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| September 27th, 1998 |
Win98 supports USB
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Universal Serial Bus is the long-awaited addition to Windows 98. USB defines a whole new class of hardware
that makes it easy to add serial devices to your computer. USB support is built to the WDM (Windows Driver Model)
specification so that future updates of Windows will support current drivers. With it, you can use a single IRQ
(serial port) to control up to 127 separate devices, provided of course that your hardware (motherboard or adapter
card) supports USB!
With Windows 98 and USB, you can view streaming data, including digital audio, DVD, or broadcast PC, on your
computer. To install a USB device, simply plug the cord from the device into any USB port on your computer.
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| September 13th, 1998 |
Intel Application Launch Accelerator for Win98.
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Win98's Defrag program includes IALA which loads software faster.
" Intel Application Launch Accelerator (IALA) technology dramatically speeds up the time it takes for
software applications to load from the hard disk drive by improving the performance of PC storage subsystems."
Also Norton's speed disk supports the new application log feastures. Information from Nortion:
"Speed Disk in Norton Utilities 3.0 does support the Windows 98 application log feature, and in fact uses
the algorithms for laying down the applogged sectors. Speed Disk will also move the swap file, which is very
advantageous. Since applog fragments a portion of the disk on purpose, the fragmentation level of the drive could
appear artificially high. LiveUpdate #3 includes a change for this (which is a Windows 98-specific fix)."
If you want to view which files it is optimizing the log is optlog.txt. Also, Task Monitor is the utility that
monitors a Windows session and takes note of which programs are used the most.
This data is later used by the Disk Defragmenter to organize your programs more efficiently.
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| September 6th, 1998 |
SCANREG
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New in Win98 is Scanreg.exe. Scanreg runs upon bootup and keeps copies of the last five registries. The
options switches with scanreg are:
/? (To display usage.)
/backup
/restore (Choose a backup to restore.)
/fix (Repair and rebuild the registry.)
/opt (Compress the registry.)
You can change the number of default backups and add additional files by editing scanreg.ini.
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