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Windows 98 on CD |
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Suggestions For a better CD: There are several things that could be done with this CD that could make it more useful and compact; the ramdisk could especially be adjusted according to your needs. What I have in mind is something I’m not particularly interested in researching right now: placing choices into your startup / configuration files. There is no reason why the elements beyond windows, and even some of windows itself, could not be used as modules. The user (you) could be allowed to chose, for example, to include / exclude winamp in the configuration which is copied into the ram disk. IT could save 1.15 MB for Winamp and 1 MB for the Divx codecs. This would entail: 1) structure zip files on the zip according to modules. You would zip up the winamp folder and the winamp shortcut on the start menu into a nice little winamp.zip. You then give you self the option to install it from a menu in config.sys or autoexec.bat. A real space saver on the ram disk would be the option to include / exclude ATI or NVIDIA drivers. The Nvidia variety is heavy (8.35 MB on the ram disk) but the ATI Radeon drivers are outrageous, adding up to 10.3 megabytes to the windows\system directory. Installing base support for a pci vga device (which works on most all video cards, by the way) and using my easy visibility appearance scheme, you can save 18 MB on the installed base!!! With my current setup, that would allow my to use windows with Partition magic, using less than a 55 megabyte ram disk! This would run find on a 64 MB system and provide the basics for some system repair. This type of setup menu should be very easy to produce; there are provisions in the startup files that would allow you to assign values to different components and therefore the ram disk size could be compensated correctly for your needs. I Believe this would be ideal; it’s only a matter of reading up on config.sys / autoexec.bat menus and correctly setting up your archives. Start up would be a bit slower than without the choices, but it opens up a world of possibilities. You wouldn’t have to carry around a stick of SDR and a DDR with your windows credit card, either!
Conclusion: I hope you have all found this tutorial helpful. It has been a learning experience for me and I hope it can be for you too. In the end, I have a very nice tool that up until six months ago, I, along with everyone else I have ever read, deemed impossible. I regret that I can’t answer emails about this information – I don’t even work in a computer field so I have no time to reply to all of you. Nonetheless, if you know how to hex edit and use the registry without much trouble, everything should work fine for you. It is a procedure of trial and error – I don’t know how many coasters I’ve made but I hope I’ve helped you all to avoid a few yourselves. For reference, or whatever else you want to use it for, here are a few helpful hints. I’ll let you use my floppy image and have a peek at my windows.zip and programs.zip file contents. These aren’t perfect – I just looked through and noticed things that could be removed (there is even support for both nvidia and ati in there) – but they’ll give you an idea of pretty near the bare necessities. Happy Hacking!! Semios
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