As the NFL keeps trying to make itself a religion - Sunday is the 'fun day' - well, upgrades are always . . a fun day. This is what I mean. Windows 2000 and XP seemed interesting. I had both for some time, and never installed. I always . . feared the hassle of incompatibilities, time to fix, time to research, etc, etc. And my fear was in no way misplaced. Ultimately, I 'repaired' my fresh Windows 2000 install. That had been the subject of my last article. The 'repair' essentially removed most every setting and installation I'd had. Then I ultimately reformatted the drive and completely reinstalled Windows 2000. No matter what, by some point, the darned thing was crashing with 'memory' errors. But the memtest tool, run off of floppy, showed no memory errors.

Sometimes, a memory error doesn't mean there's an error in memory. The routines and libraries were calling the wrong thing. So I have it working. It's unstable. I still haven't figured out what's not working. But it mostly sort of works, and particularly for some key apps.

But I was ambitious. So, the heck with an obsolete Win2000, I said. NT 5. On to NT 5.1, XP. (I think with the bad publicity for Vista, Microsoft is eager to move on with Windows-7, but they are going to identify it as - NT 6.1 - NT, the OS that wouldn't die). It seemed outfits, now gone and orphaning their wares, were more eager to update for 98SE - a fairly successful operating system - than for Win2000 SP4. But XP? That's only recently been proposed for the orphanage by Microsoft. So, I thought it might be easier to find compatibility, the latest apps and drivers, and so on.

So, yet another drive, another format, and on went XP. Activation went fine - I'd heard horror stories. I had SP2 on a second disk, from Microsoft. But for all the downloaded updates, Microsoft didn't have the brains to update their "sfc /scannow" utility which was still looking at the original D: CD-ROM, and couldn't find the files it needed. I changed a registry entry from D: to C:, copied the whole bloomin i386 directory from the original XP disk, and sfc worked fine. But . . darned. Microsoft - pick up the ball. Get in the game. This was a known problem. People shouldn't have to spend time researching why they get a slew of error messages from sfc.

You get Windows - and you gotta become some insider Microsoft systems programmer! just to get the thing to run or update. What the . . ?

Microsoft should be paying its customers for being on staff.

So apart from some continuing problems with ASUS system-level drivers and both 2000 and XP, updates were going fine. And then I made the mistake of copying over an app that didn't require install. You just unpacked from zip, and ran the app. Guess what!

CRASH! BSOD! And the blue-screen disappeared so quickly on reboot that I can't even see what it says. Something cryptic, I'm sure. One has to get into the Control Panel, System, Advanced tab and the Startup/Recovery button to turn off, Auto Restart. And keep the dump 'small', because the 'full' memory dump takes a lot of time.

So, okay, I said. XP needs a specific install. It must be tracking the running apps, somehow, by internals, or id, or filesize, or something. But I clicked then on some old practically-DOS-era apps, just to see. And they booted up just fine. An old Spirograph app, a Japanese kaleidoscope pattern maker, and some other thing. But then I hit another of these and - CRASH, BSOD, reboot. No consistency.

Dang!

Oh well, I said, a lot of the other apps had installed. So I went to an old MIDI app, a really neat orphanware package that the author had sent me with his own id as registration. It was so old it was on floppy disk. So, ran the install on floppy and - that's right - CRASH, BSOD, reboot. The thing ran just fine in Win2000.

This XP was looking less and less stable all the while. And I'd already successfully run SP2.

Oh well, I said. I hadn't downloaded the latest from Microsoft. SURELY, that . . would go well. So the update site recommended SP3, which consisted of a bunch of updates, IE7, and Winplayer 11. Okay, I said. I'll run the updates unattended, and take a moment for a film - the Eastwood movie about the Asian gang and how 'real men talk', etc. I got back, saw my screen - virus. I thought - a virus! There were blocks of random junk on the screen. And the system appeared to be hung. Well, it wasn't. The system wasn't frozen. I was able to close out of IE. And I was able to shut down, after some delay.

But oh the wonder upon reboot. Immediately, chkdsk started to run. It said - you don't want to run? Press any key. I looked for the any key . . no, I pressed a whole bunch of keys. And sure enough, chkdsk ran. It's a Core 2 with a fast FSB on a 100MB partition. Fifteen minutes. No errors. Reboot.

Guess what - it runs chkdsk a second time. No errors. And up comes Win XP with a whole bunch of error messages. Suddenly, I don't have a pagefile in my root directory. And there were a bunch of other messages about some directory $MFT, I assume some temp directory. That wasn't on the disk. And neither was the pagefile.sys that I'd seen there in the root directory, before. I went to the Advanced tab from the System icon in the Control Panel. Pagefile is just the latest in the virtual memory gimic Windows has had since I used 3.1. There was a setting. I set it. But it just kept saying - 0 used. I set it again. Nothing.

So, going to my Microsoft cubicle - or should have been - I poured through the company documents as it were and discovered that this is just what happens when you allow Microsoft to automatically install ie7 on your brand new XP SP2. When they say - Microsoft IS . . a virus . . really, they're not kidding. Apparently, the problem has to do with a 'malware' update acting like a startup or boottime virus check. If not that, then some other app. Hijack This may have a bootup app, or maybe Sypbot, something like that. If XP was installed, and then SP2 installed from a separate Microsoft CD, it seems that you must either use the stand-alone ie7 or have to get Microsoft to send you the SP3 CD.

And it left quite a mess. One immediate step was to turn off file indexing. That took a while because Windows literally goes through every file on disk to turn this feature, or bug, on or off. By this time, copying over a lot of data, I had over 160 thousand files on the HD. That worked for a couple of boots. And then $MFT, where are you, messages started to show again. And pagefile, Windows just wouldn't create one. So - of course - uninstalled ie7. Boot, shutdown, boot, and there was pagefile, and no more mention of $MFT - just a real lasting fear of . . ie7, let me tell ya.

For both Win2000 and XP, by the way, I'd read to disable the messenger service. Guess what happens when you have new installations? You get bugged by one outfit selling - regnow. NEVER . . buy regnow. They seem to be the only outfit using Windows messenger, just to scare you. So, Administrator Tools, Services, and disable Messenger.

I did use HiJack This 2.0.2. It picked out, in Windows 2000 a day after fresh install, the wmnncs, worm. Spybot had no clue. And HiJack shut it down. The wmnncs grabbed control of the connection going out and just flooded different ip's with stuff to the point that I literally couldn't surf the web. I wish I'd figured it out, sooner. My computer sent out a lot of junk. I don't know how it got in there, so fast, so soon after a fresh installation, but it seems to often hide in the Fonts directory, which Microsoft in its wisdom displays differently than other directories, by showing only fonts. So it's easy to hide a file there, unless you boot from another drive and use the problem drive as a second drive, where you can see all the files. There was another that got flagged, algs. Still don't know about that, but it's gone. Again, this was just in the Win2000 install.

So, I got malwarebytes and discovered in a 'full scan' not a single problem in any file in Win XP. Seemed like a good time to set a System Restore point. So I created one.

And so it goes, as I work my up in the Microsoft corporation - so it seems. They should be paying me to use their products. I should be on staff for all the research one has to do just to install apps, particularly their own.

And chkdsk. Dang it all, Microsoft. If a person don't want to run this app, give people a way to escape out of it. Period! It takes forever to run. And for all the times it was run on this ie7 botch-job, it always showed the drive was just fine. Windows falsely setting the 'dirty' flag was the problem, not the drive.

Onward and upward. I hoping for a corner office. And I'll update with my latest 'training' in updates, as it goes.

Yes, I know. Windows 2000. Microsoft doesn't even support it - well, not entirely, anyway. It's ancient - though many still use it (and also server 2003). Browser stat sites warn of old browsers because people have good, useful but orphaned software that wasn't upgraded to the latest Microsoft OS. And Microsoft's latest browsers won't run on anything prior to XP SP2. Other browsers, like Firefox 3, require at least Win 2000 (W2k). Microsoft, until Vista, was batting strong in all innings, with the breakthrough Win3.1 and truetype, which made the company, to Win95 with its networking and a design and screen appearance that has essentially been unchanged through Vista, to Win98 with USB support and large disk FAT32 (long before large GB drives were available or affordable), to Win2K with the more stable but problematic file system (what software easily installed in Win98SE might be a nightmare in W2k), to XP which also turned out to be a solid OS. With Vista, it's really their NT 6 - version 6. And what version 6 of software is ever any good? Five is often the pinnacle ap. And seven takes customers to the 'whole new level'.

I had a machine that essentially blew itself up from the heat inside the box. Graphics card, perhaps. Now in the old days these cards had fans, but no fan monitors. This fan was on the 'underside' of the 'low-power' graphics card. And so visual inspection would have been difficult. And the destruction was revealed only by looking right at the card, itself. The fan looked like it was made of paper, it was so dried out. And that heat caused the motherboard's capacitors, essentially a bank of them hidden behind the large processor fan, to blow. There was melted white 'crust' everywhere, down in behind the fan case. Probably good riddance to a somewhat flaky Soyo board, at any rate. It was the ambitious Dragon 2 series, from years ago; sort of a 'combo' board. But it never quite took to some hardware, maybe even some software (I can't remember). And the SATA and RAID drivers were primitive and unreliable, being leading edge.

But some of the software which I religiously use had not been upgraded. The companies are long gone. Thus, orphanware, already mentioned. And a Win98SE dockable drive had been used for those. And sure enough, the new boards . . the new cards . . . which I bought to replace the crashed system didn't have USB drivers, or even video drivers, for Win98SE (arguably the crowning achievement of the Win3.1 line, as XP would be arguably for the NT line, so far). The one thing that made Win98 still useful was USB compatibility, and USB 2.0 compatibility with one of Microsoft's last SE upgrades. So now it turned out that if one wanted to use readily available motherboards, say from Fry's, instead of waiting on mail order two weeks before Christmas, one could get a fairly old NVidia 6200 video card. That would be XP compatible. And it was the last NVidia for which there were also downloadable drivers for Win98. I considered it. But I'm glad I went with something built later. Because when I attempted a fresh installation of Win98SE on the new hardware, it just wouldn't take, likely some system level stuff in the installation with which the newer BIOS and chipsets are simply not compatible. [Fortunately, Microsoft released its Virtual PC for free, which it originally purchased from Connectrix (I believe) to compete with VM Ware. Problem there, VPC can't connect with some native hardware, particularly sound cards. And I needed those sythesizer sounds/patches, not whatever I could install as a 'virtual synth'.]

I decided to install an old W2k that I had never quite gotten to, back when. It would be marginally safer and more robust than Win98SE (I was hoping). Some of the old software had NT drivers. W2K is really NT 5, just like XP is really a version of NT (though what runs in W2k, may not - in XP). But I thought, perhaps 2000 would be just good enough, and close enough in time to the old software that it just might work. For some aps that was true. Yes, the NFTS file system is different. But W2k can also read FAT file systems, such as that on the old Win98 program and data drives. So. And some of the libraries/dlls even might be the same.

Now, I had first attempted this feat with a Gigabyle S-Series board, with 'double'-BIOS and 'guaranteed' robust performance, etc. Unfortunately, the BIOS or other chips seemed so geared toward Vista, in particular, that some of the old drives just weren't being recognized. Even a test run at installing a fresh XP crashed. None of the OS would get past the boot-to-disk phase. I called the Gigabyte support line, and got a tech with a thick Asian accent, almost a parody I thought, whose sole advice was - try different drives, try different cables, try different motherboard connections/channels. And I said to myself, maybe I should try another board.

So back went the Gigabyte. And I wanted a tried and true, branded name. This time - Asus. And Asus sells an almost innumerable series of P5 boards. This was the P5QC, a 'combo board', and a fairly recent 775 pin socket model (Intel's next 'upgrade' processor is supposed to have double the number - I guess Moore's law now applies to socket pins?). Lots of MBs with P5 in the name. So the connectors looked funny on my new Antec 'quiet' power supply. There was a four-pin for 12v power. Typical for ATX. And the board had an eight-pin, with a plastic cap over four. Nonetheless, the manual only spoke of an eight-pin connector. So I called the support line. Got a guy who spoke perfect English, who said the eight-pin would be needed for some overclocked, high-power set-up with a 'hot' video card. And some cards do have these four pin connectors (some have two such connectors). Otherwise - furget  . . etc. Clear, to the point. Booted up the OS. This time, copies from CD to HD, and now itbooted right off the HD. So the hardware bolted together easily, as they all do, these days (in the old days, there were - lots of wires). There still was the problem of no three wire connector for the power supply fan (not to run it, but to monitor it). And in fact, I used the thin SATA cables, just for better airflow, on two separate master - IDE - drives. PATA drives. There's a converter card/clip available, an adapter, SATA-cable to IDE connector. Retail, 20 bucks. Obviously, it's for slow ATA 100/133 IDE, now called, PATA, drives. But these worked fine with those drives and the ASUS P5QC. I even asked the tech guy about it in that same call. And he said we use those connectors/converters ourselves here at ASUS (pronounced - ay-SOOSE). You need two power supply connections into these clips, one for the IDE device, and a SATA power connection for the adapter itself (which is the same connector as for the old 3.5 floppy drives). And SATA or PATA in this way, one doesn't need worry about master/slave setups, anymore, since the newer boards have six or more SATA connectors. You can have six master drives (shunted as master drive on the HD itself), and the board will boot the first in order with an OS. Simple. So if you want to share data, one just puts the bootable data drive in a higher numbered bay. The lower numbered drive is the one that boots. And if one wants to boot the data drive, just switch off whatever is above it. When done, run them both again and the other OS can read whatever work you completed in the data drive. The reason for two is to have to OS. Virtual PCs are great. But there are limitations. To avoid those, you need an OS actually installed on a HD, and on the particular hardware.

But once the hardware ceased to be an issue, then came what I feared - installing a MIcrosoft OS. W2k isn't quite unsupported, just yet. You can download the patch, SPx, etc. But it's quickly going to be unsupported. Nonetheless, I downloaded the 'network'/download SP4. There's a smaller 'express'/user version of this. And you can also get a CD version, perhaps still. Now apparently Windows 2000 is pretty much useless without an SP2 upgrade, then SP3. And Adobe wouldn't launch without SP4. Even the ASUS board drivers wouldn't launch without some upgrade. So I downloaded SP4 straight off.

So fresh drive, newly partitioned and formatted by the W2k setup from CD. And in went the OS. Then the video driver. I quickly set up the 'appearence' and a tiled background I still use from Win95 or 98, namely the 'forest.bmp'. So I got the resolution and menu and font appearance to that which I was accustomed (I like the 1280 x 1024 for the still square graphics monitor I use, instead of the wide-style LCDs now being sold). I added some one or two key startup menu items. I installed a few software items. Firefox went in and then I downloaded the final upgrade for version 2. Version 3 also runs on W2k, and alongside 2 by loading specific profiles. And I had the latest Opera, as well. But I wondered if their installation with the latest Windows installer hadn't partly caused previous problems. So I'd hold off on that. I could 'surf' the web with FF3.

And then it was on to upgrading the ancient, and almost unusable IE 5.0 to a version 6, SP1. W2k shipped with IE 5.0. Oddly, some few people still report this at browser stat sites. But the upgrade 5.5 was marginal, and very good for its day. Even IE 6 SP1 is getting to be ancient, and to be fair, though again in late 2008 IE 6 still accounts for maybe 15-25% of browser usage, depending on what stat site one cites. It's still handy to check this version, even today. And I made a mistake. I left two drives up and running, the new W2k and a data drive, when installing this system software. Pretty soon, I think, the OS started linking between the two HDs. And sure enough, IE 5 would not upgrade. A message insisted, another 'upgrade' was in process. But shut down and restart as I would, I still couldn't upgrade. Bad to worse. I tried the SP4. It began installation just fine. After checking system 'contents', it crashed after giving a message - the installer INSIDE the package was not properly digitally signed by Microsoft (I believe the 'signature' is held in a similarly named 'cat' file, same directory). It was most likely a spurious message. But whether for that reason, or something that quickly followed, the software must have assumed this, or assumed that, and the assumption wasn't met. Search as I might, there were no satisfactory answers for any of this on the web. And I think, ultimately, that the problem was that with two drives up at the time of system upgrade, that the upgrade got 'greedy' and tried to affect both drives, messing up the OS, itself, in the process. At this point, software that previously installed just fine was choking on 'can't install' messages. Things had gone badly.

So since the new drive had information entirely copied from the other, now reduced to just a data drive, the only information to be lost in a reinstallation would be a handful of drivers I'd downloaded. So I just reformatted the drive, removing the temptation of the OS to try to incorporate INFs or registry settings already on the drive. This time, it went smoothly. There were no installation glitches. The 'digitally signed' nonsense never appeared with SP4. And once SP4 went in, suddenly other software seemed to suddenly again 'like' W2k, including Microsoft's own apps.

So, if anyone has attempted this, again for the purpose of trying to run good, but orphaned, software that may have had NT or specific 2000 drivers, but which may not work in XP or Vista, then any of this might prove interesting.