This is topic Internet Explorer 5.5 in forum Film-Yak at Film-Tech Forum ARCHIVE.
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Posted by Paul G. Thompson (Member # 655) on 04-07-2001, 08:35 PM:
A real POS. We all know that. What size claw hammer do I use to rip out what specific files so I can load IE 5.0 without destroying the entire windows 98 directory?
That 5.5 is nothing short of a bug infested program that never seems to work properly. 
Posted by Adam Martin (Member # 641) on 04-07-2001, 08:51 PM:
If you upgraded from 5.0, you should be able to uninstall the upgrade from the control panel (add/remove programs). I wasn't real fond of 5.5 myself.Otherwise, you could download 5.5 service pack 1 from http://windowsupdate.microsoft.com . This fixed a lot of my problems, but just didn't "do it" for me. I'm running 5.01 SP1 now, and will probably download SP2 this weekend.
If you're feeling particularly adventurous, I hear the beta version of 6.0 has been released... 
Posted by Paul G. Thompson (Member # 655) on 04-07-2001, 09:06 PM:
Hi, Adam. It is not possible to remove 5.5 through add/remove programs. The only option available is to "FIX" it, but that often fails.
Beta 6.0? Oh, God......
They should get their old crap running correctly before they screw up something else.
Posted by Adam Martin (Member # 641) on 04-07-2001, 09:19 PM:
Job security. 
Posted by Joe Redifer (Member # 3) on 04-07-2001, 10:26 PM:
6.0 beta? I thought IE 4.0-5.5 were all betas! Actually they are, based on the fact that they are all pretty buggy (some more than others).With 6.0 they are probably beta testing it to see which bugs they need to add. They need to make sure it will give everyone some grief and not just most people.
Actually, they're not bugs. They're "features".
Posted by Paul G. Thompson (Member # 655) on 04-07-2001, 10:43 PM:
Actually, Joe, the 5.01 seems to be a good browser when all the updates (about 30 megs worth) are downloaded and installed.I have had very good luck with it.
Posted by Joe Redifer (Member # 3) on 04-08-2001, 02:17 AM:
I am using IE version 5C. Of course I am on a Mac. It's probably one of the better browsers on the system, but every once in awhile it will crash hard for absolutely no reason at all. Well except for being programmed by MicroSoft. Netscape works well but it is just too slow for me. Both IE and Netscape work much faster when you assign the cache to a RAM DISK. Both browsers slowly reload when you hit the "back" button otherwise.
You can do RAM DISKS in Windows, right? I honestly have no idea.
Posted by Ian Price (Member # 14) on 04-08-2001, 02:29 AM:
Well, just because I'm a masocist and I don't know any better, I just upgraded to IE6.0 public preview.So far, I notice absolutly no difference. The About section tells me that this is IE6.0 and that it is based on Mosaic. But it looks exactly the same and so far behaves exactly the same.
There is one new icon on the tool bar. It is called a Personal Bar, but I haven't clicked on it yet.
They didn't even dress it up like the MSN Explorer.
The more things change, the more they stay the same.
Posted by Jason Burroughs (Member # 68) on 04-08-2001, 03:21 AM:
Joe,Regarding Windows 95 - ME the swap file is general managed by Windows itself unless specified otherwise by the user. It is also known a virtual memory. Typical settings is 0 minimum with a max being the size of the C partition. With Windows NT the swap file should be set with a minimum matching the physical RAM, and a max double that. IE if physical RAM is 128MB then minimum should be 128 and max be 256. You can set a larger swapfile but it will not be utilized. One of the major advantages of NT is the ditching of the DOS memory model that is still used in current version of Windows (98 & ME) the OS can only access 640KB of memory at one time. the rest is utilized by page files. When a user gets a Page Fault error it is generall caused by the corruption of the data in one of these page files. NT skips all this and is just one reason NT is more stable. Windows ME is the last release on the old DOS kernel. Windows XP is based on the NT kernel.
Posted by Randy Stankey (Member # 64) on 04-08-2001, 03:45 AM:
VM takes some of your hard drive and sections it off for use as if it were RAM. You get the appearence of RAM but at the cost of speed.What Joe is taking about is RAM disk. It is the exact opposite of Virtual Memory. This is done by taking some of your exess RAM and telling the system that it's OK to pretend that it's a hard drive. Mondo-fast but eats up your RAM if you don't have a lot.
PS: Joe; did you install that firmware upgrade? (2.1.7) I did and had no problems with my 3rd party RAM. How about you? I'm still wondering if I should "downgrade" back to 2.1.6.
Posted by Adam Martin (Member # 641) on 04-08-2001, 10:13 AM:
From everything I've read about MSIE 6.0, it will finally conform to w3c standards. Hypothetically, this means that web designers no longer have to program "work-arounds" to get the stupid thing to work the way it's supposed to.If a designer places a !doctype tag specifying which standard to follow, the browser will automatically follow that standard. If there is no !doctype tag, the browser defaults to the unstandard 5.x crap that it was displaying before. That is why Ian has not noticed any change; no one is using the !doctype tag yet.
More info at Webmonkey
Posted by Joe Redifer (Member # 3) on 04-08-2001, 04:25 PM:
Randy - I have not installed the firmware upgrade. I really don't think that I need to. My G4 is running purty sweet as it is. I don't have any 3rd party RAM. Just one big 256 meg stick. I did upgrade firmware a long time ago and noticed no difference. I don't think you can downgrade firmware.
Virtual memory sucks. I always have it turned off. I can't believe X doesn't even allow you to turn it off.
Posted by Randy Stankey (Member # 64) on 04-08-2001, 04:44 PM:
I use VM sometimes when I'm doing a really big PhotoShop file or something like that. I don't care one way or another about it. Matter of fact, I don't even know if I have it on or off right now.Now, RAM disk! I forgot all about that! Up until recently, I didn't have enough RAM to even think about it! Now I have 192MB. That's enough to start using it modestly, isn't it? Now, tell me... what were you doing? Putting your IE cache file into RD? How much space are you giving it?
Wanna' buy another 64MB of Apple's RAM? I just took it out. (It's PC 100 / iMac, the kind you use, right?) I have a little application that checks your RAM for you to make sure it's compliant with Apple's new "stricter" standards. All my RAM checks out. (Got it from Ram-Jet.)
Apple published a 2.1.6 firmware "update" on iDisk shortly after this whole question came up. I was thinking about downloading it. but as long as things are running OK then I'll leave it as-is. Like you, I noticed no real differences.
Posted by Scott Norwood (Member # 30) on 04-08-2001, 07:49 PM:
Virtual memory (swap) is generally a Good Thing. I can't really think of a reason why anyone would want to turn it off, unless the disk performance on a given system is just horrible.
When setting up virtual memory, performance can be increased significantly if the swap space is on a different partition or (preferably) physical disk from the one where most of the disk activity is taking place. This is easy to set up on WinNT or Unix systems (some of which can be made to use the /tmp partition for swap space as well), but I'm not sure on how to do this with other OSes.
RAM disks are pretty archaic. They might have made sense at one time for PCs where floppies and slow MFM hard disks were common, but they're pretty much obsolete now, although the idea of using one for a browser cache is an interesting idea. The problem here, though, is that in most cases that would just mean trading disk activity caused by the browser cache for disk activity caused by increased need for swapping to virtual memory, thus killing any potential performance improvement. If you had a few gigs of RAM, though, this might make sense.
Posted by Steven Gorsky (Member # 603) on 04-08-2001, 08:08 PM:
I beleive you can tell a Mac where to place the swap file.On Netscape you can set sizes for the memory cache and disk cache. Setting the memory cache to a good size would be like using a ram disk.
Steven Gorsky
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Projectionist
Posted by Joe Redifer (Member # 3) on 04-08-2001, 09:47 PM:
I always leave Virtual Memory off on the Mac. It actually DOES increase performance when you turn it off on a Mac. UNIX OS's love VM, though. Pretty soon RAM will be so inexpensive that having 2 Gigs o' RAM will be considered "bare bones". It would be stupid to rely on hard drive space for RAM at that point in time. As Scott once said himself; "Even the fastest hard drive is slower than the slowest RAM."
Posted by Scott Norwood (Member # 30) on 04-08-2001, 11:09 PM:
Joe -- you're forgetting about software bloat -- i.e. software demands will grow to fill available hardware capacity, and then some.
At my previous employer, we had a machine with 13 gigs of RAM, and yet still had about a hundred gigs of swap on a big RAID array (yes, the swap was striped across the RAID array for better performance). It was very cool. Of course, having 8 processors didn't hurt the performance, either...
The film-tech webserver box has two separate 128-meg swap partitions (primarily because Linux limits the size of the swap partition to 128 megs), but that's really overkill for a machine that is just a web/mail/ftp server.
Posted by Joe Redifer (Member # 3) on 04-09-2001, 12:41 AM:
Scott - I am counting on more efficient programming! I do know that UNIX and its cousins (even Mac OS X) definitely function better with VM than without. I don't see that going away. If they can do it without me having to listen to the hard drive grind away (Maxtors are pretty quiet) then I will be happy. I hate hard drive noise. Also, the more hard drives read/write the sooner they go bad. RAM has no moving parts. It should last longer than your computer unless you buy that crappy Iraqi RAM I know that my mailbox on the Film-Tech server gets its own 128 swap file. It was necessary.
Posted by Cory Johnson (Member # 103) on 04-12-2001, 09:50 PM:
Take heart, 5.1 IE in OS X is a POS also.
Omniweb & Mac OS X & 1GB Ram & Dual G4/500 & Cable = Great experience.
They still have some more bug fixes and updates to do, but it is looking very bright.
Posted by Jonathan Haglund (Member # 807) on 04-13-2001, 02:15 AM:
Lots of topics in here...
<2 cents>
Why bother with IE at all? Its fast and everything, but like you may have noticed, its no quality product. Use mozilla instead. Its near production quality, moreso than IE is, and is everything IE 6+ promise to be.Ram disks are very current technology, only outdated because the current memory model utilizes the ram more efficiently. The only place they are officially used is on the emergwncy boot disk for win9x. BTW, win9x uses the 9x kernel, which is based on the DOS one in the sense of 16 bit compatability. It is completely different in all other resepects and it is that compatability that makes it unstable. (NT runs 16 bit stuff, but in a way that is can not take down the system)
Linux can use a swap greater than 128. Just make the swap partition bigger. I usually use 256, and I have 384 megs of ram. The *BSD's are better for servers. In the event of flooding, they take a lot more punches before getting knocked out.
VM is different from a ram disk. I think that was covered. Be warned against mixing Mac terms with PC terms. Macs are much friendlier with ram disks, but setting the memory cache in the browser is about the same thing. Also, turning VM off is good on Macs if you have a lot of ram since the more hard drive space you have devoted to the VM, the more overhead the finder (kernel in Mac X, but its VM is MUCH faster anyway), causing the slowdowns. Just dont run out of ram, macs hate that.
When tuning the VM on a PC: Its best, but not required to have the swap file (the VM file on the disk) to be on a separate drive. If it is, it needs it own bus (plug) on the main board, otherwise its pointless. But the big speed hit is when during a page operation, windows needs to resize the swap file. Just manually set it to 1.5 times the amount of physical ram you have.
But if theres one thing you should remember...wear sunscrean.
I mean use Mozilla, and a mac. Windoze is really only good for compatability and uptight IT techs with rebates and fat bonus's being waved in their face by a nameless corporation in Redmond.
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Jonathan Haglund
Edwards Theatre Circuit, Inc
Park Place 10
Posted by Joe Redifer (Member # 3) on 04-13-2001, 02:23 AM:
I have never tried Mozilla. However that is because I hear that it is a slightly better version of Netscape 6 and is nearer to completion. When I design pages according to W3C specs, often they do not display anywhere close to proper in Netscape 6, especially when dealing with embedded tables. How is Mozilla in this matter?
Posted by Jonathan Haglund (Member # 807) on 04-13-2001, 02:52 AM:
Netscape 6 is based on Milestone relase 17 or 18 of Mozilla. There have been many great enhancements/fixes since then. It is now version 0.8.1 and while I dont know about that bug specifially, many hundreds have been squashed since the Netscape 6 release.
http://www.mozilla.org
for those not in the know------------------
Jonathan Haglund
Edwards Theatre Circuit, Inc
Park Place 10
Posted by Scott Norwood (Member # 30) on 04-13-2001, 02:59 AM:
Jonathan is right, I was wrong. Linux _does_ let you use >128MB swap partitions, but only with kernel versions 2.2 and later. The FT server _is_ running a 2.2 kernel, but I didn't realize that the swap limitations had changed when I set it up, since most of the machines which I had run before then were based on the 2.0 kernels (which, admittedly, are kind of archaic, but are also quite stable).
As for the BSD vs. Linux issue -- I think this is more of a religious argument than a truly practical one. Each has its own advantages--I'm mostly knowledgeable about NetBSD and OpenBSD (my FreeBSD experience is only with an ISP I had that used it...it seemed similar, of course); they're good OSes and the releases are more tightly controlled, less "bleeding edge," etc. On the other hand, they're also a bit archaic in some ways (especially multiprocessor support, which Linux has been doing fairly well for a few years now). All run on multiple platforms (though FreeBSD is primarily x86), as does Linux. I'm not totally sure that I buy the "BSD is mmore stable" argument, though. I've had Linux machines (including the poor little 386 box that still runs my mail and web servers) with 250+ day uptimes (limited only by the power company), and have never had one crash hard. My 386 box is currently at 122 days of uptime, btw.
Part of the reason that Linux gets a somewhat bad reputation is that there are so many less-than-wonderful distributions. I'm very partial to Slackware since the days when it was the only option. Redhat, Caldera, Corel, etc. are junk by comparison, and tend to be less stable because they depend on more "bleeding edge" beta-quality software. Further, Linux seems to be generally more popular and thus tends to have less experienced users, which helps to give it a poor reputation. This isn't to say that the BSD variants are bad, just that my own opinion is that their advantages over Linux are more limited than they might seem. Linux does stuff like allow for installation over a serial console, which is one of the reasons why I chose it, since I'm several thousand miles away from Brad and might someday need that capability.
Basically, I like most of the Unix variants. Solaris is my personal favorite at the moment, but only on Sparc hardware. Linux and Net/OpenBSD would be my preferences on x86 hardware. If I'd played with FreeBSD more, I would probably like it as well.
Posted by Jonathan Haglund (Member # 807) on 04-13-2001, 04:21 AM:
Projection tie in:
The poor quality of the linux distributions is much akin to the teenage operator. The more that exist and get created (trained) faster, the lower the quality. The more work and thought (!) put into the project, the better the result. Debian on the linux side, most everyone here on the projection side.As for the BSD "issue", yes its religious, but your religion is wrong. Just kidding. I never said either was more stable, I dont think I've seen a linux box go down without be stabbing it to death. BSD just has the numbers. ftp.cdrom.com = most traffic in a single day using FreeBSD. Thats good stuff there when the distributed but well maintained project beats out the silly microsoft New(?) Technology systems.
BSD has the issue of being segregated to niche markets. Each being very good at its niche, but not so much in general purpose use like linux is.
Simple solution: Overthrow the evil tyrants in Redmond, replace their system with a BSD based one (read :Mac OS X) and have a nice, technologically superior unix world, just like it all began. And like I said before, screw IE.(pay no attention the the navigator.appName behind the curtain, even I dabble in a bit of IE heresy sometimes, but I still hate it)
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Jonathan Haglund
Edwards Theatre Circuit, Inc
Park Place 10
Posted by Joe Redifer (Member # 3) on 04-13-2001, 05:11 AM:
What about Omniweb for Mac OS X? I hear it was designed and programmed by Jesus Christ Almighty. Or at least that's what you would think when you hear some of the raves about it. I haven't tried it (I only have X beta), but I know it is not yet complete, either. I'm sure it complies to W3C standards, but do you think Jesus included support for DHTML and style sheets (linked and unlinked) when he designed it? I haven't seen any Mac browsers that use either very well at all. Personally, I think DHTML kinda sucks. It's no substitute for the sloppy JavaScript code that I like to write. But style sheets are pretty damn cool. Actually IE5 OS 9 seems to support the style sheets pretty well.
Posted by Scott Norwood (Member # 30) on 04-13-2001, 07:34 AM:
Oddly enough, I'm not actually religious about OS choice. I use whatever happens to work, with preference given to whatever I am already familiar with and/or stuff that is less expensive. If it does the job, I don't really care what it is. There are even some things that NT does well, but being a web/mail/ftp/dns server isn't one of them.
On the other hand, some things can only be justified by religion: emacs sucks, vi forever!
Posted by Brad Miller (Member # 2) on 04-13-2001, 04:44 PM:
I will spare the FT community on my thoughts for that inredibly annoying piece of shit known as "Vi". Scott knows what I mean. 
Posted by Joe Redifer (Member # 3) on 04-13-2001, 04:57 PM:
Hmmmm, this "Vi" sounds pretty good! I wonder if MicroSoft will adopt it into their new OS? Actually I have never even heard of "Vi", apparently for a reason.
Posted by Brad Miller (Member # 2) on 04-13-2001, 05:18 PM:
Joe, this "Vi" program was written long before people realized they could use the 4 arrow keys to move around on the screen. Let's say you need to move down a line. Simple, just hit some stupid combination like CTRL/SHIFT/W and viola! Need to move up a line? Try something equally senseless like SHIFT/ALT/F3! Need to move back a character, was it ALT/SHIFT/Z? I don't know and after giving it a couple of shots, do not ever care to know! Scott can give history on it and why it is so annoying, for apparently a long time ago keyboards did not have arrow keys or something and people had to use keyboard short cuts. Scott mastered this program when he was in the 3rd grade (I'm assuming) but I am not computer-literate enough for my brain to be able to handle keyboard shortcuts of this magnitude. Every other program I have ever worked on uses a mouse or arrow keys and this thing just makes my head explode. Then again, me never said me wuz smart or nothin.
Posted by Joe Redifer (Member # 3) on 04-13-2001, 05:24 PM:
AWESOME!!!!!!! Where can I get my copy? This "Point and Click/Drag and Drop" nonsense has gone on far too long!However, "Vi" still seems like it needs a little work. Only three different buttons comprise a single shortcut? What's up with that? There should be no less than 11 simultaneous buttons required to be pressed for any one command. That way you have to use all 10 fingers plus your nose/chin/other appendage.
Posted by Scott Norwood (Member # 30) on 04-13-2001, 05:36 PM:
Joe -- MS actually _does_ provide a (rather poor) vi clone in the NT resource kit. Mac OS X also includes vi. There are also a number of vi clones which are publicly available. vim is popular, runs on many platforms, is free with source code, and is available at http://www.vim.org/
There is more information about vi in general at http://www.vi-editor.org/
Brad is a frequent visitor to the "vi Lover's Home Page": http://www.thomer.com/thomer/vi/vi.html
Really cool people who use vi to write HTML can use the "vi powered" logo on their pages: http://www.darryl.com/vi.shtml
Posted by Ian Price (Member # 14) on 04-19-2001, 08:21 PM:
Ok, so I tried IE6.0 and Netscape6.0 Both are based on Mozzila. I don't get what the difference is. But here are my observations.IE5.5 is stable, fast and well integrated to Windows 98. IE6.0 loads slower and has a weird lag when it loads pages.
Netscape6.0 loads even slower and has the same lag. Also the Back function didn't work with Film-Tech. When it did work, I got the "no book marking" page.
I have deleted both of those programs from my computer and have gone to IE5.5 with the service pack 2 update. I have also loaded Netscape4.8, which loads fast and seems pretty good.
I didn't have any disasters with either browser in version 6.0 but unless they have some neat new feature, I think I'll stick with these versions for a while.
But I'm still wondering what Windows X will be like?
Posted by Brad Miller (Member # 2) on 04-19-2001, 08:50 PM:
Interesting about the back button with Netscape 6.0 Are the GOOD older versions still available? This doesn't surprise me too much, as apparently there are various known compatibility issues with the newer version of this forum program and Netscape 6.
Posted by Ian Price (Member # 14) on 04-19-2001, 08:59 PM:
Netscape and Microsoft offer all their older versions for download off of their sites.I downloaded Netscape 4.8 which said it was the latest full version. I downloaded just the browser. It seems to work very well.
Posted by John Wilson (Member # 269) on 04-20-2001, 03:05 AM:
We're running an old computer here that Noah left behind when he got on board the ark...It's an IBM with a 28k modem and IE4 installed. If I wanted to upgrade IE which version should I go for? There are several listed as suitable at the microsoft site, but I don't want to download the wrong one and stuff up the computer...
...any ideas?
Posted by Joe Redifer (Member # 3) on 04-20-2001, 03:18 AM:
Ian- You mean Windows XP? Good god that looks horrible. Imagine the ugliest operating system you that you possible can. Windows XP is about 1,000 times worse than that.
Posted by John Wilson (Member # 269) on 04-30-2001, 04:59 PM:
Also, Netscape 6.0 seems to mix up the fonts between paragraphs...think I'll go with the 4.8 option.
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Children really brighten up your life...they never turn off lights.
Posted by Jonathan Haglund (Member # 807) on 05-01-2001, 06:08 AM:
Don't judge Mozilla based on Netscape 6. It is based on an old and very out dated version of the Mozilla code. You can get the lastest Mozilla at www.mozilla.org IE 6 is not based on mozilla. Microsoft would never cave in and use standards compliant software that is stable at the same time.
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Jonathan Haglund
Edwards Theatre Circuit, Inc
Park Place 10