Windows Me, Netscape 4.x

This text was written as a series of replies I posted in the YouTube comments section of a promotional introduction video of Windows Me, which can be found in the said operating system.

Since the video was not uploaded from the official source, chances are that the video and the comments to it won't be available at some point of time. So I posted them here for future reference.

And since Blogspot does not have limits on the amount of text, then I have edited the replies a bit to add text.

Windows Me was really good on something like a 667 MHz CPU and 128Mb RAM at the time. If you want to run reasonably modern software without swapping much, then you need 256 Mb of RAM (factor in [modern] web browser, IM program, OpenOffice 2.4.3).

Windows Me can run on less, of course, as it was included in computers that only had 64Mb of RAM.

At one point, Windows xp ran fine with 128 Mb RAM, but nowadays it needs 512M RAM as a real-life minimum to keep the system secure & do something productive.

These specs were for a new PC from around 2000 that was first supplied with only 64 Mb RAM. I requested it have 128 Mb, since the lesser setup was slow with multimedia of the time (it had fast Internet, so I knew it was the amount of RAM). After the RAM upgrade, using the computer was a breeze.

I also took very good care of the hard drive and the OS, keeping it updated & secure, and since its users mostly used Netscape for business, then viruses and exploits never made it there.

At that time it [the popular version of Netscape] was Netscape Communciator 4.x. I think on that PC we stuck with 4.79 for a long time (the last of 4.x was 4.8, released in 2002 :-). The 4.x branch was the first to support CSS, but that was the only feature which caused crashes when turned on (especially in 4.0x), so I kept it off on all our Netscapes, which were fairly solid after that. Despite the clunky Navigator, the best part was the e-mail client, which introduced mail filters to fight spam (then seen as controversial).

We skipped Netscape 6, never considered 7.x, and in newer PC's moved instead to Mozilla, the open-source descendant of Netscape and which Netscape 6 and 7 were based on anyway.

As Mozilla Foundation started Firefox, it ceased Mozilla development, which was taken over by others, and Mozilla Application Suite became SeaMonkey.

The last version of SeaMonkey for Windows 98/Me is 1.1.19 ([from] 2010); its Gecko rendering engine is a wee bit newer than that of Firefox 2.0 (Gecko 1.8.1.20 vs 1.8.1.24).

msn connectivity of Pidgin 2.6.6 in Windows 98

I very recently attempted to connect with Pidgin IM 2.6.6 (the last to run on Windows 98, AFAIK) to the .NET Messenger Service, which handles Windows Live Messenger connections. In short, I wanted to connect to msn, but it was impossible because of certificate issues.

The typical solution is to upgrade Pidgin to version 2.7.6, but this version relies on the gtk+ 2.10.xx or newer runtime (a library), which won't run on Windows 98/SE, so users of this operating system may feel stuck.

The solution is thus:

• Close Pidgin.
• The real solution is at SQuID's rants blog post or at the Pidgin developer site.
• Caveats: The filenames must be
  Microsoft_Secure_Server_Authority_2010.pem
  and
  Microsoft_Secure_Server_Authority_2010.pem
  If by any chance the files saved save as *.pem.log
  or anything that does not directly end with a .pem extension, then rename them to *.pem (the asterisk stands for filenames).

The following was my initial solution, but there was a chance that it might not have worked. For other purposes, I left it as a tutorial on how to export and save certificates in W98/Me.

• Go to
  C:\WINDOWS\Application Data\.purple\certificates\x509\tls_peers
  or
  C:\WINDOWS\Profiles\Profilename\Application Data\.purple\certificates\x509\tls_peers
• There you will see what appear to be .com (command) files which are appropriately shown as such by Windows Explorer, but they are actually certificates. Amongst them you will see the omega.contacts.msn.com file. Back that file up by moving it somewhere else, but keep that directory window open and copy its address bar contents into the clipboard.
• With Internet Explorer, connect to
  https://omega.contacts.msn.com
  You may get a denied directory listing, but perhaps the most important part of it is that you'll be presented with a new certificate. —
• View the certificate, go to the Details tab.
• In the Details tab, click the "Copy to File..." button;
• In the Certificate Manager Export Wizard, click next;
• Choose the Base64 encoded X.509 (.CER) format, click the Next button;
• In the Export File Name step, browse to
  C:\WINDOWS\Application Data\.purple\certificates\x509\tls_peers
  or your profile location (best now to paste the location of .purple certificates into the File Name field and then pressing the Enter button for the filepicker to reach the folder), then write the filename as omega.contacts.msn.com, click Save. As the full filename path is now given in the "File name:" field, click Next.
• In the next step, you'll see the certificate export summary, where you'll just have to click Finish and the system will prompt that the export has completed successfully. But that's not everything.
• Restore the abovementioned tls_peers folder window and you'll see that omega.contacts.msn.com may not be that, but omega.contacts.msn.com.cer

  (that is, if you can see the .cer extension. If not, but the file has a certificate icon and not a program icon, go to View > Folder Options > View tab > and in Advanced Settings, uncheck "Hide file extensions for known file types", click OK).

  The solution is to rename the .cer file by removing .cer from the filename. Windows will ask for a confirmation as to changing the file extension (the renamed file will have .com extension). Confirm the rename.
• If it's impossible to change Windows settings as to showing filename extensions (you may be using a work computer, but such a situation is rare with a Windows 9x PC), and if you still can access MS-DOS Prompt, then rename the file from there:
  Type
  cd "C:\WINDOWS\Application Data\.purple\certificates\x509\tls_peers"
  or just type
  cd "
  and paste the certificate directory address by accessing the window menu (click once on the MS-DOS icon and choose Paste from the Edit submenu), type another quote,
  press Enter.
  Your profile directory path may vary as stated above depending on settings.
  Use dir command to get a directory listing. That should show short and long file names. If you see omega.contacts.msn.com.cer as the filename of the msn certificate, rename it:
  rename omega.contacts.msn.com.cer omega.contacts.msn.com
  That should do it. Type exit, press Enter key to close the MS-DOS Prompt window.
• Now start Pidgin and see what happens at the msn login. I could successfuly log in, so you should hopefully not have any trouble either.

I got the initial above solution from Ticket #12906 at the Pidgin developer site.

Various iterations of gtk+ 2.6.10 for Windows

Today I was searching for various iterations of later Gtk+ 2.6.xx runtimes compiled for Windows, to see which project offers their most recent version of Gtk+ 2.6 and if there is anything newer than 2.6.10-rc1.

The reason for this kind of search is that Gtk+ 2.6.10 is the last major version of Gtk+ to run on Windows 98/Me, providing compatibility for a number of important Gtk-based applications, including Pidgin, an instant messaging program and GIMP, an image processing app.

The free software nature of Gtk+ means that many projects that depend on Gtk+ can create their own versions that may be more compatible with their apps.

The GladeWin project at SourceForge.net has perhaps the most stable version of Gtk+ that I know of, offering
2.6.10-rc1 for download.

The Pidgin instant messaging project on SourceForge has
2.6.10 Rev A

The Gimp-Win project, which specialises in releasing The GIMP for Windows, offers
Gtk+ 2.6.10-20050823.
This is possibly the most widespread variant of all Gtk+ 2.6.xx releases available, but not all that stable.

The Gtk-Win project run by Alex Shaduri offers
2.6.9-050806-ash /dated 06.08.2005, if dates for the 2.6.9 release date at ftp.gtk.org are correct /The installer is in English and Russian

Windows Update error 0X80072F89 in Windows 98

If anyone gets their hands on a really old computer with 32Mb of RAM and, of course, a legitimate installation of Windows 95/98 in it, updating that operating system through Windows Update may prove to be a slight hurdle.

Internet Explorer 5.0 on its own is now quite an old web browser, but there are at least two reasons why it's important to download updates through Windows Update:

• After browsing around the web to research the error, the most common suggested remedy was to install Internet Explorer 6 on the computer, but given that as a major next version, a typical installation of IE6 would take more system resources to run on a computer with 32Mb of RAM, than, say, IE5 that's already been installed.
  
• Connecting to Windows Update early is especially useful in cases when the computer keeps acting up because of a software issue that must be fixed first.
  

1. The first useful suggestion I got is to update root certificates for Internet Explorer, as suggested here.
   
2. And this nice Microsoft newsgroup post offers a direct download link for it. Just in case, I'm providing the download link for ROOTSUPD.EXE here, too.

After that, Windows Update should work fine.

So if Internet Explorer 5 has already been installed, Internet Explorer 5.01 Service Pack 2 might also solve the issue, but I can then only vouch for it once I get to update another computer with Windows 98 that's already been installed on a PC. To download IE5.01SP2 and other assorted browser goodies, the browser archive at evolt.org is the best place to start.

Deleting files with Shift+Del in Windows 95/98

Over all those years using Windows 95/98/98SE, I had issues with permanently deleting files with the Shift+Del key combination: Either I'd get the vanilla deletion dialog (after which I had to retry) or sometimes I'd hit lucky with a real permanent file deletion dialog.

This Summer I discovered that the trick was to hold the Shift key until the permanent deletion dialog appeared, which then seemed to solve my problem with all this.