Hi! It's been a while, and a lot has been going on. I upgraded to Windows XP Home SP2, and I decided I needed more memory so I added 128 MB to my existing 128 MB.
Windows XP seems to me like it's a completely different operating system than 98 SE. All those services! Well, now I've had a month or two to get used to it, and I feel a lot more comfortable than I did in the beginning. Now I'm trying to get XP to perform better. I've been reading some articles and forum threads, and I increased the file cache to 128 MB, which is half of my memory. I also initially moved the pagefile (virtual memory on hard disk) to a second hard disk. Now I hear that it helps to make a pagefile in the system partition at a size recommended for XP. I also increased my other pagefile to 1 GB, 2x my memory. Increasing the file cache in memory helps noticeably. I'm not sure about the pagefiles - I'll have to see.
Other than that, I have a second partition that is formatted as FAT32, which is supposed to be faster than the normal XP disk format. I try to put all of my new files on that partition, Drive D:.
One other thing - I got a copy of Visual Basic .Net from Microsoft for free, for watching 5 of their training videos (short ones) streaming over the Internet. This was some time ago. I really want to get up the nerve to start learning about it and write some little programs, like "Hello World."
I recently changed my ISP to Netscape Internet Service, which doesn't give you server space, so I am switching my website, and I'll be writing new webpages for it. So far, Netscape is pretty dependable - no line drops, some problems with DNS server.
I wrote a Windows PowerPro script to run the Netscape dialer and make it dial. Of course, it references the location of the dialer file, so you may have to change that line if you somehow manage to install the Netscape files somewhere else besides the default location. It works pretty well - I have it on an Internet key on my Internet keyboard. Sometimes things screw up - I think it's mostly the fault of the dialer program. By the way, although Firefox is not officially supported, I'm using it with just some problems with the dialer starting things up after connecting.
Here's the script:
