dencorso

Welcome to MSFN! And have a great New Year, too!

During the installation of Office 97, don't forget to enable the installation of all the optional converters included in the package, because some of them don't install by default (select custom installation to be able to do this). Please find below a list of the necessary patches to have a fully updated Office 97, AFAIK. The patches listed below refer to Word, Excel and PowerPoint only. If you decide to install also other Office programs besides these three, please refer to Office Online - Downloads for Office 97/98 (yes, it exists still!) to check whether some more patches are needed, just in case. Service Packs: SR-1 -> sr1off97.exe SR-2b ->sr2bof97.exe Updates (see also Q248710): Q163299 -> wd97au.exe Q214652 -> Wd97mcrs.exe (requires SR-2b) Q214757 -> fm2paste.exe (requires SR-2b) Q215462 -> Wd97SP.EXE (requires SR-2b, install this one just after SR-2b) Q222180 -> pf_setup.exe Q222180 -> OFF97UIP.EXE (requires SR-2b) Q238445 -> JetCopkg.exe (not needed for 2k, XP and newer OSes) Q238918 -> cnfupd.exe Q241873 -> OFFHLINK.exe Q249881 -> WW5Pkg.exe (may not be needed...) Q255606 -> xl8p9pkg.exe Q256904 -> Wd97lyp.exe (requires SR-2b)Q269263 -> xl8p10pkg.exe Q268477 and Q299368 -> ppt97sec.EXE (requires SR-2b) Q273956 -> jetcu40.exe (not needed for 2k, XP and newer OSes) Q274249 -> wdac97.exe (requires SR-2b) Q830354 -> Office97-KB830354-ENU.exe (requires SR-2b) Q830356 -> Office97-KB830356-ENU.exe (requires SR-2b) Converters (install in this order): 1) ppmm.EXE 2) OCONVPCK.EXE 3) FileFormatConverters.exe 4) compatibilitypacksp1-kb940289-fullfile-en-us.exe 5) compatibilitypacksp2-kb953331-fullfile-en-us.exe 6) office2007-kb969613-fullfile-x86-glb.exe 7) office2007-kb969618-fullfile-x86-glb.exe 8) office2007-kb969679-fullfile-x86-glb.exe 9) office2007-972581-fullfile-x86-glb.exe 10) office2007-kb973704-fullfile-x86-glb.exe Free Add-On: DRAW98.EXE

The FSB, RAM and AGP slots are under the control of the northbridge, all else is controlled bu the southbridge. I've once had to fix a machine which had a quite localized southbridge failure: the FDD stopped working, but all else was OK. Since it had an EISA slot, all I did was give it an old ISA floppy controller, and it still worked OK for about four years, before being retired (while still functional) by a motherboard upgrade. In your case, it's difficult to say which part of the chipset is intermittently failing, because you have issues in the domains of both bridges, but they are interconnected, so it may be any of them or (much less likely) even both. What you're describing are the first signs of an impending "catastrophic machine failure", where the failure of a part overtaxes the next leading to its failure and so on, until you get a full-system failure. It's due to material fatigue, of course, and is unavoidable for real materials. Your best bet would be to replace your board before it atually stops working. You have a good chance, in places like eBay, of acquiriing another used motherboard of the exact same model for a good price, and chances are it'll be able to run longer than the one you're using now. Or upgrade to a slightly newer board at the right price. Good luck!

Please do read Day-to-day running Win 9x/ME with more than 1 GiB RAM.

Hi, Rick! Thanks for the info. This shouldn't be a problem, since your system's FSB is 133MHz. It's, in fact, quite common to see machines which original stick has a lower rating than those added on later because, as higher frequency rated sticks appear in the market, those with lower ratings tend to fade out. Memory rated for higher frequencies always runs OK at lower frequencies. But all sticks will always run, at most, at the highest frequency acceptable to the lowest frequency rated stick. So, it only would be a problem in case your system requred more than 133MHz, which is not the case.Changing subjects, you have an onboard Intel i845G video chip integrated in the chipset. So, I'd say the best course of action for you right now would be to search for an older Intel graphics driver: I'd go for the oldest possible one that supports the 845 (it should be from 2002, see the List_of_Intel_Chipsets, and work from this one on, until you find one that doesn't present the graphics issue you're having. In my experience, older drivers work better with 9x/ME than the newest ones. Work just on the video driver, letting the others you have installed alone, since you only found an issue with the graphics driver. I know it's a lot of trouble, but I do think it worth it. And, BTW, forget about the drivers offered by Dell, for now, and turn to those released diretly by Intel. Good luck and Happy New Year!

I'd say soporific's Auto-Patcher (A-P) for 98 SE is the nearest you can get to what you want with 9x/ME. In any case, do give a good look at the Important / "Stickified" / Pinned Windows 98/98 SP1/98 SE/ME Topics, for, probably, there are also other things there that might interest you.

Happy New Year, everybody!

Rick, let's define better what hardware do you have, so as to help us help you. Do please post the CPU and Mainboard screens from CPU-Z and the main screen from GPU-Z, or the info presented therein.

That shouldn't happen. Have you double-checked that all cables are well connected? Is the HDD SATA or PATA? And the CD-ROM? To me it seems you've got a bad southbridge, not a bad HDD. Or that something went really wrong during the HDD swap. Did you test the HDD you've removed in th other machine? Does it fail there too?

Is it a Corsair, perchance?

But do also read: [32Bit or x86] Use more memory above 3.25GB, Its possible now!. HTH.

For more info on VBEMP and bearwindows, check this post, and the next four replies that follow it. HTH.

Before you turn to VBEMP, do try this: And this post, in reply to the one I just quoted, confirms it works for video card problems. Good luck!

Great, GunSmokingMan! Thanks! However, it'd be nice if it was not restricted to >= Vista, since cluberti's original script runs perfectly on XP SP3... Would you please relax that restriction?

The Reverend Horton Heat - In Your Wildest Dreams

Go to RLoew's Software Homepage, grab the RAM Limitation Patch Demo and apply it with the /M option. Let's see whether it solves your video issues or not.

Try acrofull.zip, from the 1st post. It should work. If it doesn't, I'll try to create one that will. But I bet it does work. Please let me know your results, regardless of whether it works or not. Good luck!

Why must it be on the same partition? Two botable system partitions and a data partition, three partitions in all, would be much simpler to implement and to manage, especially when things get ugly. With a single partition, when (and if) it gets fubar you won't, in all probability, even be able to boot from the HDD. Not to mention it's way more difficult to accomplish.

grub4dos

You can even work with the newer formats with Office 97... see: MS Office 2007 Compatibility Pack with Office 97. If super-small is what you want, a fully updated Office 97 SR2 with the Compatibility Pack is the way to go.

Welcome to MSFN and merry X-mas!

In Day-to-day running Win 9x/ME with more than 1 GiB RAM you'll find actual working examples of how it's done, even without patching, If you limit the RAM memory.You can boot Win 9x directly from USB if the BIOS has USB-HDD mode, or in various roundabout ways if the BIOS has just USB-ZIP or USB-FDD mode, the simplest being to boot the devide as A:\, create a ramdisk, move the boot files, command.com and some devices to the ramdisk, jump from autoexec.bat to a batch in the ramdisk, load DOS USB 2.0 drivers, adjust the path and the comspec and run win.ini. However you'll not be able to use Win USB drivers and will have to do without USB hot-plugging. But it's possible and has been done in various ways.

I take the opportunity to add my best wishes to you all, too!

Great, MDGx! Thanks a lot! But, since you've added the most up-to-date working USBSTOR.SYS from Win 2k, it's necessary to ensure WDMSTUB.SYS gets loaded too. The easiest way to do it is to use the appropriate line I left commented out in the latest version of USBSTOR.INF, findable in usbstor110c.7z, after inverting the semicolon as per this post, to ensure WDMSTUB gets loaded. * Note: It may be necessary to remove from device manager and redetect any previously detected USB devices, to get them to use the new usbstor.inf (insted of what already was in the registry).* Thanks again. You rock!

I didn't, myself, test Win XP SP1 files for USB, up to now. Those from XP SP2 and SP3 don't work OK, according to my tests. So, here is a preliminary analysis: windowsxp-kb838989-X86-ENU.exe USBEHCI.SYS 5.1.2600.1515 PE Timestamp: 04/11/2004 3:21:54 AM CRC32: C45C00F6 Size: 025216 WDMCHECK: Module has no missing import links. USBPORT.SYS 5.1.2600.1532 PE Timestamp: 05/14/2004 7:40:19 PM CRC32: CFC74047 Size: 139136 WDMCHECK: Module uses the following missing functions: IoCsqRemoveNextIrp; IoCsqInitialize; IoCsqInsetIrp. Compare with: USBEHCI.SYS 5.0.2195.6882 PE Timestamp: 12/12/2003 5:37:43 PM CRC32: 85F85C09 Size: 019792 WDMCHECK: Module has no missing import links. USBPORT.SYS 5.0.2195.5652 PE Timestamp: 04/23/2002 5:46:44 PM CRC32: F7760957 Size: 135920 WDMCHECK: Module has no missing import links. Having missing functions, USBPORT.SYS v. 5.1.2600.1532 is a no-no. USBEHCI.SYS v. 5.1.2600.1515 may be viable, however, and warrants more testing. I generally tend to stick with Win 2k files as they should be the least distant from the 9x files, at least in theory. But I'll give this one a try, soon.