"Counselor" <counselor@geocities.com> wrote:
>You'll not tempt any criticism of Win98 out of me. In fact, I've
>found Win98 to be the most stable Windows OS yet. It's *way* better
>than Win 3.1 imho.
There are sure more features and I am generally happy with the way
it's supposed to work. But I am getting many screen freezes, invalid
page faults, illegal operations and the like. Sometimes I can
gracefully restart but more often it requires rebooting, meaning I'm
afraid to be doing more than one thing at a time because I lose
anything unsaved. I can't even remember the last time Win 3.11 crashed
on me.
>I currently run yarn in a DOS box under Win98 and send/receive packets
>using VSOUP95 which works great! You didn't tell us the speed of your
>processor, but since you said your pc is new, I will assume that it's
>probably fairly fast. When I first purchased my Pentium 2/350MHz
>machine, I was faced with many of the same problems you are
>describing. I learned that there is (or at least was) a bug in the
>Bohrland compiler which made programs using that compiler to not work
>on fast processors. This is certainly the case with yes.
I guess I've given up on Yes for the time being, and hope it will
someday be recompiled to work. My processor is a Celeron 333. And you
are right I think, I've been advised by another helpful person as
well, that the source of the problem is the fast processor.
>I also had trouble with my image viewer, although metamail still works
>for me and I'm able to detach attachments without problems. I have
>never implemented an html viewer, so I cannot say for sure, but I do
>know that a program called view will display html files and I've run
>it in a DOS box successfully.
I will tinker around with metamail some more, as it sounds as though
this *should* still operate. I'm still unclear about how the mailcaps
file would work calling a native Win98 application. I've been told to
call them with " START [options] [program] in a batch file, but
mailcap calls a program with parameter %s to pass the contents of the
currently viewed article to the program. Obviously it's time for me to
go out and buy some more books '-) For now, if there's encoded
material that I want to check, I will write the article to x.uue and
drop that on Winzip, and open whatever it is from there (other than
exe's or doc's of course).
>I believe you can launch a Windows application from your DOS box, but
>it will switch the task and you'll have to manually use ALT-TAB to
>switch back. That said, I found that Win98 comes with a pretty nifty
>little image viewer called kodakprv.exe which is located in your
>Windows directory. This program does not have a lot of features, but
>it works fine for viewing images. It's menu driven and can be set to
>view an image by setting it to its true size, fitting it to width or
>fitting it to height. The arrow keys will scroll through the zoomed
>image and the menus are accessible.
Yes this one seems like a good simple viewer. By the way, a nice fast
viewer/converter is IrfanView, which will also display gif animations,
step through all images in a directory, various "fit" options etc. It
can be driven almost exclusively with the keyboard too. I was
impressed. It's freeware to boot:
http://stud1.tuwien.ac.at/~e9227474/download.html
>Regarding the compiler bug, someone sent me a program which will patch
>some of the DOS executables with this bug in them and it worked for a
>couple of my programs. Unfortunately, it did not work with yes.
>Alas, I have had to give up using yes with yarn. But, don't blame
>Win98 for this -- it's actually the fault of your fast processor.
Have you found anything similar to take its place? I regularly used
the Yfolder program for neat and quick archiving of my World Tibet
Network newsletters - it will be time consuming to do them one at a
time with yarn's write/append procedure. Reorder can be done manually
within yarn (delete and re-insert in the newsgroups list window).
Adding taglines and sigs can also be done manually but it sure is nice
to have it integrated.
>I hope this information helps. If you want me to send you that patch
>program or if you have further questions, please don't hesitate to
>write back. Good luck and I hope you grow to enjoy Win98 as much as I
>do. :)
I hope I do as well. Eventually it will all be sorted out, but looking
into the Win98 discussion group the other day, I notice a lot of
others with the same sort of page fault, illegal operations warnings
and lockups that I'm experiencing. Wouldn't be such a big deal if one
could gracefully extract oneself from them, but more often than not I
will get frozen and the mouse can't move, the keyboard doesn't
function (the only combination it can understand is Ctl-Alt-Del -
would be nice to use Alt-Tab and Alt-F4), and so no way to kill the
offending process.
Thanks for offering to send the patch, but if it doesn't help Yes then
I imagine I wouldn't try to use it.
>"Happiness isn't getting what you want, but appreciating what you
>have."
Good advice. In the current case - I wanted a new computer, I got
Win98, and I'll do my best to appreciate it. '-)
Brian