It's ZoneAlarm

I think. My latest attempt at preventing crashes/freezes is to turn off the firewall. If you were to ask me: should I get ZoneAlarm to use on my memory-constrained Windows 98 system, my answer would be: no, I wouldn't advise it.

Revised 98 crashes

On the track of Zone Alarm (the firewall): commented out references in autoexec.bat to tvdumpflags, because I was seeing an unusual number of freezes while trying to download/play a large Quicktime file, and also while running the modem for a while.

3/22/2006: uninstalled old driver, and re-installed latest version of modem driver with call waiting app. Am about to test it. First test seems promising. Called using a friend's phone, had 15 seconds to answer call, or ignore, answered it, talked for a few seconds to verify voice connection, and then hung up, and was automatically switched back.

3/24: Success in a 6 hour download! Cranked back the receive modem buffer, and turned off all software in the system tray that didn't have anything to do with the download.

3/27: Installed update of firewall. On the trail of sporatic crashes trying to download update (10 meg). Cannot find dialog box to update modem buffers.

The Latest Version of Flash Don't Work...

About 50 percent of the time (maybe more,) both IE and Firefox crash on 98 running Flash. Yes, it's the latest patched Flash version that is supposedly been virus toughened.

But I wonder if it's been crash enhanced. ;) Anyway, got rid of it in the Firefox plugin directory (npsfw32.dll,) and also flash8a.ocx in C:\WINDOWS\SYSTEM\MACROMED\FLASH (for IE.)

More to come as I evaluate this change. Note: I do not recommend you make these changes on your machine unless you know what you're doing.

98 crashes

Installed old version of Zoom driver. (I thought the modem-on-hold app was causing problems, but my current thinking is not.)

Currently, my suspicious are too memory constrained, and procexp cannot run at high priority. The memory constraints (64 mb) put an unusual demand on swapping, and swapping demands are not being handled in a timely manner.

Considering putting modem-on-hold back in. Also, have given up trying to use the WSIWIG editor in blogger.

Konica Personal Laser and USB trials and tribulations

(in which I discover you can't run USB version 2 on W98, and the printer gets working by magic, more than anything else.)