Foxbat

Wow, thanks for all the responses. The Win9x community is still as active as ever! That's a lot of info to look over. Only as a last resort. Years ago, I got into the habit of powering off the surge protector when closing out for the night or prior to leaving to keep all the connected electronics from wasting power. Good habits are hard to break. Thanks for the script. I will try it when I have the chance. For the modified drivers, I could not get 98 to accept the inf. It doesn't see it, and always go back to the generic driver. When I went to change custom resolutions, that option is not there anymore after switching to the Dell. I guess I can't change it with this monitor. That's all the time I have for now. Life's getting busy again, so I will have to spread this out over time.

MSI GeForce GTX 970. Too recent, not gonna work. My 98 system doesn't have PCIe. VBEMP provides no harware acceleration. I need the system to be fully functional with nothing nerfed, otherwise, it would defeat the purpose of using 98. 1. I couldn't get my modified drivers to work. 2. Haven't had much luck in messing with custom resolutions in the past. I'll give it another go this time around. 3. The next alternative monitor that fits my specs start in the $1000 range, so I bought the $500 Dell monitor. It has to be one single monitor to share with 98 and 7. In order to meet the requirements of my line of work, I had to get rid of my beloved CRT and deal with some pet peeves of an LCD. Works well with 7, but not optimal for 98. It's either one or the other. Can't have both--everything's a compromise.

Checked Win7 with DVI. No problem there.

Win98SE is using a GeForce4 Ti 4200, which only has VGA and DVI connections. DVI is the only choice here.

Thanks for the ideas. Every little bit helps. I haven't had any success in getting the system to recognize the modifed inf. It probably wouldn't do much anyway since Windows is already aware that a Dell U2413 is connected, and recognized its native resolution without the drivers. There's a possiblity that it could be somewhat EDID related since I am not connected via VGA, but instead of the OS, it could be the monitor not getting the return signal. The U2413 is completely digital and does not include VGA or DVI-A connections. Win98SE is connected via DVI-D, Win7 via Display Port, and changed via an input selector. I've done some more testing, and found what could be a possible explanation why the problem occurs. If I boot up Win98SE system first, the floating mouse behavior appears on the monitor. If I later boot up the Win7 system and switch input to it, Win7 inherits the problem, and remains that way. However, if I boot Win7 first, there is no floating mouse problem, and if I later boot up and switch to the Win98SE system, it stays problem free there too. Note that power must be completely cut to the monitor at the surge protector in order for this to work (a monitor cold boot if you will), otherwise, the monitor will remember the inherited problem from a previous Win98SE boot and keep it that way. I think the monitor is not receiving the proper communication from Win98SE on DVI, and thus, it operates in some form of compatibility mode. When Win7 sends the proper signal to the monitor from a monitor cold boot, everyting is all fine and dandy if I switch over to Win98SE. However, booting up another system if I only want to use 98 is just silly. While this is not a solution, maybe it can lead to one.

I called Dell tech support. They searched through their knowledge base and haven't found anything related to this. All they could come up with was some kind of compatibility problem between the OS and monitor. Due a lack of data for this monitor and Win98SE, they couldn't pin it on anything else. All that's left to do is to try and see if I could modify the drivers to work with Win98SE, if I can get it work at all. I am using the monitor on Windows 7 without any drivers, and it doesn't have that problem.

Installed and tested the ASUS drivers. No improvement on the mouse problem. The drivers were a little bloated, so I went back to the reference drivers. Might have to let this sit for a little bit and come back to it when I have more time.

Thanks for the replies. Checked DxDiag and AGP Texture Acceleration is enabled. I have DirectX 9.0c, Dec. 2006 release. I don't have a spare graphics card available, and there's no integrated graphics on the mobo, so no hardware swapping can be done. My card is an ASUS AGP4X using the reference drivers. I'll try out the ASUS drivers.

After having waited long enough for LCD technology to improve to an acceptable level of performance, I finally upgraded my Win98SE computer's monitor from a CRT to a Dell U2413 professional level IPS. I compared the latency between both monitors side by side, and the LCD lags a bit as expected. However, there was an unexpected weird behavior with the mouse pointer on the LCD. There's the expected slight lag, but moving it around the screen, it appeared to have a floating feeling, as if a smoothing filter was applied to the mouse movement. No such option exist in the mouse settings. Mouse acceleration is off. If I click and drag a window around the screen, the pointer does not exactly follow the window where one would expect the pointer to be. Same thing happens with scrollbars, or dragging anything around which provide an object of reference. I though maybe it was the input lag. I use IPS and TN monitors all the time, at work, in school, and at home. I have a cheap TN that is connected to another computer and an LCD TV connected to my brother's computer. LCD TVs are notorious for terrible input lag, yet there was no floating mouse phenomenon. This only happens on my Win98SE computer with this monitor. To eliminate some factors, production models of the U2413 from the first two years had problems with ghosting and overshoot, which has been resolved in the latest revision, and is unrelated to this problem. The U2413 has a game mode that makes it one of the fastest IPS monitors, making the display lag performance as Class 1 in an in-depth review by TFT Central. Activating game mode doesn't fix it. Tried swapping different mice, optical or laser, high or low DPI, PS/2 or USB, and it's still there. Searching for a solution, I found something that might explain this behavior. According to this condition, the GPU renders the mouse pointer separately from the rest of the screen. It is usually not apparent in CRTs, but sometimes, the floating mouse behavior appears on an LCD. Some users experiencing this issue reported it to be resolved if the hardware acceleration slider is moved one step to the left, while others needed to completely turn it off. I tried it, and it did not help. Anyone recognize this problem? My configuration: PIII 1Ghz Windows 98SE NVIDIA GeForce4 Ti 4200 with 56.64 drivers NUSB 3.6e KernelEx 4.5.2