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Old February 11th 18, 07:54 AM posted to microsoft.public.win98.gen_discussion,microsoft.public.windowsxp.general
Paul[_6_]
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Default Cant switch default browser

wrote:
On Fri, 2 Feb 2018 10:16:08 -0800, Mike Easter
wrote:

wrote:
I'm running Win98se.

What is this hardware running W98se? CPU (including flags such as sse2
and cmov or not), ram, graphics.


You got me.... I dont even know what most of that stuff means.
It's a 18 year old computer, that is all I know.
I dont see why that matters anyhow. This is about browsers and Win98.
The hardware runs just fine...


The OSes you can run on a computer, are determined in
small part by the choices the software company made. If
they design the software to use SSE2 instructions (a common
thing), then older processors without SSE2 can't run that OS.
That's why he is asking questions.

"SSE2... initial version of the Pentium 4 in 2001"

Windows 10 for example, has maybe six or seven of those
gubbins you need, to run the OS. Which is why you need
something more modern than a Pentium 4 to run Win10. By
asking about SSE2 and CMOV, implies an OS that doesn't
have quite the same appetite for custom features.

If you want to see just how many of those instruction set
and feature flags there are, this utility lists quite a few
of them. But this isn't likely to run on Windows 98.

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sys...loads/coreinfo

And there's info on where that stuff comes from. The privileged
CPUID instructions have the flags as a series of bits. While Intel
has several utilities for "Processor Identification", I don't know
if there's one for Win98 that dumps the flags. Undoubtedly somebody,
at some time, has written a utility similar to the one described
in this article.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CPUID

Linux gives easy access to the info. But not every Linux LiveDVD
boots on old computers (I've tried). And I don't know if Puppy
has the info available or not. You can see an example here, of
/proc/cpuinfo belching up the details.

https://www.cyberciti.biz/media/new/...oc-cpuinfo.png

Paul