mac57

I second this. MS has a patch which cures a hang after each 49.7 days. This prooves that W9x can be up for this period. I find that I have to reboot my Win ME quite often due to the pesky "Windows Resources" issues. They slowly run down over time and usage and the only way to clean them up is to restart. Annoying to say the least!

I would go with the AGP video card. PCI has a bandwidth of about 100 MB/s. AGP 4X has a bandwidth of 1 GB/s. BIG difference. The machine I am posting this on is also a "home brew" machine. I built it originally as a 1.6 GHz PIV with a PCI based nVidia 5200 card. On web sites with a lot of heavy Flash animation, the machine chugged a little, so I decided to try out an AGP card. I bought a low end nVidia 6200 based card and was astonished at the performance improvement when I put it in. Just amazing. The 6200 is pretty low end chip (stripped down 6800), but it ran rings around my 5200 card. I am assuming that AGP (4x in this case) was the major contributor. So, I would go AGP. It also frees up a PCI slot for other use. A while later, I upgraded my CPU to a 2.66 GHz PIV, and bumped my RAM up to 768 MB. It is a pretty zippy box at this point. However, the mobo will take up to a 3.06 GHz PIV HT. I just got one on eBay and it will be fun to see if there is any noticeable improvement. I am not expecting much; just doing it for the fun.

I can confirm that the 8269 drivers work with the nVidia 7800GS AGP. I am using that card and those drivers right now on my (Win ME) system as I post this.

Great - thanks! I downloaded these Win NT USB drivers. Now, what device types do they support? For example, with Windows 98, there is some USB support, but it is fairly generic, and then you need specific USB drivers on top of the OS support, one driver for each device. Are these NT drivers the same, or for example, could I plug in a USB 1.1 compatible hard drive and just expect it to work?

Great link. Thanks! I have TWO WinNT4.0 machines at home. One is an old Micron Magnum Pro 200, and the other is one I actually built myself from scratch. It is really neat - a dual core (yes, TWO CPUs) Pentium Pro 200 machine w 128 MB of RAM, dual booting Win NT 4.0 and Arch Linux. I downloaded these Win NT USB drivers. Now, what device types do they support? For example, with Windows 98, there is some USB support, but it is fairly generic, and then you need specific USB drivers on top of the OS support, one driver for each device. Are these NT drivers the same, or for example, could I plug in a USB 1.1 compatible hard drive and just expect it to work?

Could you post an example of the GRUB entry for menu.lst that would cause the halt? Thanks.

Yes, and there is a "halt with APM" item that I have been meaning to try, to see if it will shut down completely. Hopefully it will.

EXCELLENT thread - thanks all!!

Why use 98SE, or in my case, ME? Simple - speed. They are lighter and faster than today's OS' and for the vast majority of things the average user does on their computer, still perfectly current. I can still browse the web, do my email, balance my household budget, listen to my tunes, play games, edit my photos in Photoshop Elements... About the only thing I can't do on my ME machine is video calling on Skype, which is a shame, but I also own a Mac (PowerMac G5) and I do video calling (plus iTunes and a few other things that ME is no longer able to do) on that. This is a home built computer - I built it myself. I purposely put Win ME on it because I wanted the speed it would offer on this hardware. I have not been disappointed. This machine, with its measly 768 MB of RAM, is in all likelihood faster at all of the above tasks than a much beefier machine with 2 GB or more of RAM running Vista would be. Speed and low resource demands are good! ...PLUS, I just *like* Windows ME!! Now there may be the best reason of all!

Hi xrayer, my shutdown is very low tech. I tell Win ME to restart. The machine does a restart just fine. That activates GRUB in the boot sector and it presents its usual boot menu selection (in my case, Win ME or Linux). At that point, if you press "c" on the keyboard (for "command") GRUB drops to its command prompt. From there, you can issue GRUB's "halt" command. This doesn't shut down per se, but it does halt the machine and then the front panel power button turns it off gracefully. If I wanted to go one step further, I could have GRUB boot the Linux distro to its login manager. There is a real Shutdown command there that truly turns off the machine, but I don't have the patience to wait another 30s or so for Linux to boot just so I can shut down. GRUB's halt does just fine!

Thanks MDGx for these 82.69 drivers. They are the only thing I have found that will make my video card work properly under Windows ME. I installed them by running the installer, restarting and then doing the Display Properties->Settings->Advanced->Adapter->Change routine and running through that. One restart later and all was well. So far, the drivers seem very stable. I am running an EVGA GeForce 7800 GS, AGP 4x, on an Intel D850 motherboard equipped with a 2.66 GHz PIV. I have a Viewsonic VP2130b LCD monitor with both DVI and RGB inputs. I am using the 7800 to drive the RGB input (I have another computer driving the DVI input). I dual boot Windows ME and Yoper Linux 3.0. The 7800 GS card now works well in both OS' thanks to these brilliant new drivers! There are still some minor problems though: 1/ When I start up, the Windows ME splash screen briefly disappears mid splash and then re-appears. Annoying, but not a danger apparently. 2/ Whenever I right click the desktop to get Display Properties, the screen blanks out completely for a second or so and then comes back with the Properties dialog displayed. If I carry on to Settings->Advanced, when I press the Advanced button, the same thing happens again. Again things carry on normally about a second later. If I shift my video cable connectors around so that the 7800 GS is driving the DVI port of my monitor, the splash screen "shudder" still appears, but is much, much shorter in duration - more like a brief flash - and the temporary "black outs" in the Display Properties dialogs do not occur at all. 3/ The machine will not shut down properly. It simply hangs part way through. I work around this by doing a Restart instead of a shutdown, which takes me to my Linux GRUB bootloader. I can shutdown from there successfully. So, overall, great job! Since no one else had reported success with a 7800 GS, I thought I would post this. If anyone has any ideas about what might be causing the splash screen and Display Properties issues, I would love to see a post back! Cheers!