Sysdll

Newguy: Hi I’m new here and I was wondering if anyone could suggest a good set of tires for my 5 year old Saturn. LatestAndGreatist: Dude, your car sucks! Don’t waste your money buying new tires for that old car. Go out and buy a new Corvette. FerrariFanboy: I agree. That old car can do a maximum or 80 mph my new Ferrari can do 160. Newguy: Well, I mostly use the car to pick up my Grandchildren from school so I don’t need the speed. LatestAndGreatist: Dude, check out the new Masarati, it can do 210. Newguy: (Sigh) Thanks anyway.

Edelweiss from The Sound of Music This is fun, can we play again?

I’ve been reading this forum for a few years now and I find the members here to be the brightest and best. My computer is tuned to perfection thanks to the advice I’ve received and I’d like to say thank you.

Me. (sorry, bad joke) I use it on a dedicated Sims Complete / Casual Games machine that keeps family members from hogging my main computer. I even like Vista. If it wasn’t for Vista there wouldn’t be all those Vista non-compliant peripherals on Ebay for $5.00 a pop. I’ve upgraded all my 98x machines with pocket change and that cheers me up.

You didn’t say what controller and hard drive you were using. I’ve tried the generic ATA cards and found them to be trash. Give Promise or Maxtor (same cards) a try, especially the Promise SATA150 TX2. It installs 98se without problems. It’s an SATA card and I use only the ATA port so I don't know if SATA drives will work the same way.

I’m running XP on one of my BX/Pentium III’s and it works just fine. Find the latest bios you can for your motherboard preferably dated 2001 or later and disable video shadowing, system bios caching and video bios caching. It’ll make setup go much more smoothly.

On the Maxtor I have I didn’t need the drivers to install 98se. Maxblast found the controller and drive, formatted it for fat 32, and instructed me on how to proceed.

I just refurbished a PIII with ME on it for games, mostly to keep my family away from my XP computer. I bought the ME disk when it first came out, used it for a week and reinstalled 98SE. I was surprised to see what ME is like with all the updates from Microsoft as well as ATI’s video drivers from 2005. I hadn’t realized this OS had been tweaked and tuned to run this well. Of course there’s still the problem of ME being unhip so I made a Vista like startup screen and removed “Windows Millennium” from the start menu so now it’s cool. My Frankenstein machine in the basement still runs 98se. I use it for my experiments with the projects found on this forum. I’ve killed it a few times with my hardware mods but thanks to EBay I can still find all the parts I need to bring it back to life. I’ve spent about 75 dollars total on these two old machines so 98xx has the best bang for the buck of any OS. I hope everyone here keeps up the good work so I can still be running 98se for years to come.

Repeated power outages can cause all kinds of errors. Power outages and spikes can also damage ram and bad ram will cause scandisk to report errors where there are none. Also when troubleshooting older computers (or any electronic equipment) it’s always a good idea to take it apart, clean it, and put it back together.

Why use Win 98/SE/ME The right tool for the right job I guess. I have a machine with 98SE and every patch and add on available on this site (I’ve had to reinstall a few times). I do it because it’s my idea of fun and it’s one of the best ways to learn the ins and outs of Windows.

Yes first back up your important data and get another drive. I have drives that have shown similar scandisk logs after power outages. I’ve had some success in making them useful again by using the manufactures original startup utility and then Scandisk from the Windows ME boot disk followed by a format from whatever OS startup disk you’re using. All previous information is lost this way but it’s worth a try before tossing the drive.