video streams, such as Youtube. Before, watching Youtube at 480p would freeze maybe every 5 to 10 seconds because my slow connection from a weak reception was trying to keep up. I would then always have to step down to 360p or 240p. Now at 1440, it's much smoother at 480p. I would not see short freezes for maybe until 30 seconds, or a minute or 2, or more, later. I would need more testing, but at the moment, I think I don't really have to, the eyeball results tell me something better is working at 1440. I believe the usb tether & wifi hotspot are throttled anyways by the phone service , so every little thing like adjusting the MTU can help it along the way. If I needed faster Internet, I would have to shell out even more money per month to the company, but my service is grandfathered from nearly 15 years ago, when we had slider phones, back when most of our service was 2G. But a couple years ago the phone company gave us a free offer & increased our Internet speed to 4G at no additional monthly cost. I think this meets our needs nicely in the middle, i.e. good usable highspeed internet at low monthly cost. My next attempt is to try to add more gain to the signal reception. I'm thinking either modifying the antenna in the smartphone, perhaps into some sort of biquad shape, or maybe build some some of cellphone inductive cradle booster, idk.
  5. Hi, not sure which category to post this in... I use USB tethering between my Motorola smartphone & laptop (Windows 7) for Internet. I am wondering if I could help optimize & speed up downloads/uploads by changing the MTU. I have 3 devices in Networking Connection on the laptop. I checked the current MTU of all 3 devices & they were all at 1500. I tested my highest MTU without fragmenting using PING & it would be 1440 with 0% loss. So I just changed one device to 1440 with TCP Optimizer (TCPO) & then rebooted & TCPO works, but I changed it on a device that is not connected. Before that, I tried using NETSH but it kept saying my syntax was invalid so I downloaded latest TCPO to change MTU. The device that seems to be the Tethering is currently called "Local Area Connection 2" under "Remote NDIS based Internet Sharing Device". The MTU for this is 1500. However, I am afraid to change that to 1440 yet as I am unfamiliar with any changes to the network parameters of tethering. Does anyone know if it's ok to change the MTU of this NDIS from 1500 to 1440? And if so, will it optimize the speed? Right now, tethering looks good, but my cell reception is not really good, so just wanting to see if mtu can help it just a little more if possible.
  6. Yeah, nah, that looks risky. It's puzzling why people would not like this feature. It would be nice if Microsoft had left it in. If you don't like it, click on Disable. If it looks like it's useable, Enable it. I'm sure it will work smoothly if you just keep getting the bugs out, just like the rest of the debugging with the rest of the operating system.
  7. I had asked the same question at the Ars forum (practically copied & pasted my original post from here) and got a couple of responses: https://arstechnica.com/civis/viewtopic.php?f=15&t=1413465 So, it looks like there really is nothing that can be done until Microsoft perhaps changes some of the Windows code. As I referenced in my first post above, the app TouchMousePointer is going to be the next closest thing, though I still haven't installed yet, because it's still not quite what I am looking for. It might be worth checking out eventually, but again I just know it's not exactly as functionally elegant and simple as what I've described originally. http://www.lovesummertrue.com/touchmousepointer/en-us/index.html
  8. Hey... would like to know when using a touchscreen (in Win10 or earlier versions) that the mouse pointer stays on all the time and visible. When I touch the screen with my finger/stylus, I would prefer the mouse pointer onscreen stays and shows right underneath my finger (no matter how fat your fingers are). And when I drag my finger on the screen, the mouse pointer should move along with it. The mousepointer is only visible when I move an attached mouse or when I use the touchpad. I looked in the Mouse/touchpad/touchscreen & Ease of access menus, but could not find anything about it. Am I looking in the wrong place or does it not exist? There is a 3rd party program I found called Touchmousepointer & this seems to be in the right direction of what I am looking for but I have not tried it yet. If any of you use those video rental kiosks, especially Redbox (in the USA), then you know what I am talking about when/where the mouse pointer on their touchscreen appears at the point where you touch the screen. Thanks. My specs: Nextbook Flexx 11A hybrid tablet-laptop (Atom x64 cpu) Windows 10 32-bit
  9. I too still use Opera 12.x, as I was on 12.16 for the longest time, until the 12.18 build came out last year. At least thankfully the Opera guys were still messing with 12.x to give us a new (and probably the last, finally) build of 12.18 when they were working on new Opera versions in parallel. So yes, there is "irony" at MSFN when this forum can't even be seen on all "old" browser versions when the majority of the forum content is about "old" Windows versions.
  10. Yes, I suppose workgroups. Yes, I assume it's the same as "ad hoc", but "peer to peer" (or P2P) seems like the older original naming for it. The IP address (at least in IPv4) across all computers are set up as the same except for the last part: 1.2.3.x. The subnet should be the same for all. Then in file explorer, you just map the drives so you can see a PC's drive contents (files/folders) from another PC, and so forth, as well as use the printers directly connected to another PC off another PC in the network. I recall doing a P2P network on XP with 9X a few years ago, but there was like some other things that I've forgotten (something about a logon with password crap, etc) that had to be done to get it to work, so that's why I'm asking if anyone's knows that there might be similar issues/hindrances with 7.
  11. How hard or easy would it be to configure a Win 7 (or 8 or 10) box into a peer to peer network so as to communicate with PC's that are Win 95 and/or 98(SE) that are also set up as P2P? I have an old (mid 1990's) 32-bit networked database program I use in 9x and wondering if that program can be installed on Win 7 and then used via P2P between all these PC's. I have not attempted anything yet as I don't want to mess anything up in Win 7. Or forget the database program for now, I will also be ok if I can just get P2P between 7 and 9x.
  12. Thanks I will try DeChk and TrID. I was being philosophical about whether to delete or convert to file the scandisk repair, because either way, I'm hosed. There is some urgency in trying to get this operating system back to normal as this is a PC that is used frequently. The question is whether I should proceed with the Scandisk repair and save the CHK file and then peruse it with DeChk and TrID. Will I find anything useful? While the operating system is working, I know it is going to freeze or hang or say something about a corrupted registry again, because of the parts on disk that are corrupted. When it freezes, there is this thin light green horizontal line below the active title bar. Hard to explain, you would have to see it. Scandisk shows that it "found 1261568 bytes in 3 lost file fragments". That is where I have stopped and the PC is turned off for now. Yes, the desktop is working, but as I said, once the O/S needs to run a particular file that is already corrupted, it will freeze. Or a small window will pop up at any time saying it found a corrupt registry and it needs to restart. I wish the O/S knew what system files are bad. There have been a couple times in the past where I've seen 98SE (and also in XP) where it tells you that it found bad system file and it overwrites the bad file with a good copy from some backup folder or something. Anyone know what I'm talking about? That would be one surgical skill needed in this scenario.
  13. Ok, I got my desktop back. Here is what I did... 1. Booted to command prompt (from 98 startup menu). 2. Backed up the registry cab files in win\sysbckup (as stated in my previous posts). 3. Renamed rb000.cab to rb000.bak (even tho I won't use Registry Checker). 4. Instead, I used Scanreg/restore . 5. Picked "rb005" cab in the list, which looked like the best cab as discussed earlier. 6. Rebooted, hoped, & prayed. 7. It booted all the way into Win 98SE desktop. Yay. But I'm not quite off the hook yet. I did a Scandisk (Windows version) & it found abount 1 megabyte of corruption. That might not seem like a lot, but this is 98se & this is only an 8 gb harddrive, so 1 mb could be any thing(s) important. I checked win\sysbckup and a new RB000.cab was created by Windows. I have not proceeded with the fix in Scandisk yet, so I ignored it for now and continued. Eventually I will have to either Delete it or Convert to file. WHICH ONE? Next, I will have to find (or buy) another hard drive and back (or clone?) this drive up, before things may head in the wrong direction (most likely due to the fix inside Scandisk). Anyone recommend a nice backup and/or cloning drive-to-drive software? Thanks to rloew for the help!
  14. Oh, looks like you posted a new reply (above) while I was editing my last post above. As my edit shows (last sentence), I just wanted to be sure whether I type SCANREG/RESTORE, or just SCANREG. I assume it is SCANREG/RESTORE as that goes directly to the restoration, while SCANREG itself will perform a regsitry scan, which is what we don't want. Again, just being anal-retentively careful and precise. Also, if the restoration is successful but I get a popup in Windows soon after saying to reboot to perform the registry checker, does that mean some other file(s) is messed up?
  15. That sucks! Ok I will rename RB000 first for now. I have copied all the contents of \sysbckup to a folder on drive D:, i.e. D:\sysbckup as further backup. As far as I recall, I started opening up the PC a few hours after 1:04pm as the RB005 timestamp shows. I am confused on which one you want me to do. In your first post you said to let the Checker do its work (after renaming the cab(s) and then cold rebooting). Here, you want me to use SCANREG. I have tested SCANREG/RESTORE and it runs and I do see those cabs listed, however I hit the cancel button instead of proceeding, as I am a scaredy cat, and rightfully so. I have no full backup of this harddisk. So with all that added commentary, please let me know again if I should use Scanreg/restore now instead of your original suggestion of the Registry Checker. I'm just really being careful here. Oh and if you want me to use SCANREG, do I specifically use SCANREG/RESTORE ? Or just SCANREG? I rarely use it so I don't know all what it does.
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