I use RetroZilla 2.0, even though right now it's just a rebrand of SeaMonkey... but it's very stable and works great for stuff like VOGONS and Google Images, Wikipedia, etc... even some light news browsing.

As for a media player, Media Player Classic maybe?

Making this post from RetroZilla 😜

Why exactly would you want to play DVDs on such a system..? An old version of Geexbox running from a bootable CD would be my preference. Otherwise, you'll want something that can make use of whatever hardware acceleration features are present on your video card. If you have an ATI card, that will likely be the ATI DVD Player. (Last time I checked, the official download had some kind of awkward check in its installer, but it can easily be bypassed.) An old version of PowerDVD will also work.

K-Meleon should also work with KernelEx.

For years I've used KernelEx 4.5 Final (big mistake after seeing 4.5.2 requires a clean Win9x install with no system file patching from older versions), it worked well enough for my purposes.

For VLC I use 0.8.6b, it honestly isn't that old and it works great, even DVDs are rock solid.

For Firefox I use 3.6.28 with KernelEx, I found anything higher would constantly freeze on Windows ME using KernelEx 4.5 Final.

I'm re-installing Windows ME on my Thinkpad project system, so I will be using the latest and greatest KernelEx 4.5.2, hopefully it supports more programs.

A system that old should play DVDs fine.

An older version of PowerDVD (e.g. 4.0) will also run fine on that system and be able to play most DVDs without a hitch.

As for a web browser, try an older version of Opera. IIRC, most versions of "old interface" Opera should work on Windows 98SE, up to version 11 and maybe 12. Opera is also fairly lightweight compared to some other browsers, meaning you can have a decent amount of tabs open without encountering much slowdown.
Don't bother with installing Flash or Java, both are massive security holes and will slow down your system.

Isnt there a media player classic the plays everything I listed?

DVD playback has been around the 90s

and does opera 12 work out of the box without kernelex and does that version also work on nt4?

Opera 12.02 requires KernelEx, and other stuff as mentioned here:
http://kernelex.sourceforge.net/wiki/Opera

It's probably the "best" browser available now, though still crap.

Oldskoolmaniac wrote:

Isnt there a media player classic the plays everything I listed?

The only things you listed are "play MP3 @ 320kbps and avi as well as popping in a dvd". Pretty much any media player will play MP3. And "avi" can mean just about anything – there are so many codecs and so many different resolutions that there's no guarantee that one AVI will play just becuase another one happens to work.

DVD playback has been around the 90s

Many things have been around since the 90s. That doesn't mean 90s technology was somehow superior. Hardware decoder cards were also around in the 90s.

ETA: http://www.matrox.com/graphics/en/products/le … /g_series/g450/ refers to "DVDMax" and "hardware-accelerated video playback". If you want smooth DVD playback, that implies you will need something that supports the hardware acceleration available in your video card. PowerDVD is recommended because it tends to support the acceleration features of a wide variety of cards. (And I think Geexbox does too.)

firefox 3.6

I've now had a chance to use Firefox 10.0.12ESR for a while (Pentium M running WinME + uSP2.0 + KEX4.5.2), aside from a bit of sluggishness and occasional lockups for various odd reasons, it works well enough. I think 3.6.28 is far more stable and reliable, but it doesn't have nearly as much support for newer sites as 10 does. I also tried RetroZilla 2.0 for a bit and although it is very fast, its codebase is ancient which limits it to a tiny pool of websites these days.

As for VLC, I've tried 2.0.5 quite a bit and it's very good, but a bit slower than good old 0.8.6. I haven't yet tried a DVD, hard to say how much better or worse the performance may be.

As for using both at the same time, where Firefox 3.6.28 and VLC 0.8.6 can do so quite well with marginal sluggishness, I find Firefox 10 or VLC 2 tends to lock up on occasion, usually Firefox but it might not have anything to do with VLC running.

I've also run a hacked version of Skype 3.8 along with Firefox 3.6 and VLC 0.8.6 in the past, pretty stunning for a 17 year old OS that hasn't had an official update since 2006.

I haven't come across any newer or better solutions for web browsers and media players. This is just the nature of using obsolete OSes. If you are willing to sacrifice a bit of site support for browser stability, I highly recommend good old Firefox 3.6.28. If you don't mind a slightly older but more reliable media player, give VLC 0.8.6f a try. I've watched DVDs before just fine. Actually, I use the b revision but I doubt it makes a huge difference.

EDIT: Just now I removed Firefox 10.0.12ESR and put back 3.6.28, it is a MASSIVE improvement in speed and stability. All that's really lost here is 3 years of internet compatibility (2013 back to 2010), which I know is eons, but if you stick to simple sites (forums, google, wikipedia, etc), it works amazingly well.

Yea thanks for the tip I downgraded to 3.6.28 and works a lot better for what I needed and even tried facebook with it and its not half bad and as for vlc Ill go back to 8.6.

Sometimes the mobile sites work better on older browsers.

One advantage old Opera has over other browsers is that you can change the user agent (per site, on the fly) so you can access websites that can only be accessed with certain browsers or operating systems, e.g. the (normally Windows & IE-only) Windows Update site on a Mac.

yawetaG wrote:

One advantage old Opera has over other browsers is that you can change the user agent (per site, on the fly) so you can access websites that can only be accessed with certain browsers or operating systems, e.g. the (normally Windows & IE-only) Windows Update site on a Mac.

Of course, there are at least Firefox addons that will accomplish much the same.

Jorpho wrote:

yawetaG wrote:

One advantage old Opera has over other browsers is that you can change the user agent (per site, on the fly) so you can access websites that can only be accessed with certain browsers or operating systems, e.g. the (normally Windows & IE-only) Windows Update site on a Mac.

Of course, there are at least Firefox addons that will accomplish much the same.

Probably.

I forgot the other advantage: old Opera is fairly lightweight and you could have loads and loads of tabs open at once, even on an older machine. The difference between Opera 10.x and Firefox 3.6 on an older machine was something like up to 30-40 tabs 😎 in Opera before annoying slowdown started to occur, vs. 5-10 in Firefox 😵 ...

Oldskoolmaniac wrote:

I guess IE6 can browse vogons

Yup I have IE6 (I browse with MyIE2 though (NICEST IE WRAPPER I HAVE EVER FOUND))