WinMe advice needed

WinMe. Ugh. It came on my Amity tablet.

I'm trying to free up as much space as I can to re-partition, then do a clean install of 98. (w2k is out, I need a read mode command environment from time to time.)

Can I dump the hidden _RESTORE folder without killing ME? It's using 400mb.

I would kill ME anyway, 98 is (IMO) much better and less crash-prone.

Yes you can. And also find the settings for turning off recovery.

And install 98SE, not just plain 98.

Wallythacker, you can, but it's not the advisable way to go about it.
Control Panel > System > Advanced > Bottom left box > disable system restore (Doing this from memory and it's been a long time). This will prevent it from writing to the SR cache

Next run Disk cleanup, go to the second tab along and at the bottom there should be an option to purge the SR cache. Do both and reboot and it should be empty bar the control files.

What about 2000 and DOS box or Win32 BOSCH / Virtual PC / VMWare and a 6.22 install. The idea that anyone opts to install the problems and security woes of 9x in anything other than a "trip down memory lane" these days wigs me.

I thought long about anything but 98se. 166mhz/160mb/3gb is pretty minimal for w2k.

Unless I'm mistaken, nothing but 98 will allow raw access to the hdd so I can run ghost from within windows. Why am I running ghost in windows? I'm glad you asked.

I have 1394 & usb external housings which I use to write images to and restore from. Of course, when I'm booted into 98 the drivers are in place for those devices and ghost can access them.

I also want to avoid boot managers since I'm running a single Os.

Please chime in if I'm grossly wrong with my reasoning.

edit. TY, your help freed up the disk space.

Edited by wallythacker 2006-03-29 2:32 PM

I am not sure of the logistics involved with it under a NT OS, however you can run 2000 on FAT32, both it and 98 use Virtual Mode drviers. The only difference is that with 98 you can boot into MSDOS 7, where as under 2000 to do that you would have to install DOS and then 2000 - to which the NT Boot Loader would automatically setup the dual boot.

Of course one might conclude that it's long winded, just depends on how important security is for you, and retro app compatibility.

Saying this, I have an event on my Outlook Today screen right now that says Windows 2000 is going to hit extended support on Saturday. If Microsoft stick to that both OS's will be on the defunt register, only 98 will be leaving extended support hitting EOL very soon.

How much RAM do you have on the tablet, wally?

160mb.

The dual boot idea might work but unless I can figure out real-mode access (drivers and whatnot) for 1394 & USB I can't run ghost. Ghost has all sorts of options to use 1394 & USB so I should play with those. I doubt I'll have the patience though to work through it.

The other problem, I don't have the penx/cic handwriting programs for w2k. Mitsubishi doesn't have a download for them. They can be purchased but IIRC they are $60US or more.

I discovered an uninstall ME in add/remove programs and used it to roll back to win95c.

The Amity is now 3x faster. Next task is to upgrade to 98se. I don't have many options without the penx/cic programs so I hope it goes well. wish me luck

98se is a great OS, wally, although I do prefer 95c... I believe you can get the 98SE upgrade CD or floppies for about 20 USD on eBay (if you dont have it).. I just sold my 98SE upgrade CD on eBay

I keep all my old OS cds so I'm ready to go.

edit: If 95c had better usb support I'd go with it as it's compact and speedy

Edited by wallythacker 2006-03-30 1:39 AM

95c? I thought they stopped at B.

Windows 95 is OEM SR2.5. It's called C to be cute.

I prefer 95 RTM, no MSIE bundled into it, less junk on the disk. Only no USB 1.0 support from it is all.