Miscellaneous > The Lounge
Multiboot machine?
Aloone_Jonez:
I'll keep your suggestions in mind but I'll concentrate on setting up the bare essentials first.
One thing I've rememberd about Windows 98 it it's nowhere near as stable as Linux or XP, in the final phase of the installation resulted in a BSOD but I rebooted and all was well and the install wasn't damaged due to this minor fuckup as it was only detecting the plug and play stuff which I've managed to configure manually
Just one observation about Windows 98, it's fucking fast at lots of things, it beats both XP and even Linux at somethings, like starting programs for example. I think this is because it's designed to run on old hardware and the crappy old DOS based kernel is very simple,it doesn't have to check permissions or anything, but it's really bad at multi-tasking and some operations like reading CDs are much slower, even though it has the same speed CD drive as my XP box.
I've had lot's of fun downloading and installing the video driver (640x480 was unbearable) which requied DirectX 8+ so I tried to download the latest version (9.0 if I remember) from the MS website but they wouldn't let me download it that would be far too simple. First I had to download a crappy little program to generate a key proving I haden't stolen XP. I entered it into a form on their site, then (to my horror) when I clicked the download button it didn't download the package but a shitty binary download and install program.
How the fuck was I supposed to download it burn it to CD and install on my doze 98 box?
Answer? Fuck it, I didn't bother, I downloaded a legacy DirectX 8.1 package from another site and installed it.
Anyway ranting aside (I hope I haven't bored you too much) I'm having problems with OpenOffice 2.0.1. The install seemed to go well but when I try to load it, it performs an illegal operation, wtf, I've re-installed it but it makes no difference?
Does anyone know how I can fix this?
cymon:
When I used 98, illegal errors were very common. It's pretty much unavoidable, just a price you pay.
worker201:
An illegal operation is when a program is trying to access more memory than Windows wants to give it. If the program can create a scratch or temp space, it will use that instead - that is why Illustrator and Photoshop almost never give this error. Otherwise, the program tries to steal some memory from Windows itself.
In Windows XP, the core OS is constantly on the lookout for a memory theif, and simply turns it away, and your computer goes into thrashing mode, which is basically an infinite loop where the program wants to take memory and Windows won't give it. When a program in XP is not responding, often, this is what has happened.
In Windows 98, Windows only checks its memory allocation sporadically, and sometimes a program can get in there and take some. Eventually, though, the core OS will catch on and kill the process responsible. Now, when I say core OS, I mean something like the kernel or IO system, because as we all know, Windows Explorer and the Desktop and IE can all pull illegal operations. Actually, IE was the king of illegal operations, in my experience.
Ways to fix this - get Linux :D
Seriously, though, the more memory you have to spare, the better. And set your paging file size correctly. Adobe recommends a min paging file size of (RAM/2)+12, and max size of 2*RAM. So for 512MB, that's 268 min and 1024 max.
Also, even more esoteric, you can adjust the memory allocation directly. One thing that you can do in the config.sys file and autoexec.bat file is allocate and deallocate low and hi memory. Fucking with this without knowing exactly what you're doing can screw things up bad, so I wouldn't recommend this until you've had read a whole book on DOS.
btw, this perspective of the "illegal operation" is childish and generalized - therefore, its only purpose is to illustrate concepts to people who aren't familiar with them. Anyone who already understands memory allocation procedures in Windows will probably find this version is ridiculously dumbed down.
Pathos:
Linux isn't as fast as win95 and 98.
I have a DSL frugal install and win2000 is just as fast, although that uses a compressed image (but I'm sure its faster compressed because the harddrive is so slow).
http://www.oldversion.com/ is a great site for restoring old copies of windows.
Aloone_Jonez:
Yes Windows 98 is faster, it boots faster and loads programs faster, but you pay for this with poorer secuity and stability.
Sorry I didn't give enough information:
Crashrep caused an invalid page fault in module kernel32.dll.
So it looks like OO had already crashed then crash recovery program failed.
Worker,
I can agree with you that this is a memory allocation but I strongly disagree that simply throughing memory at this will solve the problem. I have 256MB installed and this was a hell of a lot when Windows 98 was released when 64MB was typical for a reasonably good machine and I've installed OO 2.0 on a 64MB machine at college with no problems. Both of my systems are far from short of memory and just to prove you wrong I've disabled virtual memory on both of them and they still run smoothly. My XP machine will load OpenOffice 2.0.1 and I've also got Thunderbird and Opera running with five tabs open, and all is well it's only using 123MB - there's still another 133MB free (whoops I need to subtrach 8MB for my on-board graphics, well still 125MB free).
So if this isn't a low memory problem it must be a memory allocation problem which is due to Windows 98 being shit. I know the obvious solution is Linux or indeed even a Windows NT variant but that would be boring I want lot's of OSes and the beauty of Windows 98 is I can run all of my old DOS games and OpenOffice on one platform, if I can get the latter to install. I might try re-installing Windows 98, but I think I'll take this one to the OpenOffice forum first.
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