Table of content
Devices
Devices
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Audio recording
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LP-Ripping
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HW-Setup
Lot's of us older users have numberous precious Vinyls. I'm constantly recording my 500 LP's which I will manage to do over the next 2 years.
Though I'm not a HiFi-freak, chasing behind the maximum quality out of music, there need to be setup up some thorough measures to get quality recordings acceptable for normal listeners.
The Hardware setup:
- Setup your turntable on the same power supply-lines as your PC is, to avoid grounding interferences
- Attach your turntable to the line-in of your soundcard. Mostly you'll need with magnetic-devices an additional Pre-amplifier in line with the cables
- If possible use shielded stereo cables with additional grounding connection, either to the PC or to the chassis of the turntable, this eliminates grounding loops
- Ensure all your sound-related cables are not coiled up and tie-wrapped.
- Clean your vinyls wet with so called Wonder-Tissues (microfelt)
- Setup your loudspeakers physically far away from the turntable, not to catch low level echos
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Sound-Card
The Soundcard setup:
- Ensure your soundcard properties are adjusted to 44,1kHz Stereo PCM-mode recording
- For recording leave only Line-In and Wav selected, especially disable the Mic-in
- For fast access to the recording facility make a shortcut to, or place a permanent Run-command for: sndvol32 /R , this circumvents the clicking through the options panel for always choosing recording, but works only in windows98
- With these settings switch on the turntable without any LP playing and listen to the basic noise levels from your speakers/headset. In the first move pull up the sliders for line-in and the first for recording to the maximum. If its unacceptable loud you need to look for any grounding problems. Ensure no secondary devices try to use the soundcard, eg.:Browser on pages with sound, players off, tv or radio cards off
- Recording adjustments for the individual LP need to take place on the first physical record of the LP, they have the most dynamic behaviour, than from the inner tracks. If the track starts very calm, look out for the next loudest passage on the LP.
- Reduce the Line-In slider to such a position, that the recording level indicator doesn't reach the red indication on the bar. This reduces as much as possible any electrical noise at the port.
- Use the main recording level only for fine adjustment down from the top, the internal amplification of the electrical signal is almost much better than the signals arriving at the line-in connector
ENSURE really no red level indication, this is slightly other than recording on a cassette recorder, where you could use some magnetic reserve. A digital record doesn't allow for that.
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SW-Setup
You need special Sound recording software to get the audio written as WAV-file. The windows internal soundrecorder is not appropriate for this. It's limited to predefined length of records and unbelievable slow and resource hogging. Simply forget it.
There is a number of professional SW on the market, however also some Free/Shareware, which I've found not very comfortable. You may give http:/www.goldwave.com a try, but I prefer the Power Edition of WinOnCD, which is a CD-Writer program with an audio-editor comfortable enough to do the job fast and easy.
Though the SW's may have numberous of options to rework recordings for pops, clicks, noise levels or effects like stereo enhancement, echo etc., I prefer to just plain record and leave the original as is. All special features are not reversible, but they can be made mostly either later with more sophisticated stuff to come up (especially the processing power must be considered, I'll leave it open until to the GHz processors are available), or can be done dynamically with plugins for players. On the other hand for dedicated functions like WAV-trimming, encoding and ID-tagging, I prefer to use independent little utilities, which offers the chance of parallel processing. You'll find using a function inside one huge package, will lock up the whole package until finished.
Fire up your SW, push the record button and start your turntable playing. Record all in one piece from one side of the vinyl.
Attention: Don't switch any electrical equipment in your house while recording, you might catch disturbing pop's.
Push stop button when ready and stop the turntable.
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Record editing
Load the WAV-file into the editor, this might last a bit and you can turn your vinyl already in the meantime and clean it from the other side.
You have to split now the different tracks. SW having such a feature to do it automatically almost doesn't work properly and is much too slow. Do it manually, mark the wave parts you've identified and save them as "01-blabla", "02-blabla", thus keeping the order of the tracks.
You might have any text-editor in parallel at hand, to copy already prepared tracknames into the save-as filespec popups. There are CDDB services available in the web providing all this informations, but I've found them too uncomfortable slow for searching rather than just quickly write down the tracks in an editor.
Problem with splitting live-records; ok just a matter of taste to save such records just in one piece or to fiddle with marking and splitting them to individual tracks. Certain people like to add some empty space prior and behind the track, not to have the players jump to hard in it later on. I leave live records in one piece per side. Doing so gives the opportunity to just record on the final filename already, no extra loading into the editor.
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Record Trimming
What's that all about?
CD's are sampled in 16bit, thus providing this high dynamic differences which can't be achieved by vinyls. They normally can't get higher than 12 bit sampling rate, exceptions are directly written ones, which can go up to 14 bit.
What does triming with it, is to pseudo lift the recorded WAV to the maximum loudness of an overall track, that is to read, if your record volume was set a bit too low, the whole wave will be lifted in loudness by a mathematical amplification. It gives a higher dynamic impression, but in fact it's still the old one just lifted a bit in total, the quality is still at maximum 12bit but stretched.
Certain people don't like to do so, as it's not the original. I trim only basically loud music, no soft ones and never life-stuff. The life-music is allover the track nearly the same level, and I've found rarely that trimming will take place, if the input-levels are adjusted properly. Music with calm tracks and loud tracks on one side are tricky to handle, you have to chose manually which tracks to be trimmed.
Far the best and simplest trimmer is wavtrim http://www.jps.net/kyunghi/mp3encod.htm
I start it from the desktop with:
E:\Sound\WavTrim.exe -t -N -x *.WAV
thus clearing empty spaces at the beginning and at the end and normalizing to 100%. Otherwise you've to chose always via the options.
Don't close it, leave it in the taskbar, thus keeping the initial settings. When reinvoked, simply chose start and it offers the list of the next tracks recorded. Mark them starting from the last to the first one. This ensures the order in triming is starting from the first one. I don't know why this happens, but it works. Otherwise it's sampling through the order of records. This would hinder parallel processing with encoders.
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CD-Ripping
The fastest and almost exactest ripper is the alternate CDFS.VXD.
There is only one exception, in case of faulty (scratched or dotted) cd's the Exact Audio Copy (EAC) produces better results, for the cost of speed.
Eg. my Samsung3232 CD-rom supports up to 14x ripping speed with the alternate cdfs, where exact audio copy with a well conditioned cd doesn't exceed more 0,8x read speed. All other rippers offered in the web are between these both speeds. The next closest I found with VOB's instant music with 10x( they've produced a similar cdfs replacement approximately 120KB but not that effective), the popular CDCOPY acts at around 8x
- Tip1: try to remove any scratches with tooth-cream and a soft Kleenex
- Tip2: if possible with your cd-rom, try to disable internal caching, as this would simply disable failure correction methods of EAC
- Tip3: certain people report continuous problems with reading Compact Disk Audio CDA, using the alternate cdfs circumvents this by reading the tracks as wav-data-files
- Tip4: reading the audio -cd's as WAV-files prolongues the life-time of the laser, as reading CDA is a continuous task rather than reading data, which is intermittent
What's all about this alternative CDFS.VXD?
Wild rumors are going on, how this one is born. My favourite is that it escaped from MS-laboratories.
Some sites identify Cyber7 in South-Africa as programmer, however he doesn't respond nor give any information about it.
There is an update available for those, which have trouble to read track 01 of an audio-cd, I found it on the italian division of CD-FREAKS, but was gone after a few days. I've put it on this site for all who need it. Http://www.webwi.de/cdfsmod.zip To my knowledge the only place to draw it at the moment.
The EAC can be found at http://www.ExactAudioCopy.de/
Your CD-device doesn't support Digital Audio Extraction (DAE)?
Don't throw it away, but get anyway a newer one for the PC, they are cheap. Your old cd-rom is still good enough to be build into a MP3 player. There are kits for setting up your own off-line MP3player, which need just a simple CD-rom. An old fashioned 1X device would be ok already.
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Other sources
You can attach also your cassette player or tape devices to line-in, the recording is the same procedure as with LP's. Don't expect very good quality from this. The LP's can make up to 20000Khz frequency pending from the quality of device and source. The cassette will rarely make frequencies up to 15000kHz and the dynamic behaviour is poorer than from LP. Only professional multitrack tape-decks can produce good results. An alternative, but rarely individually available are sound records made on video-tapes or on DAT-devices. For the DAT-or Mini-Discs you would need a soundcard with digital interface or you will loose a level of quality going over the analog outputs.
Another source are FM-radio equipments either external or internal, however the transmission could never exceed a transfer rate of 96kBit/sec, thus limiting dynamic behaviour and the max frequency is anyway below 15Khz.
Microphones are the worst for PC-recording. The Mic-Input on most soundcards, is almost only mono and the levels are to low for standard mics. Use an own powered dynamic mic for best results. However I would recommend better to use external tape devices than directly go to the Mic-Input.
Internet streaming radio is almost of poor quality. Though the indication of certain players may show high streams up to 112kBit/sec the real quality is mostly much lower than 96 kBit/sec. The same applies to a lot of downloadable MP3's. I've thrown away more than half of all my d/ls during the last year.
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MP3-Encoding
My favourite encoder still is MPEGSuite http://ec2000.xperiment.net/ (the link seems to be dead now, they finished the project)
The internal encoder is far the fastest I've tested and I can't hear any difference to others. Maybe my ears are outdated, however I'm really pleased with it.
Though it's reported that 96kbit/sec or 112 kbit/sec encoding are cd-like I chose 128kBits/sec to have some spare quality for eventually later reediting.
Speaking about speed, I've experienced a 6,6x realtime encoding leaving the encoder alone. Thus allowing with the previous mentioned alternate cdfs ripping and encoding a complete CD in about 10 minutes.
The only negative effect is, that the titles of the ID3 tag need to be corrected manually, as the filenames are automatically read as Track01 etc. The Encoder takes automatically the trackname, the year of encoding and a copyright information into the ID-tag.
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ID-Tag
MIR tagger http://home.t-online.de/home/sensai/ is my favourite ID3-tagger. I've found so far none other, which provides the functionality I need.
- Taking interpret from directory structure
- Taking album from subdirectory structure
- Taking Title from filename
- Run a complete directory in a few seconds
- Complete renaming functionality to your own choices
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General hints
- User resources: While saving tracks with WinOnCD keep an eye on your user-resources, they are eaten up over about 25 titles or so. Just close the SW and restart it again. I watch them continuously with tclockex http://users.iafrica.com/d/da/dalen as percentage aside the date. With 20 % only left I close all and start new.
- Concurrent Activities: After a record taken, I start the trimmer, after the first track is trimmed I start the encoder, after that begun to encode, I start to record the next side, I switch to the ID-renamer and do what is necessary, all in parallel !! After tagging I clear temporary files off, go to my editor and write the next tracks to be saved as blank entries, to have them at hand when splitting. Than I go surfing the web for the next 10-15 minutes or maintain other things.
You ask, how all this possible?:
- Ona PII/400 the recording SW claims 100%CPU, but in fact it's happy already with 8%, it just releases more if other apps need it
- The trimmer works with highest priority, so it will always go faster as any other app, taking about 45%cpu at runtime
- The encoder works similar, but the process is much slower by nature, it starts with some 15%cpu and gains about 50% when the trimmer is finished, thus providing an average encoding speed about 2.5X. The IO-traffic is at it's maximum in this situation, you can do only little other file operations.
- The other apps use only temporary cpu and IO-traffic and don't harm anything.
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Burning CD's
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General Hints
- Make up an individual partition on your hdd for stuff to be burned and keep it below 2GB
- Defrag this Partition just before burning a CD
- Don't copy CD's "on the fly" if the CDR and the CDRW are hooked up on the same IDE-chanel.
Setting 2 HDD on one channel and 2 CD on the other was a valid decision before DMA came up.
The cd would have slowed down the hdd. Data stream can go on one channel only in one direction at a point in time.
So the second device has to wait. But data traffic can go parallel on two channels.
If the cdrom has to be reread by any reason, that could cost some seconds, already purging the buffer. That's the reason in general, not to copy to a burner on the same chanel, especially with higher speeds. Newer burners have up to 2MB internal buffer and this problem doesn't occur there anymore, if not excessive file-operations are done. This makes obvious why CD-copying should go across channels. Hdd's should be always master (minimum the boot drive), as there might come up some other glitches I can't recall at the moment.
- Avoid any other Disk-activities while burning, the buffer is been emptied within just seconds.
- Set Vcache in the system.ini to min and max the same values, to prevent from windows internal remappings while burning.
- Set your Swapfile to a fixed size.
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Copy Audio
Another point is the format of the copied files, if they are in CDA rather than WAV or data, they are to be read in continuous flow. Interupts on CDA data stream may take up to 10 seconds to relocate the position of the track. This is the main reason why copying music cd's directly doesn't work on higher speed with having them on the same channel. The best way is to use an image file on the harddisk. Within most burning SW you should switch off "On the Fly" for audio copying.
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Partitions
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Fat16 - Fat32
What's that all about?
DOS based systems can store data on HDD's in clustersizes from 4kbyte to 32kbyte.
A FAT16 (File Allocation Table) partition is described in 16bits used for the cluster address on the disk.
The maximum therefore is a FAT of 64kbytes with a maximal cluster size of 32kbyte the addressable room is 2Gbyte.
Pending from the defined size of the partition, FAT16 addresses cluster sizes of 4, 8, 16, 32kbyte size.
With the introduction of FAT32, both the FAT entries and the sector numbering are now 32-bit.
4,294,967,296 distinct 32-bit values multiplied by 512 bytes per sector yields at 2 terabytes (2,199,023,255,552 bytes) as the maximum possible disk size under FAT32
Pending from the defined size of the partition, FAT32 addresses cluster sizes of the following:
> 260meg 4K, > 8gig 8K , > 16gig 16K, > 32gig 32K
Note: The minimum size for a FAT32 partition is about 260 MB.
For one thing, the size of the FAT itself becomes a factor. The operating system keeps two copies of the FAT, so each cluster requires 8 bytes for its FAT entries. On a 2GB disk with 4K clusters, the two FATs require already 4MB. Compare this to the equivalent 64kB Fat16 table.
There is more than disk space; there are performance issues. VCACHE, tries to keep the FAT in RAM for speedier disk access. Obviously, that's easier if individual FATs are 2MB instead of 16MB.
Certain even newer BIOS will not allow for HDD's to see more than 32Gigs anyway.
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Partitions
Some generic hints for getting the most out of it.
Why partitioning? = Illegal_Question
As a matter of fact Fat16-tables are half the size of fat32, so read and cached with more than double the speed.
Install pure win98 Operating System on a fat16 <256Megs and it keeps all advantages of newer memory management. It has the same cluster size as fat32 (4Kb blocks), and that's just the size which win98 reads in the same way into memory, thus preventing from extra internal remapping and resulting in a remarkable speed increase on startup.
Install swap on a single fat16 <256 and it works great if anyway needed eg. only up to 64MB ram. With 128MB ram you'll encounter swapping anyway only rarely pending from your SW-applications. If you can manage it depending from your other devices , put the swap on a different drive, but this would not help much if they are both on the same IDE-channel.
It's been reported, though not stated by others either myself haven't tested it yet, placing such a partition at the physical end of a drive shall increase data-traffic by 5% more than placing it in the physical beginning.
Install progs to a <2GB fat32 and it runs like hell. Simple reason, the fat32-table <2GB is just a quarter than those of 8Gb. This improves opening and closing of applications to the max.
Any further Partitions which need high rate data transfer, keep also below 2GB eg.Images for CD-writers.
Anything else not rearranged so often or rewritten, put on partitions <8GB, NEVER, I mean NEVER NEVER use partitions larger than this. Partitions over 8Gigs have an huge increase of the fat-table, which may slow down things as if you run a Porsche from a 6Volt battery. Also Defrag may not work on larger than 8Gb partitions properly.
You can partition as you want, as long as you stay with your 24 Drive letters for all devices. However making use of hidden primary or logical Partitions can increase the number of all partitions over that limit. This is very useful when playing around with different OS-setups.
Though there are already some freeware SW for dealing with it, I recommend Partition Magic from htttp://www.powerquest.com/ as the ultimate tool to handle partitions.
A very good source of information for partitioning is also at http://www.webdev.net/orca/
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Partitions Order
The partition rules for IDE drives lettering go like this:
The first active primary on channel-1disk #1 (master) is C:
The first visible primary on disk #2 (slave) is D:
Then come in order after that..
All logical partitions on disk #1
All logical partitions on disk #2
All other primary partitions on disk #1
All other primary partitions on disk #2
Of course hidden partitions do not appear in this scheme.
Compressed drives (fat16 only) appear as a host drive and a virtual one, occupying two drive letters, unless the host is set hidden in Drivespace. The hostdrive can be advised to a given letter but after all physical hdd's.
For more disks the order will be the same according master / slave / chanel-number
If unhidden, the other primary drives are available to trade files, etc. just like logicals.
Keeping a primary on the second (or any additional) drive but hiding it, has the advantage to have an OS at hand if the first drive fails physically.
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Shared Logicals
With shared partitions, it is more friendly than you would imagine; one swapfile can serve several WinX systems. It doesn't care that another system created it, just keep the filename unique to all systems.
Same with Temporary Internet Files. All systems' browsers contribute to them and use them, provided it is the same browser (like IE4). NS can deal with even different versions across platforms.
Try to set up your mail folder to be shared too, so whichever system you are in, you are looking at the same inbox.
Common applications work the same, with one reservation:
If you have to install them via a setup routine which writes to the OS, you have to do so also for the other OS, thus overwriting the shared directory and it's content.
The uninstall will work only from one OS, from the remaining OS's it must be removed manually.
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Strategy
Partitioning becomes more important with these larger hdd's. But you need to do a planing for it.
Before starting such a job it's a good clue to address the CD-Rom/writer to a letter like X: Y: Z: in the device ctrl pan.
If your LS120 or Zip-drive is not set to A: or B: you should direct it also to the end of the alphabet before starting partitioning.
C:\
My recommendation for beginners is to have a smaller primary 1Gig as C: for the Operating system and strictly to that associated stuff.
For advanced users keeping the OS only on a fat16 below 256MB partition is a real tweak, as it's 4kB cluster size, just what win98 wants, and fat handling is a quarter of effort internally for win.
You have to maintain of course a thorough planing concerning the installations and shortcuts to other partitions.
Even if you are not thinking at it in the beginning, it's quite handy to have several versions of the same or other OS on hidden primary partitions for testing purposes or explicite configurations, but with PM you can rearrange any time you want for such a thing. The same applies to additional hdd's, you can setup ready made OS, but hide them all on primary partitions.
D:\
After setting up the primary partitions, make the extended one just up close to the end of the physical drive, to hold the logical drives.
Make up a smaller logical 2Gig as D: for unimportant stuff like an imaging drive for a CD-writer. This becomes handy if you deal any time later with a second hdd, to just cancel or hide this partition, when you need to have a primary partition on the second drive, even if it is temporary needed than only.
For that reason you should not place to much references like shortcuts or pathes to this partition in your environment.
E:\
Make up a smaller logical 2Gig as E: for all program installations and maintain that through every future activities.
F:\etc
All the remaining space place on smaller 8Gigs logical drives of your choice within the extended partition either of any drives.
Specials:
Following the fixed assignments, you can add special partitions for defined purposes and maintain them permanent in order as example:
- C is always the OS
- D is placeholder for primary partition on second hdd or miscallaneous stuff
- E is common programs installations
- F eg. for Sourcefiles for installation (Windows-CD + drivers+patches) and OS-systemfiles backups
- G eg. for important dynamic data
- H eg long therm storage place
- I eg. a common shared swapfile for different OS + temp-files (change settings in autoexec.bat)
This makes sense for defrag and backup purposes as well as easy house keeping.
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Tweaks
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CD-cache
Taken from Axcels and it works really good
This is a REG-heck to create a 4 MB CD-ROM/DVD cache. This is nothing for small RAM>64MB
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\CD-ROM]
"Required Pause Tolerance"=hex:e7,13,00,00
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Floppy 1,7MB
Ever had too low space on a boot-floppy?
There is a nonag shareware Maxidisk HTTP://www.herne.com/mdisk1.htm which formats standard floppies to 1,7MB. Remember Windows95 floppy version came on such floppies. They work on 99% of all PC's.
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HDD last access
Any touch of explorer to a file updates the last access time in the partition tables.
To speed up the drives enter in the config.sys a line like this:
ACCDATE=[drive]-
ACCDATE=C- D- E-
disables the file access actualization on C: D: E:
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PCISteering
Tweak the PCI Steering
For those that need a new tweak there is to throw something at you.
The tweak is with the PCI steering settings. After applying this tweak the system seems to be a bit more stable and I have not had any conflict errors what-so-ever.
Open Control Panel\System\Device Manager then path to System Devices\PCI Bus and then double click it. Tab to IRQ Steering and uncheck everything except for the box that says "Get IRQ table using MS Specification table." This will force the OS to use just the MS steering table and not the others.
The PCI Bus steering table is read in order meaning if the first box is checked and a steering table is found that is the steering table it will use. If it's unchecked then the next field is looked at and used if a steering table is found, and so on. By allowing only one table to be checked this allows the MS table to be the only one in use and this seems to be what 98 wants in the first place.
This is for advanced tweakers only!
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Hoaxes
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HDD-Read Ahead
What is Read-Ahead optimization ?
Read-ahead optimization was intended to speed up hard drive access. If activated, Windows reads some blocks more that needed from the HD and 'hopes' the program will need the data later.
It will work if you use only 1 application at once, but this is not always the case. As soon as 2 programs try to access the hard drive at the same time the Read-ahead reading will slow down things up to 50% !
In many cases DISABLING Read-ahead optimization will give your a huge performance boost - just give it a try !
System Properties / Performance / File System / Read ahead
FACTS: Any failure reading a media (which is normally quite often) will result in a heading back to reread at critical runtime.
This is primary slowing down applications as it makes no use of caching drives.
Secondary with streaming media you will experience sudden drops.
So push the lever FULL to the right
Instead make it even more advanced with this setting
"ReadAheadThreshold"=hex:00,00,00,0f
In this case "ReadAheadThreshold" is set to 1.5 MB (1536 KB).
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VXDs
That are the files integrated in vmm32.vxd during original Setup of windows. You can't replace these from your setup or SFC, so make a backup if it gets corrupted. The alternative is to extract the individual components either to windir/system or system/vmm32 subdirectory
Configmg.vxd
Vcomm.vxd
Vdmad.vxd
Vdd.vxd
Vmouse.vxd
Ntkern.vxd
Vflatd.vxd
There are wild discussions about a fix for vmm32 error messages, a.m. method to put the single files into the vmm32 subdirectory shall slow down system performance on startup a bit which is correct by theory.
I've done it and found no vmm32 failures more appearing on my system, however I can't prove if it was solved by this measure or by other corrective action I took that time. But if it ain't break don't fix it.
Fact: Also stated by serious writers from testcenters, it's a hoax
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Troubleshooting
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0E-Failure
0E BSOD's or just blacked down without failure notifications?
The culprit might be sometimes a probably wrong BIOS setting.
In BIOS Feature Setup set L2 Cache from Wr-Back to Wr-Through.
This setting might be not always available in certain configurations.
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Boot Disk
http://www.nowonder.com/ultimate/Forum2/HTML/006761.html [link is invalid]
WINDOWS 98 EMERGENCY BOOT DISK - (aka: Win98 Boot Floppy Disk; EBD) and "How to make a "SUPER" W98 EBD disk" with Format and ScanReg
Ques: Where did my CDROM go?
EBD creates a "virtual" RAMDISK. The RAMDISK is assigned the next drive letter AFTER the Hard Drives, but BEFORE your CDROM drive letter assignment.
EXAMPLE: (Assumes no partitions and single hard drive)
Normal Boot:
A: = Floppy
B: = Floppy
C: = Windows 98
D: = CDROM Drive
Booting from Win98 EBD:
A: = Floppy
B: = Floppy
C: = Windows 98
D: = RamDisk - (created by Win98 EBD)
E: = CDROM Drive - (CDROM drive letter assignment changed from D: to E:)
As you can see, when booting from W98 EBD, your CDROM drive letter is reassigned to E:. This should clear-up user confusion when technical support asks to load W98 CD and extract a file. Just remember: "Booting from W98 EBD shifts your CDROM Drive letter assignment."
Ques: Where did Format.exe go?
For some unexplained reason, Microsoft decided to put "format.exe" on the "virtural" Ramdisk. This normally does not create user problems unless EBD fails to create the RamDisk. To insure that "format.exe" is always available,I recommend copying "format.exe" to the EBD floppy.
Copy "format.exe" to the EBD floppy:
Boot to Windows
- Insert EBD, make sure "write protect tab is off"
- Go to W98 MSDos Prompt: Start > Programs > MSDos Prompt
- At the prompt, type: xcopy c:\windows\command\format.com a:\
- After completion, go back to Windows by typing: exit
- set floppy write protect on.
- Label the EBD Floppy!! Date and "Copied Format"
Ques: Copy ScanReg.exe to your EBD !!
- Boot to Windows
- Insert EBD, make sure "write protect tab is off"
- Go to W98 MSDos Prompt: Start > Programs > MSDos Prompt
- At the prompt, type: xcopy c:\windows\command\scanreg.exe a:\
- After completion, go back to Windows by typing: exit
- set floppy write protect on.
- Label the EBD Floppy!! Date and "Copied ScanReg"
Ques: Trying to make a W98 Emergency Boot Disk .....
Another Microsoft mystery. It should have been a "one button" function, but its not.
- Load the W98 CD in your CDROM Drive
- Use Explorer to find the CDROM Drive letter assignment. (!remember this!)
- Insert good blank floppy, write protect tab off
- Start > Help > Index Tab > "disks, startup" > Display > "click here"
- Select "Create Disk"
- It will ask you for the W98 CD.
- You may see a message "blah-blah" cannot be found.
- Where you see "Copy files from", type: (CDROM Drive Letter):\win98 Example: If your CDROM drive is E: then: E:\win98
- set floppy write protect on.
Option: if you want to copy format.com to your new EBD:
- Insert EBD, make sure "write protect tab is off"
- Go to W98 MSDos Prompt: Start > Programs > MSDos Prompt
- At the prompt, type: xcopy c:\windows\command\format.com a:\
- After completion, go back to Windows by typing: exit
- set floppy write protect on.
- Label the EBD Floppy!! Date and "Copied Format"
Option: if you want to copy ScanReg.exe to your new EBD:
- Insert EBD, make sure "write protect tab is off"
- Go to W98 MSDos Prompt: Start > Programs > MSDos Prompt
- At the prompt, type: xcopy c:\windows\command\scanreg.exe a:\
- After completion, go back to Windows by typing: exit
- set floppy write protect on.
- Label the EBD Floppy!! Date and "Copied ScanReg"
Now TEST your new EDB to make sure it works
Don't forget when booting from EBD the CDROM drive letter assignment changes !
Make THREE copies! One to use and two just for grins!
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Compatibility mode
Open Registry Editor in Windows. Open Hkey_local_machine/system/current control set/services/VXD/IOS. Look for a "NO Ide" entry on the right hand side. Highlight it and delete. Reboot.
http://www.hostclub.net/ubb/Forum1/HTML/000793.html by MrComputer
Other measure to prevent from using the compatibility mode:
- don't load smartdrive before loading windows, reboot to unload it and ensure it's not in your autoexec.bat
- don't place a swapfile on a ramdisk, this is ridiculous anyway and results in double remapping from ram to swap, where the ram could hold it in the first place of it's own
- check your system.ini for this entry: 32BitDiskAccess=ON
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DeviceNo.
To aid error interpretation on drivers
ID-No. / Driver-Name / Driver Description
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
# 0001 VMM Virtual Machine Manager
# 0002 DEBUG WDEB386 Kernel Debugger
! 0003 VPICD Virtual Programmable Interupt Controller Device
# 0004 VDMAD Virtual Direct Memory Access Device
! 0005 VTD Virtual Timer Device
# 0006 V86MMGR Virtual 8086-mode Memory Manager
# 0007 PAGESWAP Demand Paging Swap Device
# 0008 PARITY Parity-checking Device
# 0009 REBOOT System Reboot Device
! 000A VDD Virtual Display Device
# 000B VSD Virtual Sound Device
! 000C VMD Virtual Mouse Device
! 000D VKD Virtual Keyboard Device
! 000E VCD Virtual Communications Device
! 000FVPD Virtual Printer Device
3.1 0010 BLOCKDEV Block Device Driver
# 0010 IOS Input/Output Supervisor
# 0011 VMCPD Virtual Math Coprocessor Device
# 0012 EBIOS PS/2 Extended BIOS Device Driver
# 0013 BIOSXLAT BIOS Translation Device Driver
# 0014 VNETBIOS Virtual NetBIOS Device Driver
# 0015 DOSMGR MS-DOS Device Driver
# 0017 SHELL Shell Interface Device
# 0018 VMPOLL Virtual Machine Polling Detection Device
! 3.1 001A DOSNET MS-DOS Network Interface Driver - This driver is often replaced by third-party network drivers
! 001B VFD Virtual Floppy Device
$! 001C LOADHI EMM386 Memory Manager Driver - This driver is often replaced by third-party memory managers
# 0020 INT13 Fixed Disk Interrupt Driver
! 3.1 0021 PAGEFILE Paging File Device - This driver is often replaced by RAM-doubling software
0022 SCSI SCSI Device
0023 MCA_POS MCA_POS Device
0024 SCSIFD SCSI FastDisk Device
0025 VPEND Pen Device
3.1 0026 APM Advanced Power Management Device
# 0026 VPOWERD Virtual Advanced Power Management Device
# 0027 VXDLDR VxD Loader device
# 0028 NDIS NDIS wrapper
# 002A VWIN32 Windows 95 Win32 Support Driver
# 002B VCOMM Windows 95 Communications Device Driver
# 002C SPOOLER Print Spooler
3.1 002D WIN32S WIN32S Driver
3.11 0031 VNB NetBEUI Driver from Windows for Workgroups
3.11 0032 SERVER NetBEUI Driver from Windows for Workgroups
# 0033 CONFIGMG Plug and Play Configuration Manager
3.1 0034 DWCFGMG Configuration Manager for Windows 3.1 and MS-DOS
# 0035 SCSIPORT I/O Subsystem Miniport Loader/Driver
# 0036 VFBACKUP Helper Driver for Backup Applications
# 0037 ENABLE Accessibility Driver
# 0038 VCOND Virtual Console Device for WIN32 Console Subsystem
# 003C ISAPNP ISA Plug and Play Enumerator
# 003D BIOS BIOS Plug and Play Enumerator
# 003E WINSOCK Windows Network Sockets
# 003F WSIPX Windows Network Sockets for IPX
# 0040 IFSMGR Installable File System Manager
# 0041 VCDFSD CD-ROM File System Driver
# 0042 MRCI32 Microsoft Real-time Compression Driver
# 0043 PCI PCI Plug and Play Enumerator
# 0045 EISA EISA Plug and Play Enumerator
# 011F VFLATD Linear Frame Buffer Video Driver
# 0442 VTDAPI Multimedia Timer Services Driver
3.0 0444 VADMAD Auto-initialize DMA
! 0445 VSBD Sound Blaster (Windows Resource Kit) [ASCII 150] This driver is often replaced by third-party sound drivers
# 0460 UNIMODEM Universal Modem Driver
# 0480 VNETSUP Network Support Driver
# 0481 VREDIR Network Redirector
# 0483 VSHARE File Sharing Support Driver
3.11 0484 Old IFSMGR from Windows for Workgroups
# 0486 VFAT 32-bit File System Driver
# 0487 NWLINK 32-bit IPX/SPX-compatible Protocol
# 0488 VTDI TCP/IP Driver
# 0489 VIP TCP/IP Driver
# 048A VTCP TCP/IP Driver
# 048B VCACHE Cache Manager
# 048C VUDP User Datagram Protocol Driver
# 048E NWREDIR Windows 95 NetWare-compatible Redirector
# 0491 FILESEC File Security Driver
# 0492 NWSERVER Windows 95 NetWare-compatible File Server
# 049B VNBT NetBIOS Transport for TCP/IP
3.x = only in version
! = Hardware configuration dependend
# = generally
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GraficCardFix
This is from http://www.geocities.com/~budallen/desktop.html and very useful.
You may not think that "Explorer.exe Caused a GPF in Kernel32.Dll" has anything to do with a mouse or Video Display.
But it has been documented to be one of the #1 causes of this error. And here is the solution. MAYBE?
To find your System's Graphics Acceleration settings:
- Right click on My Computer
- Choose Properties, that takes you to your System's Properties
- Click Performance Tab
- Click the Graphics button.
There you can adjust the speed of your Graphics Accelerator
Microsoft suggests that you reduce the hardware graphics acceleration setting for the video driver. Here's how: Click Start, Settings, Control Panel, and double-click System. In the System Properties window, click the Performance tab, then click Graphics. Move the Hardware acceleration slider one tick mark to the left of the Full setting. The following comment will appear in the window: "Most accelerator functions: Use this setting to correct problems with the mouse pointer."
There are three reasons why your graphics hardware may have difficulties using the Full graphics hardware acceleration setting. First, Windows 9x may have misidentified your display adapter or monitor during the installation procedure. If so, Windows 9x isn't using the proper drivers to communicate with your devices. Second, the version of display driver your system is using may be outdated. Many graphics hardware manufacturers have improved their drivers and released updated versions that perform more efficiently than the older versions. Third, your display adapter may be an older, less sophisticated, model. If that's the case, it simply may not be able to handle the Full graphics hardware acceleration setting.
Regardless of the cause, you'll want to begin your troubleshooting expedition by making sure that you have installed on your system the correct and most recent graphics hardware drivers available. If Windows 9x misidentified your display adapter or monitor during the installation procedure and you later install the most current drivers, you should use your system for a few days before adjusting the graphics acceleration setting. You may have solved the problem with the new drivers and will be able to safely and reliably use the Full graphics hardware acceleration setting. More detailed information on identifying and obtaining graphics hardware drivers.
Adjusting the setting
If you continue to have problems or if you discover that your display adapter is an older model, you'll want to adjust the graphics hardware acceleration setting to an appropriate level. The Hardware Acceleration slider actually has four notches. The notches from left to right correspond to None, Basic, Most, and Full. Moving the slider to the left gradually disables Windows 9x graphics acceleration features and lets you eliminate system crashes caused by graphics operations. To adjust the setting, access the Advanced Graphics Settings dialog box as we described earlier. Then, move the slider down a notch, click OK to close the Advance Graphics Settings dialog box, and click Close to dismiss the System Properties sheet. When the System Settings Change dialog box, prompts you to restart your system, click Yes to do so.
Identify - Check Your System's Graphics Hardware
Best places to download updated drivers
Web Site Address
The Drivers HeadQuarters Web site www.drivershq.com
WinDrivers.com www.windrivers.com
Windows95.com Drivers Updates www.windows95.com/drivers
Windows Sources DriverFinder www.zdnet.com/wsources
Conclusion
Before you adjust the graphics hardware acceleration setting, make sure that Windows is correctly using and identifying the display adapter card and monitor. If it's not, you'll need to install the proper driver.
-------------
My personal experience was not to update always to the latest drivers. I experienced massive problems with a new SIS graphic card driver and had much trouble to reinstall the old one. Life is sometimes a compromise. Find out yourself.
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MousePower
If you have ATX Main Board, ATX case Award Bios, or any Bios that supports PS/2 Mouse Power On, then you can power on your computer with a double click.
To activate this feature:
- Restart your computer
- Then press Del when the BIOS message appears to enter your CMOS configuration
- Select Integrated Peripherals from main menu
- If PS/2 mouse power on disabled, activate it by press page up/ page down key it will became Double-Click
- Press Esc key to exit
- Press F10 to save and exit Power off your PC
- Now double-click the left mouse button,.. Your PC will turn on
Regrettably my BIOS doesn't offer this.
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MSGSRV32
Msgsrv32.exe is a program (Windows 32-bit message server) that performs several background functions necessary for Windows operation.
These functions include:
- Load installable Windows drivers at startup and unload them at shutdown
- Run the shell program (usually Explorer.exe) and re-run the shell if it fails to respond
- Mediate Plug and Play messages among various parts of the operating system
- Coordinate automatic responses to Setup programs. This includes checking whether a Setup program has improperly overwritten Windows files, and optionally restoring the Windows versions of those files
- Display the initial logon dialog box if networking is enabled
- Play the system startup and shutdown sounds
Troubleshooting errors based on Msgsrv32.exe
- Disable driver settings in config.sys and autoexec.bat with REM.
- Disable System sounds
- Disable Logo Screens with TweakUi
- Remove and reinstall networking device
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Partition Fix
In some configuration with hdd's over 8Gigs it might happen that you get nothing but trouble with your partitions.
Symptoms are continuous bad sectors, scandisk stops and can't finish, defrag stops at 4%
There is a simple trick on this.
Don't use up with your last physical partition, the whole diskspace left over. Leave a MB or so unpartitioned. That's it.
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Sound
You don't hear what you want?
Ensure in Sys-Ctr-Pan Multimedia the devices are individually set for Play and record.
The Volume Ctrl Checkbox is ticked for the systray.
Double Click the Loudspeaker Icon in the systray and call options / properties.
Tick the checkboxes for all types you want to have in the volume control.
Ensure the volume ctrls for the devices are not muted and the sliders are up some way from bottom.
Do this for both options record and play.
Ensure your Mplayer has been installed by the windows setup. You can reinstall it by The windows setup from Syst-Ctr-Pan Software.
At run type sndvol32 /r (prevents from ticking through the options under win98 only) and pull down the input levels for line-in and mic as long as you don't need them for recording purposes. This raises the input-impedance and reduces noise on the output. Mute all devices which you really don't need.
Ensure your soundcard is as far as possible away from the Grafic-card and grafic-card is as close as possible to the motherboard.
The speakers amplifier (volume) should be set to the lowest (of your taste) while the volume control should be operated at the maximum rates.
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Technologies News
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NanoParts in HDD
There is a new Ferro-Platinum alloy half the size of so far used Cobalt fill ins for hdd's, allowing approximately 100 times density on hdd's (IBM, San Jose)
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7Ghz Processor
For high capacity radio transmission with satellites a laboratory 7Ghz processor has demonstrated functionality
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Fiber Optics
The capacity of a single fiber has been enhanced with 1045 channels to over 1Terabit/sec recently.
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Molecular switches
Development is on the way to produce organic molecule based reversive switches. This would allow to produce a workstation sized computer in the body of a watch.
Gag aside, you cellular telly would be painted on the finger nail.
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Hologram CD
Latest breakthrough in memory technology allows for storage of holograms in vertical direction of a CD thus allowing about 1000GB on a CD-Type disk.
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Multi layer CD
In autumn 1999 a multilayer cd was presented allowing 10 layers of storage on a conventional CD-size. Disk storage was about 130GB. Time to market is scheduled already for mid of 2000.
Rem.: Based on this I will definitely jump DVD-devices
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Adhesive tape
A breakthrough in memory technology was found with transparent adhesive tapes from Tesa an Beiersdorf trademark.
On a 3m spooled tape are about 3GB data storable. This invention will allow for high speed rotary devices eg.cameras in small sizes to store some hours of video.
The data is stored by revertive little bubbles in the surface of the tape. The standard production of these tapes is clean enough to allow high class quality storage.
A principle flat layer of this tape storing a hologram was shown in german TV mid 1999.
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Mini-WEB-Server
There is a web-server based on 256 bytes of code allowing any device of the house remotely controlled via the web. The processor and the ram consist of 2 tiny electronical parts not larger than the head of a needle. Price in mass-production is around 1$.
The link http://www-ccs.cs.umass.edu/~shri/iPic.html
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History
My Computer-evolution
1972 bought a LED pocket calculator which could operate radicals
1974 bought a LCD pocket calculator with 56 mathematical functions
1976 had exercises in Fortran on an ancient IBM
1979 played around with a Commodore Pet
1984 played around with an Atari ST
1985 got at work an IBM8086 640kb RAM 10MB hdd, wow what a machine DOS3
1986 bought a 10Mhz AT with40MB hdd Portable
1989 got at work a PS2 386SX16 DOS4
1989 bought 386SX20 Notebook 80MB hdd DRDOS
1992 got at work a 486/33 DOS5 Win3.1
1994 bought a P90 700MB hdd Win3.1 / Win95a
1995 got at work a P100 Win3.1/Win95b
1997 bought a P75 Libretto Win95b
1998 got at work a P133 NT4
1999 bought a PII/400 Win98
1999 got at work a PII/266 NT4
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