The VideoLAN Forums

I am having trouble launching VLC. It may be that my computer is too old. It is Windows 98, 32RAM, 8GB hard drive and possibly a pentium 1 or 2. Every time I have tried to launch the application I get this report: Fatal Error: Error while loading DLL 'unicows.dll' I only have an old CDROM 24x and will not be supporting DVDS. I would like to be able to play AVIs, WMVs and music files. Is there any hope for this old computer to take VLC?

You could read the download page....

http://www.videolan.org/vlc/download-windows.html

Read on the right of the page.

if you have openoffice.org v2.0.x or jave JRE 1.5.x you can copy the unicows.dll file from the program or bin folder of the other app and put it in the same directory as your vlc binary, then it should work.

It would be nice if the unicows.dll file as distributed with openoffice.org was included in the vlc distribution for the benefit of all us win98 users...

It may be that my computer is too old. It is Windows 98, 32RAM, 8GB hard drive and possibly a pentium 1 or 2.

CPU frequency ???

YEAH ... it probably is insufficient. At least you should get 64MB RAM as
absolute minimum, 128 MB would be better.

Win98 should be preferrably "98SE".

Is there any hope for this old computer to take VLC?

Try it. If VLC does not work, try MPXPLAY and Quickview ($hareware), both
for DOS.