Kwibus

I got my PCI-E Geforce 6800 256 ram card working by using the vmm32.vxd (real mode) and vcache.vxd files from Rloews demo patch for using more than 1 GB of Ram. Without it my graphics card had over two gigabytes of ram according to dxdiagnose and would crash when running directx 9 applications. This suggest that the PCI-E 6800 card can also use turbo cache. I have not had time to try it. A lot of the basic parts of your mainboard work well with the default win 98 drivers. You can sometimes also use part of the drivers form windows 2k or xp. Win 98 drivers from a previous version of the main board sometimes work as well on newer versions. If onboard parts like network card usb ports and soundcards do not work you can use PCI cards that do support win 98. If there are no official win 98 drivers for a motherboard it thus does not mean you can not build a fully functional computer with it. If you're computer is set to automatically obtain an IP adress and does not get one it can spend quite a while waiting for it although i do not think it waits long enough to explain the full 18 minutes.

You can use openoffice 3 it should be able to open docx documents. You do need kernelx to run it.

I took a look at the specs of your computer and i think there should be official drivers for your mainboard and graphics card. Your mainboard has an nforce 2 chipset, you can download a driver for all its components from the website of nvidea. The driver for your gforce 4 mx card you should also be able to find on the website of nvidea or you could try a newer un official driver see http://www.msfn.org/board/nvidia-drivers-82-69-t97140.html

Some questions to ask before you buy Do you want to install an Os other than win 98 Where do you want to use the computer for? Do you still have old components you want to/can recycle graphics card, memory, powersupply, hard disk etc?

I think you can install win 98SE after win 2k. If i remember correctly Win 98SE will recognize it as Win NT. I would recommand to install them on seperate partitions though.

I have win 98 SE running on a athlon64 X2 3800+ socket 939 2.0 Ghz

I had a look at my memory CPU-Z identifies it as ddr400 My Mainboard which is set to auto for the memory timings however sets it up as ddr333 ram. I have had a busy week so I did not have much time to work on this topic I hope to be able to spend some more time during the rest of the week

I still have a few questions for all the people out here with more knowledge of win 98 than me. First: Have other people experienced problems with installing windows and multiple optical drives? I have never heard about it before perhaps it is because I have scsi drives? Second: I have to disable config.sys while booting up the computer. The line device=C:\WINDOWS\COMMAND\display.sys con=(ega,,1) causes the problem what is it's function? And any idea why it causes the windows to hang?

How to install Win 98 on a mainboard with nForce 4 chipset. This article may contain usefull tips for installing windows 98 on other mainboards as well. Dencorso asked me to make a post about how I installed Windows 98 on my computer. As an illustration what can be tried to install windows 98 on a computer that does not officially support windows 98. As I am reinstalling windows 98 this post should grow to contain all the necessary steps. I will also try to clean up my post then to make it a little more readable. Feel free to ask questions. First the system specs: The main board is an asus A8n-E with nForce 4 ultra chipset socket 939 It has an onboard sound and network card memory: 2x 512 and 2x 1024 mb of ddr400 ram still running at 167 Mhz for the moment. processor Athlon 64 x2 3800+ graphics Gforce 6800 pci-E harddisk 300gb pata seagate I am not using the onboard sound and network card yet Instead I have a Aureal vortex 8820 sound card and an realtek 8139 network card. I also have a adaptec scsi controller on the Scsi controller I have a cd burner and a dvd drive I also have an ide CD ROM (This probably is just temporary but I could not boot from the cd when it was in the scsi drive) The windows verion used in win 98 SE Chapter Two: Installation of windows 98 1 insert the cd rom in the cd rom drive and boot up from the CD If you do not get a choice to boot from either hard disk or CD. check that the cd rom drive is selected as the first bootable device in the Bios. I have also had problems with booting from scsi drives so you may need an ide cd rom drive. 2 select windows setup. If you have multiple optical drives the setup program may install the driver for the wrong optical drive. You will get an error stating that the windows setup files could not be found. Either place the windows cd in the drive for which the driver has been installed. Or physically remove the other drive by detaching the cables from the rear of the drive. 3 continue the setup as normal and select the options you want After restarting the computer you may get the error: insufficient memory to initialize windows. This may be caused by having to much Ram in your computer. Windows might give an error when more than 512 mb of ram has been installed but usually Windows 98 works with up to 1150 mb of ram. To solve this reboot the computer you should now see the start up menu. Select command prompt only now type cd windows\command and press enter now type edit and press enter Press alt and F simultaneously. Then select open go to the directories field by pressing the tab key. Select the two points by pressing the up arrow and press enter press shift tab to go to the files column Now select the system.ini file under [386Enh] add the line : MaxPhysPage=40000 and under [vcache] add the line: MaxFileCache=524288 To be on the safe side you could use more conservative values like 20000 for MaxPhysPage and 131072 for MaxFileCache. Press alt + F again and select save then press alt+ F again and select exit Now reboot the computer. And continue the installation normally. (you could of course also remove the memory) With the installation on my Asus A8N-E mainboard the computer stops responding during the detection of non plug and play devices this is “normal”. Just reboot your computer. If the computer hangs again after a reboot try to start up the computer in safe mode. If you now get the insufficient memory to initialize windows error again you should do the following. Instead of safe mode choose step by step confirmation. Select N for the processing of config.sys and select Y elsewhere. You need to keep booting up your computer like this until you reach step 5 You can then select run in the windows menu and type msconfig go to the config.sys tab and uncheck the check box in front of the line: device=C:\WINDOWS\COMMAND\display.sys con=(ega,,1) 4 After setup has reboted the computer a few more times Windows will be loaded and show a lot of found new hardware Windows will now try to install a lot of devices for most of them it does not have the correct drivers. I prefer to just skip installing them for the moment and install them when windows is fully booted up so I can use find to locate the needed files. 5 Congratulations you should now have a very basic win 98 installation

Look Here This should be a generic driver for USB storage devices for win 98 FE http://www.msfn.org/board/index.php?showto...3605&st=349

I have an older updated version of the esdi_506.pdr file. It is from 2006. I used the inf files to install the drivers. I have kernelx 4.2 installed which may have helped with installing. Some of the inf files in my C:windows\inf\others folder still have windows NT as signature. I do remember changing the signature to Chicago some times. and shortening some of the texts between [] to less than 16 characters if they were longer and adding devices. I am not sure what did the trick though. Perhaps i should do a reinstall on a different disk and write down every thing this time. It is win 98 SE.

the 6800 card you linked to seems quite expensive for such an old card perhaps you are better off finding a second hand one.

about the slower hard disk It mainly means that it wil take longer to load and save data. If the whole program fits in the memory of your computer it should not run more slowly it just takes longer to load. It may also take more time to process the data than it takes to load it. In that case you may not notice a difference in loading time or the difference is less than would be expected based on the hard disk speeds. I do not think the benchmarking program i used is such a good program though as it gave very little performance difference between win2k en win 98 while i use a dual core processor. I think the K8T900 is the last via chipset for AMD processors with win 98 drivers i could not find any mainboards with this chipset however. the AM2V890-VSTA is an AM2 board with a via chipset. I'll describe my system here in a little more detail I thought i had a AM2 board but i just looked it up and it is an 939 socket the chipset i have however also supports AM2 so i hope there won't be any big differences differences. main board is A8n-E memmory i think it is 2x 512 and 2x 1024 mb of ddr400 ram processor athlon 64 x2 3800+ graphics Gforce 6800 pci-E harddisk 300gb pata I am not using the onboard sound and network card yet instead i have a audigy 2 sound card and an realtek 8139 network card. I also have a adaptech scsi controler i will list all the weird drivers the network card and the scsi card have official win98 drivers The drivers i use for the graphics card are the unofficial 82.69 drivers. I also had to install two files from rloew's demo ram limitation patch for it to work with more than 1 gb of physically inserted ram without the third file which locks up the computer after 10 minutes (it will have demo behind its name when you install the patch) i can use up to 1150 mb with rloews demo patch i can use up to 2052 mb (i still have to contact rloew about it) if i use more ram my sound cards stops working correctly edit: with a different sound card I can use 3 GB Ram. I use the nforce4 win2k drivers for the parallel sata and pata controllers. according to the control panel they function correctly. i do not have a sata device so i cannot test it. I use the win2k driver for the audigy 2 card i also use the nforce4 win2k driver for the hypertransport bus. I also have a Nvidea nforce pci system management driver i think it is from the nforce3 win 98 drivers but it could be from the nforce 4 drivers as well. i use the plug and play (failsafe) driver from win 98 instead of an ACPI driver. other than that i think all my drivers are the default win 98 drivers. there still are a number of devices with problems I have two direct access memory controllers listed one of them has a DMA conflict the onboard sound card is disabled as well as the microsoft direct music synth from my audigy 2 card the onboard nforce network controller is not working properly or does not have all the drivers installed. futrther more i have the following devices listen under other devices for which no drivers are installed. game port joystick generic ide disk type 47 MPU-41 compatible PCI input controller PCI universal serial bus.

To Eidenk: I have a computer with AM2 I did run a quick bench mark on it comparing win 98 versus win 2k the bench marking program was not very up to date though. benchmark used was freshdiagnose. the only big difference i noticed was in hard drive reading and writing win2k perfomed 3 to 4 times faster. win 2k also had a higher drystone and multimedia score. win 98 had a better score for whetstone, graphics and memory. Most of the drivers i use under win 98 are not default drivers however If you have a better bench mark program in mind i could run it for you. to robertbaer I think you could use the PCI driver from the nforce 3 chipset although i think it should work with the default drivers as well because the driver does no need any extra files. There are also a few driver you can use from the Nforce 4 chipset drivers for win 2k like the nforce4 hyper transport. If you have so few devices under system you probably do not have a bios driver installed so i would recommand you try to install the plug and play bios failsafe driver and tell us what happend. you could also try to send a pm to rloew his system is more similar to yours than mine.

How many system devices are present ? (under contolpanel -> System -> device manger -> sytem devices) On my computer which also has an nforce 4 chipset i have about 25. if you have substantially fewer there probably is no driver for the bios installed. I am not entirely sure if all the steps mentioned here are correct but i 'd rather not deinstall the driver to find out: What could work is: Go to add new hardware in the control panel click next twice now you should see a list of unistalled devices one of them should have a name with ACPI Bios something select this and press next I think you should now be able to select "display a list of all drivers in a seleted location" then select show all hardware and select plug and play bios (fail safe driver) I hope this works for you.