OT: A browser question.

[Rod]

Says XP/Vista only - anyone know if that is true?

[Mark]

If you have a fresh reinstall of win98se have you got all the updates.?

I have used this

not totally foolproof but should work ok on a new install.

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[Mark]

Avast still works ok on my 98se laptop, 64Mb ram and a 266MHz Pentium II

:(

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[The Natural Philosopher]

Its not just another OS, its...Linux..!

For everything else, there is mastercard.

[geoff]

In message , Stephen Howard writes

[Theo Markettos]

Opera's seems very good at wasting CPU for no reason at all these days, so I'd recommend v7 or earlier. Just be aware it won't be too secure.

Theo

[Jules]

I've still got one useful machine that runs Linux happily in 16MB (booting from a 32MB CF card). No graphics, but I think there's a copy of Lynx on there if I ever needed to browse the web...

Seconded on the memtest, and I'd run something that does a full R/W test on the hard disk too. Leave them going overnight; a duff disk block could be the issue, and might explain why it's app-specific...

cheers

J.

[Dave Plowman (News)]

and I'll only need it for pretty basic stuff. Since IE on that machine kept on crashing, I downloaded it with Firefox on the main PC and transferred it via Network Neighbourhood. And another app I wanted too. Both files corrupt. So I downloaded them again on the ancient RISC OS machine and burnt them to a CD. Success. Something on that main PC is corrupting downloads - even if I try with all the firewalls etc disabled.

[John Rumm]

Grab yourself a copy of memtest86 - its on the ultimate boot CD:

sounds like it may have a ram fault.

(you should be able to write the image to CD on the RiscOS machine)

Leave the machine on test for a few hours to make sure.

[The Natural Philosopher]

Not necessarily downloads mate.

Been there, done this, spent a week finding the answer.

Whats is likely happening is that an I/O card or a ram chip is going slow..such that transfers between the network card and memory, or the disk and memory with the card active maybe, are getting forked. Without a full hardware debugger the only way to find out is by pulling stuff out and swapping it about. If the stuff is all built in, then all you can probably swap out is RAM.

i ah a similar problem in tis MAC here after I put in some 'ebay ram'

random corruption of files. Thought the disk had gone, reinstalled everything on a new disk and it started to flake again. ran it with one of four chips removed till it stopped. Put chip in bin.

[Dave Plowman (News)]

Yes - they even kindly supply it as an ISO image so saves work.

Two hours shows no problems.

[Andy Luckman (AJL Electronics)]

No-one has yet mentioned the portable version of Firefox. It will run on a memory stick and is quite small and fast. I wonder if that would do the trick?

[meow2222]

Opera 7.54 is good for old kit, anything from modern to as far back as P2. If youre going to P1 or 486 stuff, 7 will run but Opera 6 is much faster. However 6 is very dated feature wise, it doesnt even support dropdown menus, and falls down dead if you try and go over 7 windows. Opera 7 can stably support just under 30 windows.

Crashing is what 98 does best of course. Drivers are a prime suspect when it gets unstable, plus of course its totally vulnerable to misbehaving apps, which should all be turned off by default in msconfig, all but AV and FW. And if its a P2 or older I'd turn off real time AV scanning, just let it scan at night.

Using a good hosts file will greatly help browser security - note Opera requires its own type of file, it goes tts up if you use an IE type hosts file with it. WinDOS is insecure, but the risks are much exaggerated.

NT

[John Rumm]

Have you tested the machines at both ends of your LAN (i.e. the corruption could be introduced in more than one place)?

[Dave Plowman (News)]

I also have a USB 'bridge' cable that allows rather faster transfers between the PC and laptop - somewhat of a bargain at approx a fiver including software off Ebay. Same result with it.

[John Rumm]

Which suggests its not a LAN card issue then...

Memory fault in one of the computers still seems most likely, possibly a disk fault. I had a customers system the other day that kept getting random disk errors. However the actual drive itself was not recording any remapped sectors etc. Eventually a ram test revealed a dodgy simm in one page. If one end is running Win2K or better have a look in the system event log[1] to see if there are any reported errors.

[1] Right click My Computer and select "Manage".

[Dave Plowman (News)]

No - if I try and install it on the main PC I get an error message too. Usually something like file is corrupt.

Nothing there.

[John Rumm]

Have you doe the ram test on the main PC as well?

What about running one of the UBCD non destructive disk tests on the laptop?

[Dave Plowman (News)]

Yes - that's where the problem is. But not in the RAM.

I've installed the required software off CDs made on the RISC OS machine and it's running fine.