[trevw]

Hi guys

Ive got an old PC, which is running WinMe still, and i want to use it it on my broadband connection. I have some anti virus software, but need a firewall.

The machine trundles along quite slowly anyway so im trying to find a lean firewall (and preferably free!) that will run on winme. Can anyone recommend anything?.

I know i should be looking for a new PC and XP but i need to manage with this one for maybee another 6 months, so any suggestions would be appreciated. I was thinking of zonealarm free, but ive been told it is bloated and doesnt really support ME anymore?.

Finally i am having hell trying to find upto date drivers for the graphics
card which admittedly is very old. Its an Nvidia riva tnt2 model 64
(32Mb) tried one off driverguide and it didnt work, the Nvidia site
didnt seem to have one either. Anyone got any ideas where i
might be able to get as uptodate a driver as possible?

Thanks

Trev

 

[Glaswegian]

Hi Trev and welcome.

ZA will still work with WinME - see here

http://www.zonelabs.com/store/includes/zaSystemRequirements_popup.jsp

To my mind ZA is the best firewall. I have used the free versions on 95 and 98 with no problems. Since moving to XP, I decided that security was important enough to warrant the purchase of the Pro edition and I have no complaints.

I think this should be the correct graphics driver but please check the release notes to make sure

http://www.nvidia.com/object/win9x_56.64.html

I had this card in the past and the version number rings a bell.

HTH

Regards

 

[trevw]

Wow thanks for the quick response

I owe you one

Trev

 

[trevw]

Sorry to hassle you guys again

installed the firewall, everything seemed fine.

About an hour later the machine froze, and wouldnt reboot even in safe

So (perhaps foolishly) i sorted out my boot floppy and ran fdisk / format (took ages on a 40GB disk) and started a clean install

at 89% i got 'Standard Mode Invalid DPMI Return from' (forgotten the rest sorry)

does anyone have any ideas what is the most likely cause?.

I have looked on microsofts site and they suggest it may be bad ram??

 

[RavenMind]

I tried running ZoneAlarm on my ME machine, and it was nothing but headaches. It would freeze, go blank, and give the BSOD regularly - that is until I uninstalled it. Since I got rid of ZoneAlarm, everything has been running smoothly. I would give Syagate Personal Firewall a try. I've been running it since July & haven't had any problems. It starts up quickly & is only as intrusive as you want it to be. :grin:

 

[trevw]

It goes from bad to worse.

I tried to reinstall me, no success. Tried to format again and got
'invalid partition' so i rerean fdisk and got 'runtime error'

is my HDD broken physically?.

 

[RavenMind]

Do you have another computer you can slave that HDD to & run a few tests?