Taming Windows 95/98/98SE/ME Out of Memory Errors

Taming Windows 95/98/98SE/ME Out of Memory Errors

The symptom: If you install more than 512 MB of RAM in a system running Windows 9x (that’s any version of Windows 95, 98, 98SE, or ME), you get weird out of memory errors. Here’s how to get around those memory limitations to make Windows 95 and Windows 98 work with 2 GB of RAM.

The culprit is a bug in Windows 9x’s disk cache. The solution is to limit the cache to use 512MB of memory, or less, which is a good thing to do anyway.

Read more

Why my ramdisk techniques don’t work with XP

I got a question today in a roundabout way asking about ramdisks in Windows, specifically, where to find my instructions for loading Win98 into a ramdisk, and how to do the same in XP.
I haven’t thought about any of this kind of stuff for more than two years. It seems like two lifetimes.

The original instructions appeared in my book, Optimizing Windows (now in the half-price bin at Amazon.com), and instructions to use DriveSpace to compress the disk appear here. You can get the freeware xmsdisk utility this trick requires from simtel.

These techniques absolutely do not work with Windows NT4, 2000, or XP. Despite the similar name, Windows NT/2000/XP are very different operating systems than Windows 9x. Believe it or not, they’re much more closely related to IBM’s OS/2 than they are to Windows 98. Since there is no DOS laying underneath it all, there’s no easy way to do the trickery that the bootable ramdisk tricks use. What these two tricks do is literally intercept the boot process, copy Windows into the ramdisk, then continue booting.

There’s a $99 piece of software called SuperSpeed that gives the NT-based operating systems this capability. I haven’t used it. I imagine it works using the same principle, hooking into the boot process and moving stuff around before booting continues.

The downside, no matter what OS you use, is the boot time. XP boots in seconds, and my book talks about the trickery necessary to get 95 and 98 to boot in 30 seconds or less. But any time you’re moving a few hundred megs or–yikes–a gig or two of data off a disk into a ramdisk, the boot process is going to end up taking minutes instead.

Is it worth it? For some people, yes. It’s nice to have applications load instantly. A lot of things aren’t CPU intensive. You spend more time waiting for your productivity apps to load than you do waiting for them to do anything. Web browsing and e-mail are generally more bandwidth- and disk-intensive than they are CPU-intensive (although CSS seems determined to change that).

But a lot of games aren’t especially disk-intensive, with the possible exception of when they’re loading a new level. So loading the flavor-of-the-week FPS game into a ramdisk isn’t going to speed it up very much.

Of course, XP is far, far more stable than 98. Windows 9x’s lack of stability absolutely drives me up the wall, and for that matter, I don’t think 2000 or XP are as stable as they should be. Given the choice between XP or 98 in a ramdisk, I’d go for XP, with or without speedup utilities.

I’ve made my choice. As I write, I’m sitting in front of a laptop running 2000 (it’s VPNed into work so I can keep an eye on tape backup jobs) and a desktop PC running Linux. I have a 400 MHz Celeron with Windows 98 on it, but it’s the last Win9x box I have (I think I had 4 at one point when I was writing the aforementioned book). Sometimes I use it to play Baseball Mogul and Railroad Tycoon. Right now it doesn’t even have a keyboard or monitor connected to it.

I guess in a way it feels like hypocrisy, but I wrote the first couple of chapters of that book with a word processor running in Red Hat Linux 5.2 (much to my editor’s chagrin), so I started down that path a long, long time ago.

The worm that’s not a worm

I got mail at work today. The subject:
David you have an e-card from Alex.

Well, about the only person I know who calls me David is my mom. And I don’t know anybody named Alex. And why would a guy be sending me an e-card? Not wanting to explore that possibility any further, I disregarded it.

Then I remembered reading about something like that somewhere, so I went back and looked at it.

Short story: A really sleazy e-card company is sending out e-mail containing nothing but an URL at friendgreetings.com, which sends down ActiveX controls and installs some spyware that, among other things, sends bogus cards to everyone in your Outlook address book. That’s where I got that e-card message from. I was in this guy’s address book, for whatever reason. (Turns out he’s the webmaster at work. Funny how the webmaster and the hostmaster can go for long periods of time and never meet, eh?)

Officially, this isn’t a virus or a worm because it’s a company doing this crap, rather than a bored loser who lives in his parents’ basement and you have to click on an EULA (which most people do blindly anyway) for it to activate. I fail to see the difference, but I guess I’m weird that way.

I originally wrote that the anti-virus makers didn’t consider this a worm, but Symantec seems to have relented. You can get a removal tool at Symantec’s site.

If you want to protect yourself pre-emptively, locate your hosts file (in C:\winnt\system32\drivers\etc on NT/2000/XP; I’m wanting to say it’s in C:\Windows\System on Win9x; on most Unix systems it’s in /etc, not that it matters since this not-a-worm runs on Windows) and add the following entry:

127.0.0.1 www.friendgreetings.com

More cleanly, you can ask your network admins really nicely if they can block friendgreetings.com at the firewall or DNS level.

If you have inadvertently unleashed this monster, first, close Outlook immediately. Normally, I’d advise getting right with everyone else before cleaning things up, but since there’s the risk of making things worse if you do it that way, clean house, then start apologizing.

Next, download the removal tool.

If you want to be really safe, go into the control panel and remove anything that appears to have anything to do with friendgreetings.com. Next, I’d go to www.cognitronix.com and download Active Xcavator and remove anything having to do with friendgreetings.com. Next, I’d head over to LavaSoft and download Ad-Aware and let it shoot anything that moves.

Next, apologize profusely to the guy who runs your mail server (ours got clogged up for hours processing all the mail from not-our-friendgreetings.com) and to everyone in your address book. I can’t offer you any advice on the best way to do that. Except I’d use something other than Outlook to do it. Head over to TinyApps.org to find yourself a small freeware mail client. Assuming you’re not on an Exchange server, I’d suggest pulling the network plug before firing up Outlook again to get those e-mail addresses.

Meanwhile, it would do no good whatsoever if everyone who’s gotten one of these annoying e-cards (whether they opened it or not) opened a command prompt and typed ping -t www.friendgreetings.com and left it running indefinitely. No good whatsoever. It’s still a distributed denial of service attack if all of the participants participate voluntarily and independently. Right?

What can I say about Tuesday…?

Photography. Tom sent me links to the pictures he took on the roof of Gentry’s Landing a couple of weeks ago. He’s got a shot of downtown, the dome, and the warehouse district, flanked by I-70 on the west and the Mississippi River on the east.
I’m tired. I spent yesterday fighting Mac OS X for a couple of hours. It still feels like beta software. I installed it on a new dual-processor G4/533 with 384 MB RAM, and it took four installation attempts to get one that worked right. Two attempts just flat-out failed, and the installation said so. A third attempt appeared successful, but it felt like Windows 95 on a 16-MHz 386SX with 4 megs of RAM. We’re talking a boot time measured in minutes here. The final attempt was successful and it booted in a reasonable time frame–not as fast as Windows 2000 on similar hardware and nowhere near the 22 seconds I can make Win9x boot in, but faster, I think, than OS 9.1 would boot on the same hardware–and the software ran, but it was sluggish. All the eye candy certainly wasn’t helping. Scrolling around was really fast, but window-resizing was really clunky, and the zooming windows and the menus that literally did drop down from somewhere really got on my nerves.

All told, I’m pretty sure my dual Celeron-500 running Linux would feel faster. Well, I know it’d be faster because I’d put a minimalist GUI on it and I’d run a lot of text apps. But I suspect even if I used a hog of a user interface like Enlightenment, it would still fare reasonably well in comparison.

I will grant that the onscreen display is gorgeous. I’m not talking the eye candy and transparency effects, I’m talking the fonts. They’re all exceptionally crisp, like you’d expect on paper. Windows, even with font smoothing, can’t match it. I haven’t seen Linux with font smoothing. But Linux’s font handling up until recently was hideous.

It’s promising, but definitely not ready for prime time. There are few enough native apps for it that it probably doesn’t matter much anyway.

Admittedly, I had low expectations. About a year ago, someone said something to me about OS X, half in jest, and I muttered back, “If anyone can ruin Unix, it’s Apple.” Well, “ruin” is an awfully harsh word, because it does work, but I suspect a lot of people won’t have the patience to stick with it long enough to get it working, and they may not be willing to take the extreme measures I ultimately took, which was to completely reformat the drive to give it a totally clean slate to work from.

OS X may prove yet to be worth the wait, but anyone who thinks the long wait is over is smoking crack.

Frankly, I don’t know why they didn’t just compile NeXTStep on PowerPC, slap in a Mac OS classic emulation layer, leave the user interface alone (what they have now is an odd hybrid of the NeXT and Mac interfaces that just feels really weird, even to someone like me who’s spent a fair amount of time using both), and release it three years ago.

But there are a lot of things I don’t know.

I spent the rest of the day fighting Linux boot disks. I wanted the Linux equivalent of a DOS boot disk with Ghost on it. Creating one from scratch proved almost impossible for me, so I opted instead to modify an existing one. The disks provided at partimage.org were adequate except they lacked sfdisk for dumping and recreating partition tables. (See Friday if you don’t have the foggiest idea what I’m talking about right about now, funk soul brother.) I dumped the root filesystem to the HD by booting off the two-disk set, mounting the hard drive (mount -t ext2 /dev/hda1 /mnt) and copying each directory (cp -a [directory name] [destination]). Then I made modifications. But nothing would fit, until I discovered the -a switch. The vanilla cp command had been expanding out all the symlinks, bloating the filesystem to a wretched 10 megs. It should have been closer to 4 uncompressed, 1.4 megs compressed. Finally I got what I needed in there and copied it to a ramdisk in preparation for dumping it to a floppy. (You’ve gotta compress it first and make sure it’ll fit.) I think the command was dd if=/dev/ram0 bs=1k | gzip -v9 > [temporary file]. The size was 1.41 MB. Excellent. Dump it to floppy: dd if=[same temporary file from before] of=/dev/fd0 bs=1k

And that’s why my mind feels fried right now. Hours of keeping weird commands like that straight will do it to you. I understand the principles, but the important thing is getting the specifics right.

Secrets about hard drive recovery and wiping

Recovery. I found this link while messing around: 200 ways to revive a dead hard drive. I’ve used some of these methods myself in the past. I imagine I’ll get to use more of them in the future.

Wiping. I needed a program yesterday to securely wipe out a hard drive. I was just going to low-level format it, but Western Digital’s drive suite, whatever it’s called, refused to do anything to the drive because it was returning an error code of 0207. The drive still worked, but according to my Web search, an 0207 means imminent failure. Hey, that’s why I needed to low-level the drive–we got a replacement for it and had to send this one back, but the drive was in an executive’s computer and probably had sensitive data on it.

Incidentally, if you’re getting an 0207 and you’re here because you want to know what to do about it, back up your data immediately and get it replaced under warranty. No, it’s not practical to fix it. If it’s out of warranty, I’m sorry. Sadly, it happens.

But I digress. How do you wipe the drive to ensure no one’s reading your sensitive data? I found some DOS freeware to do it at my usual sources, but one of them wouldn’t run under Win9x’s DOS, and the drive is too big to be recognized under 6.22. Another one wouldn’t handle drives bigger than 2 gig. Another one seemed to work, but seemed awfully fast.

Disk wiping isn’t a terribly complicated thing, so maybe I should just write a program myself to do it. It’s been forever since I programmed, and I do kind of enjoy doing that… once a year. Or every couple of years.

The search for the compressed ramdisk is over!

Things that make you go… D’OH! I spent, as I’ve said a number of times before, the better part of a weekend trying to figure out how to run Windows from a ramdisk. I figured I couldn’t have been the first to do such a thing, but I couldn’t find any reference online to anyone who had. After a weekend of turning some hair gray, I got it working on my own.

Then I set out to compress my ramdisk. Disk compression makes sense when disk space is expensive, and RAM is comparatively expensive, and even if disk compression slows it down by 100%, compressed RAM is still many orders of magnitude faster than a metal disk. I couldn’t get it working. I didn’t say it was impossible, because I’ll never write anything off as impossible, but I said I couldn’t get it working. I figured that’d be the last I’d hear of it.

Then over the weekend, Tony Brewer, a reader of the Optimizing Windows, wrote in, quoted that paragraph verbatim and casually said, “It’s most definitely possible.” I was flabbergasted. Had he done it? I wrote back and asked if he’d done it and if he’d be willing to share the secret.

Indeed he had, and he was kind enough to share the secret. It turns out I was very, very close to getting it working. But close is only good enough in nuclear war, not computers.

Here’s what he had to say:

Dave,

There is an elegant and simple method for running Win9x on a compressed RAM disk. Assuming that Win9x is already installed on C: and using the same drive letters as in Chapter 11 of your book:

Run DriveSpace in Windows to create an empty compressed drive E: of the desired size using free space on C:, re-boot, then install Win9x to E:windows (with the swap file on C:). Edit c:\msdos.sys, c:\config.sys and c:\autoexec.bat as follows:

c:msdos.sys
——————
[Paths]WinDir=e:\windows
WinBootDir=e:\windows
HostWinBootDrv=c

c:\config.sys
—————–
device=c:\windows\himem.sys
device=c:\windows\emm386.exe    ;or use umbpci.sys
dos=high,umb
devicehigh=c:\windows\ifshlp.sys
devicehigh=c:\windows\setver.exe

c:\autoexec.bat
———————

path=e:\windows;e:\windows\command;e:\windows\system
set temp=c:\ temp
set tmp=c:\temp
….

After re-booting, Win9x should run on the compressed drive E:, hosted by physical disk C:. To have a compressed RAM disk, the host must be an uncompressed RAM disk, D: for example. In c:d??space.ini (c:dblspace.ini or c:drvspace.ini, probably the former), change the ActivateDrive setting to read:

ActivateDrive=E,D1

This tells the DriveSpace driver to mount the compressed volume file (CVF) d??space.001 as drive E: with host drive D:. (Mounting is not automatic as it was with host drive C:, because RAM disk D: does not exist when io.sys loads the DriveSpace driver, dblspace.bin or drvspace.bin.)

Edit c:\autoexec.bat so that it contains the following:


path=c:\windows;c:\windows\command;c:\windows\system
REM Create RAM disk
xmsdsk {desired size of RAM disk in kilobytes} d: /t /y
REM Copy CVF to RAM disk
attrib c:\drvspace.001 -s -h -r
copy c:\drvspace.001 d:\
attrib c:\drvspace.001 +s +h +r
attrib d:\drvspace.001 +s +h +r
REM Mount CVF using scandisk /mount
scandisk /mount d:\drvspace.001
REM E: is now compressed RAM disk
path=e:\windows;e:\windows\command;e:\windows\system
set temp=c:\temp
set tmp=c:\temp

After re-booting, Win9x should run on the compressed RAM disk! :o)

(On a networked PC, there is no need for a hard disk as the CVF can be copied from a server. Diskless Win9x using a compressed RAM disk works very well.)

The above method is an adaptation of one by Andre Moreira. http://www.dei.isep.ipp.pt/~andre/extern/nc98.htm

Regards,

Tony Brewer
tonybrewer@bigDELETEfoot.com

With some thought, I may be able to simplify it a little, but not by much. The obvious simplification would be to use the free-for-private-use xxcopy to copy drvspace.001 in a single step, saving all those attrib lines in autoexec.bat.

This shows a lot of promise. Memory’s so cheap right now that it’s feasible to get 384 megs, leave yourself with 64 or even 128 megs of working memory, and still have a decent-sized ramdisk. Windows 95 will install to as little as 17 MB, if you know the secrets. Windows 98 is considerably larger but it’s still possible to stuff Win98 and a couple of apps into a compressed 256 MB disk, and it’s super fast. Even with disk compression, access to a compressed ramdrive is nearly instant. I did get compressed ramdrives working inside Windows (I just couldn’t boot from them) and even on my Pentium-90 a compressed ramdisk was fast. So if you want maximum speed, this is the way. And I’m wondering what this would do for a laptop’s battery life…

I’m really eager to give this a test drive.

Update: The following doesn’t seem to work with the original Windows 95 or Windows 95A. This may explain the difficulty I had initially, because I was using the Aug. 24, 1995 release of Win95 because of its small size (I was using a P90 with 48 MB RAM at the time).

I’m going to try to test it with Win98 this afternoon. I’d rate the chances of it working with Win95B higher than with Win95A but not necessarily as high as with Win98.

Update 2: Indeed, it does work with Win98 (original, I haven’t tested 98SE yet) with the instructions as written. The only caveats: Be sure to double check c:\config.sys, c:\autoexec.bat, and c:\dblspace.ini every step of the way. Windows setup has a tendency to modify their contents without warning, so you can get complaints of missing files when it goes to look for them on a not-yet-existing ramdrive.

Also, Fat32 and DriveSpace are incompatible, so you have to do your initial build on a Fat16 drive.

And for maximum speed, be sure to defrag the compressed volume before booting it into RAM. Sure, ramdisks are invulnerable to the mechanical effects of fragmentation, but the data structures are fragmented too, which slows things down even when no mechanical parts are involved.

How fast is it? I tested it on a Pentium-200 with the Intel VX chipset with 160 MB RAM. I set up a 128-meg ramdisk with a compressed drive using 127 megs total. The system boots in a little over a minute. IE4.0 loads in literally a second. Word 97 loads in two. Not bad for a system that’s suddenly found itself with only 32 MB RAM to work with.

Obsolescence is obsolete.

12/24/2000

~Mail follows today’s post~

Last night, I sent myself hurtling 120 miles at 75 MPH to Columbia, Mo. My mom lives there, and my alma mater, the University of Missouri, is also there. Today, after morning services, I’m headed another 120 miles to Kansas City, where most of my mom’s family lives. I don’t get back there very often, so I’m looking forward to it.

I’ve got some stuff to write, but I’ll be late for services if I do, so it’ll have to wait.
~~~~~~~~~~
From: “Lawrence Kim” <lykim@nospam.telusplanet.net>
Subject: A loyal reader w/a technical question

Dear Dave: I have a few questions, well, maybe just one, related to your book.  When you do a clean install of W98SE on a partitioned drive, if you wipe C: (where W98 is), how do you get the other programs on the other drives to run again?  Especially if you’ve wiped all the .dll files and other important stuff?  Secondly, what’s a good and fast way not to have to reload all the programs again if you wipe & reinstall W98?  If I used Drive Image 4.0 or a tool like that (or maybe even Norton Ghost), how do you copy images of your drive back onto your computer?  Lastly, what’s the best way to optimize your ADSL/highspeed Internet connection?  I’ve been using this program called NetSuperSonic which is supposed to adjust certain registry settings in Windows to optimize it for broadband use.  It seems to work pretty good, but I was wondering if you would have some other suggestions.  That’s pretty much everything.  Oh yeah, are you going to come out with a new, updated book?  I don’t know, just thought that I would ask. That’s for writing the book; it’s been extremely helpful.

Cheers.

~~~~~

I think that’s actually more than one question, but that’s ok of course.

The idea of a clean install is to start over, which of course means reinstalling everything. Reinstalling everything takes time, of course, but the benefit is that you’re rid of all those old, no-longer-in-use DLLs and other leftovers that hang around after you uninstall programs. You’ve also got fresh copies of everything and a brand-new registry, which is good because registries get corrupt and so can DLLs and even programs. The result is a faster, more stable system.

But if you’ve lost the installation files for some of your programs, you’ve got a problem. You can use CleanSweep or Uninstaller to package up the program, DLLs, and its registry entries for re-installation, but be sure to test the package on another PC before you wipe, because these don’t always work.

Ghost or Drive Image aren’t a clean install per se, because they preserve everything. Generally the way I save and restore images is to a network drive, or in the case of a standalone PC, to an extra partition or, better yet, a second hard drive. You can also span an image to multiple Zip, Jaz, or Orb disks but that’s slower and more cumbersome. These programs are absolutely invaluable for disaster recovery, but as optimization tools in their own right, their benefit is very limited.

If NetSupersonic checks your MTU and adjusts it properly (many of those utilities don’t), that’s a great start. You can measure your speed by going to http://www.pcpitstop.com/internetcenter.asp, and they have some suggestions on the site for fixing sub-optimal perfomance. Ad-blocking software will speed you up as much as anything else you can do, and FastNet99 (mentioned in the book) is also useful by reducing the number of DNS lookups you have to do (I accomplished the same thing by connecting my DSL modem to a Linux box running its own DNS, which I then used to share my DSL out to my Windows PCs).

As for an updated book, I imagine not doing one would probably kill me. But publishers are understandably hesitant to do one right now, since no one seems to know what Microsoft will do next. Is Windows Me really the end? Is Windows 2000’s successor really going to be suitable for home use? When will Microsoft manage to deliver another OS? No publisher wants to invest tens of thousands of dollars in producing a book only to find out they guessed wrong. Once there are answers to those questions, it’ll be time to write a new book. In the meantime, I’m writing magazine articles (there’s very little new in the article at www.computershopper.co.uk this month; there are a couple of new tricks in the article for February, and the article for March is almost entirely new stuff) and posting new tricks to my own site as I find them or think of them. So the answer to your question is, “probably,” but I can’t give you any kind of time frame.

Hopefully that answers your questions. If not, feel free to write back.

~~~~~~~~~~

From: “Lawrence Kim” <lykim@nospam.telusplanet.net>
Subject: Drive Image Pt. 2
However, IF I were to reinstall everything, erase my game drive, utility drive, and C: drive, reinstall W98SE, all my programs, and THEN take an image of my C drive after my brand new clean install, theoretically I shouldn’t have to ever reinstall everything again (unless I add new programs or whatnot) because the image I have taken of my C drive will be a nice, squeaky clean one, right?

How do you spell “segway?” as in, linking two opposite ideas together?

Finally, do you think it’s worth picking up Norton Systemworks 2001 when I have 2000?

Thanx again.
~~~~~

You are correct about imaging a fresh install. That’s the way we handle systems at work (my job would be impossible otherwise, as many systems and as few techs as we have). It’s nice to be able to restore to pristine condition in 15 minutes instead of 6 hours.

The word segue is pronounced “Segway.” I think that’s the word you’re looking for.

The biggest new feature of Systemworks 2001 is Windows 2000 and Windows Me compatibility. If neither of those matter to you, stick with what you have.

~~~~~~~~~~

From: “John Doucette” <jdoucett@nospam.gienow.com>
Subject: windows memory use

Hi Dave

We have several high end Pentiums at work running Windows 98. These PC’s have 512 MB of Ram and run what I am told is a very resource intensive C+ program. Now I have not myself touched these machines yet and likely won’t as what is not apparently broken they will not likely let me fix (some might say break).

Now no work was done to the best of my knowledge to try and tune these PC’s. They merely installed Ram and ran the program till performance seemed to hit the ceiling.

Now I have always thought that Windows 9x would not perform any better with more than 128 MB of Ram. I think that if given the opportunity I could down grade these PC’s to 128 MB of Ram, tune them and get the same performance.
I would then have Ram to use were it could be of value.

I am curious with all your Windows tuning experience and some programming knowledge if I am pissing in the wind, or if you think that the PC’s would likely run the C+ program well with less Ram.

John

~~~~~

If the program really needs that kind of memory, they have no business running it on 98. They should be running on NT. Win98 definitely gives diminishing returns after 128MB; you see some improvement but not much. I don’t remember what the maximum memory for 9x is; it may be 512 or it may be 768, but you’ll get to a point where if you don’t specify a limit in the vcache section of system.ini, Windows won’t boot because the disk cache can’t handle that much memory and will crash. That may be the ceiling they hit.

I seriously doubt that program runs demonstrably better in 512MB than it would in 128 with some optimization. I’d set some parameters on the disk cache, optimize the hard disk(s), cut everything possible out of startup, kill anything cutesie the PCs are running, and add the line ConservativeSwapFileUsage=1 to the [386Enh] section of system.ini. I’d also use 98lite’s IEradicator to pull IE if they don’t need a Web browser–that increases system performance across the board by a good 15-30 percent. If the program’s really a resource hog, I could justify 256, but really I’ve yet to see a Win9x PC that truly benefitted from having more than 96 MB of RAM. It just makes more sense to by a 128MB stick than a 64 and a 32.

I’d say take one of the PCs, make a Ghost image of it so you can bring it back to the original, then pull 384 megs and optimize the sucker. I’m betting it’d make a huge difference. (And I’d love to hear the results.)

~~~~~~~~~~

From: Edwards, Bruce
Subject: Internet Connection Sharing

Good morning Dave:

I posted this over on the hardwareguys.com forum about internet conneciton sharing, where you kindly gave me a suggestion that helped a lot.  🙂

———————–

Hi Dave and other interested persons/Linux gurus:

Your suggestion about the gateway was part of what I needed, thank you.  In addition to not having the gateway defined on my internal Windows 98 client, I also needed to put the DNS server IP addresses on the clients in the TCP/IP configuration.  I was assuming it would get the DNS info from the Sharethe net gateway, where the DNS server is also defined.  Silly me!  There looks like there is both good news and bad news.  First the good news:

Once I was able to get it working, on the same hardware as the Wingate solution, my aDSL performance doubled!  

From the DSLReport.com scan I received this:
TCP port 53 is OPEN

GRC.com reported all ports (scanned for) were closed.

With port 53 open, I will be running the Wingate solution until I get some feedback or more info about what to do.  There is probably some bad vulnerability somewhere.  I still have not looked through the SharetheNet information I have enough to know if I can turn that port off easily (easily for a Linux newbie that is).  I seem to remember that there probably is an init file with all the services defined which would probably be easy to turn this port off.  Since this whole thing runs from a floppy, the files are actually active on a ram disk.

Here is some SharetheNet Linux configuration information specific to my current gatewayPC, in case any of you Linux gurus out there would be willing to point out what I need to do:

http://bruceedwards.com/journal/001218a.htm#connect

I’ve probably put enough info there to make hackers very happy.  Oh well, I won’t be running SharetheNet in that configuration and will not run it at all unless I can determine that it is safe.  Any comments appreciated.

Thank you,

Bruce  🙂

~~~~~

Port 53 is DNS. I wouldn’t be too worried about it. The critical ports are blocked, and even if someone does somehow manage to get into your system, since the configuration is on a write-protected floppy all you have to do is reboot. And they won’t be able to do much on your internal network since you’re running Windows, and your Linux box doesn’t have Samba installed.
 
That information you posted is mostly hardware configuration data; I don’t think there’s anything useful there unless some exploit happens to be discovered for a particular driver (possible but not worth worrying about).
 
I thought I knew once how to block specific ports, but that’ll have to wait until tonight for me to dig.

~~~~~~~~~~

From: “J H RICKETSON” <culam@nospam.sonic.net>
Subject: FDISK?

Dave –

Where did you get an FDISK that asks you if you want to do big partitions?  Mine (DOS 6.22) thinks an 8+ gig disk is plenty big enough for anyone and refuses to even consider anything larger – and a ~2 gig partition is all anyone will ever need. I need a more user-tolerant FDISK!

Regards,

JHR
~~~~~

Windows 95B, Windows 98, and Windows Me’s FDISKs all handle larger than 8 GB drives. Partition size is a function of filesystem. FAT16 is limited to 2 gigs, period. FAT32 can be several terabytes.

~~~~~~~~~~

From: “Lawrence Kim” <lykim@nospam.telusplanet.net>
Subject: Recycle Bins and Boxers

Is there any way that one can make one recycle bin in only one partitioned drive, and have all the junk from all the other drives go to that one recycle bin instead of having recycle bins for each and every drive?  And what do you think about one of your ministers of the House of Common wanting to pass a law that would indict a boxer if he inflicts serious injury on another boxer, or kills him?  I personally think that should be out of the hands of lawmakers, as both boxers realize the risk that they are taking when stepping into the ring.  The only exception that I can think of is if a boxer continues to pummel away at his opponent after the bell has rung, and he’s straddling his opponent’s waist, hammering away at his face.  Okay, that can be prosecuted, but not if everything else is completely fair.  Anyway, enough of that.  Thanx again.

~~~~~

I wish it were possible to consolidate the recycle bins, but I don’t believe it is. I’ve never seen any trick to do that. The Mac does that, so I guess I could say get a Mac, but that feature isn’t worth the trouble and expense of switching platforms.

I’m not British, so I haven’t heard of that proposed law, but that’s ridiculous. When you’re playing sports, you’re at constant risk of injury. It’s a risk you take. And with what professional athletes make (at least in the States), that’s fair. Most professional athletes in the States should be set for life after just a five-year career, if they handle their money wisely (most don’t).

Baseball’s considered one of the safer sports, but there’s been one instance of a player killed when he was hit by a pitch (Carl Mays, sometime in the 1920s, I think). There’ve been countless career-ending injuries due to being hit by a pitch or a line drive. It’s up to the officials of the sport to ensure that players are sportsmanlike and don’t take cheap shots, not the government.

Then again, the United States has a much more laissez-faire government than most countries, and I’ve always tended to flutter between the libertarian and conservative points of view so I’m even more laissez-faire than the average U.S. lawmaker.

Running something other than Windows is theft

Another example of how Microsoft just doesn’t get it. This one courtesy of The Register. If you buy a PC without an operating system (so as to load an alternative on it, such as Linux, xBSD, OS/2, BeOS, or something else that “nobody wants to run anyway”), you’re a thief. Story here.

Which reminds me, I really do need to get an OS/2 box running again, and get serious about BeOS while I’m at it…

Windows Me can’t handle more than a half-gig of RAM. This also from The Reg. Story here. The vcache workaround is legit; no one has ever demonstrated to me the benefit of using more than 4 megs for a Win9x disk cache anyway.

Pentium 4 performance is precedented

Thoughts on the Pentium 4 launch. No big surprises: a massively complex new processor design, limited availability, and systems from all the usual suspects, at high prices of course. And, as widely reported previously, disappointing performance.
This isn’t the first time this has happened. The Pentium Pro was a pretty lackluster performer too–it ran 32-bit software great, but Win9x was still the dominant OS at the time and it still has a lot of 16-bit code in it. So a 200 MHz Pentium Pro cost considerably more than a 200 MHz Pentium and for most of the people buying it, was significantly slower. History repeats itself…

Intel revised the Pentium Pro to create the Pentium II, with tweaks to improve 16-bit performance, but of course massive clock speed ramps made that largely irrelevant. Goose the architecture to 600 MHz and you’re going to blow away a 200 MHz previous-generation chip.

That’s what you’re going to see here. Intel fully intends to scale this chip beyond 2 GHz next year, and that’s when you’ll see this chip come into its own. Not before. And by then Intel will probably have changed their socket, (they intend to change it sometime next year) so buying a P4 today gives you no future-proofing anyway.

It never makes sense to be the first on the block with Intel’s newest chip. Never. Ever. Well, if you’re the only one on the block with a computer, then it’s OK. The P4 has issues. The P3 had issues (remember the serial number?) and was really just a warmed-over P2 anyway. The P2 was a warmed-over Pentium Pro. The Pentium Pro had serious performance issues. The Pentium had serious heat problems and it couldn’t do simple arithmetic (“Don’t divide, Intel inside!”). The last new Intel CPU whose only issue was high price was the 486, and that was in April 1989.

Unless you’re doing one of the few things the P4 really excels at (like encoding MP4 movies or high-end CAD), you’re much better off sticking with a P3 or an Athlon and sinking the extra money into more RAM or a faster hard drive. But chances are you already knew that.

Time to let the cat out of the bag. The top-secret project was to try to dual-boot WinME and Win98 (or some other earlier version) without special tools. But Win98’s DOS won’t run WinME, and WinME’s DOS seems to break Win98 (it loads, but Explorer GPFs on boot).

The best method I can come up with is to use the GPL boot manager XOSL. It just seems like more of an achievement to do it without third-party tools, but at least it’s a free third-party tool. You could also do it with LILO or with OS/2’s Boot Manager, but few people will have Boot Manager and LILO will require some serious hocus-pocus. Plus I imagine a lot of people will like XOSL’s eye candy and other gee-whiz features, though I really couldn’t care less, seeing as it’s a screen you look at for only a few seconds at boot time.

An Optimizing Windows followup?

Optimizing Windows NT for Games, Graphics and Multimedia or Whatever… I occasionally get a question whether there’ll ever be such a beast. O’Reilly and I discussed it in the past, with little interest. (In fact when we were negotiating Optimizing Windows, I wanted it to be an NT book, and they asked if I knew Win9x well enough to write about that instead.)

There’s the possibility that another publisher who’s strong in Windows NT/Windows 2000, such as Sybex, might be interested. I haven’t talked to anyone there about it yet. But believe me, I’ve thought about the possibility of such a book.

I tried to write Optimizing Windows in such a way that someone who knew Windows 9x and another OS would then be able to apply the principles to both OSes, even though the specifics would only apply to 9x.

In the meantime, the best suggestion I can come up with is to take yesterday’s post , print it, then paste it to an otherwise underutilized page (such as the last page of the preface, which is totally blank). While it doesn’t go into great detail, that message could well form the basis of a chapter in an NT/2000 follow-on. I’d say at least half of chapter 2 in Optimizing Windows (particularly the user interface stuff) applies to NT and 2000 as well.

Laptop troubleshooting. I had a laptop the other day that seemed to launch programs and move the mouse pointer around at will. I’d never seen anything like it before. We were perplexed about it for a couple of hours (it was a deployed user in California, so it wasn’t like I could just tool over to his desk and start trying stuff). On a hunch, he unplugged everything and powered up the bare laptop. It worked fine. He started adding components one at a time, and when he got to the mouse, the problem reappeared.

Constant travel and frequent plugging and unplugging certainly could be hard on the mouse cable, so I can see where this might be a common problem for road warriors (I’d say 90 percent of my support experience is desktop PCs). So, if you’re getting unexplainable behavior from a PC, especially a laptop, try a different mouse — and a different external keyboard too, while you’re at it — and see if that makes the problem go away.