Joseph_Joestar wrote on 2020-10-14, 15:27:
Tetrium wrote on 2020-10-14, 14:22:
Random freezes and blue screens mostly.
I tried using it once and had the same experience as the people in this thread. Not sure which version I was using though.
I am sorry that it didn't work out for you, but having just one attempt is not nearly enough to know for sure that all the different versions of the several patches floating around are all bad. Contrary to what you mentioned, there are actually quite a lot of different unofficial patches.
When reading the main thread over at msfn.org (with the main tweaks listed on this page)I get the impression that these tweaks are really more for the more advanced users and can be considered too complex for some end users.
That thread is over 80 pages long and that forum has a vast wealth of information regarding old Windows OSs. I can recommend anyone interested in 9x and other older Windows families to spend some time reading there.
I'd say that these projects for updating an otherwise archaic OS are very impressive. A lot of effort has gone into these. It does claim in bright red lettering that all is at your own risk and regardless of end user any significant tweaking may bomb out a system at any time.
I think it's pretty awesome that this stuff is even available, but it's definitely not for everybody and these are most likely not as compatible as the official MS stuff. To noones surprise, seeing that these patches were often the work of only one or at most a few individuals who did not have a multibilliondollar company backing them.
The problem in the thread you linked to turned out to have been a hardware issue apparently which apparently got solved once the 3rd stick of RAM was removed:
The t500 has three RAM slots. I have two 256 MB sticks and one 128 stick. I decided to remove the 128 MB stick. The computer boots up normally now, concluding that the problem definitely has to do with memory above 512 MB of RAM, even with the unofficial service pack.
In that thread that you dug up, there was also another mention of someone not having any issues with the 2.x version of the patch which is also my own experience and the experience we had at work when we used this update (the 2.0a unofficial SP for 98SE) for some (sometimes very) obsolescent systems we got for repairs before we started using Windows XP exclusively.
For anyone's advice which is similar to "this patch is crap, never use!!!111", it's about as dumb as the people who lemmingtrain into the echo chamber together to shout from the top of their lungs how legendarily bad Windows ME was and that ME objectively and absolutely deserves to be removed from collective memory for forever eternity. Or something like that. They often don't know what they are talking about or have very limited experiences of which the experience they did have (if any at all) is of very limited value most of the time, if not even less than that (for instance because all of their experience was based on a single system which had used a poorly executed upgrade to ME from 95 via 98 with messed up drivers and a poor hardware configuration).
I've also used the autopatcher btw, but not nearly as extensively as the unofficial service pack (the 2.x version that is), so can't really say much about it except that I've always been careful with what I installed, when, how, in which order and when not.
Not saying that you messed up yourself, but it would be careless to exclude this after having tried just once.