krick

You might be interested in installing the Active Desktop Update. It gives you the whole Windows 98 style shell... Installing Active Desktop Update on Windows 95 http://www.oldfiles.org.uk/lightspeed/Active_Desktop.html Also, this page has lots of notes on the whole thing including all the ways you should (and shouldn't) install it... http://wymette.home.att.net/programs/IEDeskUp.txt

I really don't think windows 9x will ever have PCI-E support. I suppose a chipset maker *could* write windows 98 drivers for PCI-E but I doubt they will. Nvidia doesn't support windows 98 at all with the latest nForce drivers. I think you hit it on the head, you must have hardware, BIOS, and drivers that can handle LBA48, *AND* you must keep the partition sizes under 137GB. There's a whole separate thread that addresses this problem... http://www.msfn.org/board/index.php?showtopic=46752

I think I've finally decided on a motherboard ASUS A8V Deluxe (using the VIA K8T800Pro + VT8237 combo)... http://usa.asus.com/products.aspx?l1=3&l2=...238&modelmenu=1 I'm pretty sure it has Windows 98SE drivers for everything. I'm not sure if the onboard sound would work in pure DOS but I'd probably use a SB16 PCI anyway if I decided to go that route. I'm not sure if they make it anymore but I know some stores still have it. Plus, there's a bunch on eBay from people switching over to PCI Express and dumping their old motherboards.

Ok, then is there any definitive way to test whether USP5.1 is slipstreamed properly after an install? i.e. is there something I can look for like a version number somewhere or the presence of a certain accessory or feature?

Ok, now I'm officially confused. You're telling me that Win2K with SP4 slipstreamed in is *larger* than Win2K with USP5.1 slipstreamed in? How is that possible? USP5.1 includes a bunch of additional stuff that's not in SP4... IE6/OE6/WAB6/SE56/MSI31/BITS2

I'm confused. Are you asking if Windows 98SE is compatible with a DVD-RW drive? Or are you asking if Windows 98SE can read XP/2000 formatted (NTFS?) DVD media? Or are you asking something entirely different?

I just copied my Windows 2000 CD to a directory, and used nLite to integrate USP 5.1. I didn't take anything away or add anything else. The reason I ask is that it appears that the ISO is nearly the same size as the Win2K + SP4 ISO that I made last year with nLite. Seems like it should be a lot bigger.

After using nLite to build a new ISO that Integrates 2000 and USP 5.1 Final, how large should the resulting ISO be?

If you use the stock MSCONFIG and help file from Windows XP on Windows 2000, the help file has a bunch of missing images. I decompiled the help file, removed the bad image references, and recompiled it. You can get the full installer here... http://www.3feetunder.com/files/win2k_msconfig_setup.exe

I'm guessing that this guy just doesn't know what he's doing. The PCI bus (includes AGP) only gets 4 IRQ lines to share regardless of the number of physical slots. Also, most of the onboard devices hang off the PCI bus as well and use IRQ lines. This includes... onboard video, onboard sound, onboard LAN, USB controllers, RAID controllers, additional SATA and PATA controllers. So needless to say, in a modern motherboard, there's going to be some IRQ sharing even before you plug in any PCI cards. If you are plugging in PCI cards that don't like to share, like SoundBlaster Live and his buddies, or older nic cards, you can run into problems. In Windows 2000/XP, the whole interrupt thing is given a new virtual interrupt layer that prevents stuff from crashing for the most part but you can still have performance problems when PCI devices decide to not play nice. The most common IRQ assignment I've seen is this... INTA - PCI1 and AGP INTB - PCI2 and onboard lan if present INTC - PCI3 and onboard sound if present INTD - PCI4 and PCI5 and SATA Then throw in a liberal sprinkling of USB controllers in there too. A modern motherboard with 8 USB ports requires 4 IRQs just for USB. So you pretty much have to share with USB, no way out of that. Here's the fun part. If you want to use a PCI sound card, you should probably plug it into PCI3. You should disable onboard sound first, of course. The idea is to put the PCI card in a slot where it shares with the least stuff. Typically, at least on Abit and Asus boards, this has been PCI slot 2 or 3. I almost never use slots 1, 4 or 5. However, I had problems with my Adaptec SCSI controller on my old motherboard. It didn't play nice until I stuck it in PCI slot 1, sharing an IRQ with my AGP card. Go figure. Keep in mind that all this is totally motherboard dependent. I've seen a few boards with VERY different IRQ to PCI assigments. Here's my ritual that I do with every new motherboard... Hook up the board but leave all drives disconnected so it can't actually boot into windows. Boot with just an AGP card and write down the IRQ assignments as reported by the BIOS POST screen. Plug a simple PCI card (a NIC card is good for this) into PCI slot 1, boot, note the IRQ assigments Move the card to PCI slot 2, boot, note the IRQ assigments continue in this fashion until you have a complete map of the IRQ assignments. Basically, you want to get an understanding of how the BIOS distributes the 4 interrupt lines (A through D) among the PCI, AGP, and onboard devices. Sometimes, the board will distribute them differently if there are 2 PCI cards involved but you probably won't encounter that. Usually, I use a spreadsheet to keep track of it all. When you're done, you should have a PCI IRQ map and you should know which PCI slot is *least* likely to share with other devices. You should disable any onboard PCI bus devices that you don't plan to use like SATA RAID controllers. Then put the least co-operative PCI device (like a sound blaster) in the least sharing slot. Add in your PCI network card next, etc... Boot and make sure that the IRQ assignments as reported by the BIOS are what you expect them to be. When you're happy with the BIOS IRQ distribution, only then do you hook up your drives and install windows. Note that pretty much every ASUS motherboard manual I've ever seen includes an IRQ map for you so you don't have to do this.

Yeah, I saw the reviews. It's hard to know which ones are genuine problems and which ones are just user error. In researching some of the VIA K8T800 Pro boards further, I discovered that these two boards are nearly identical... http://tinyurl.com/95hqa If you compare the images on the newegg site, you'll see that they even have the same manual and bundled yellow drive cables. The specs list VIA VT6106 on the Jetway and VIA VT6103 on the Mach Speed board and the Jetway supposedly has 5.1 audio while the MACH SPEED has 8 channel audio. Also the Jetway board has a listed memory limit of 2GB, however I think that's a typo considering it has 4 memory slots and other boards with 4 slots and the same chipset support 4GB. The specs listed on the Jetway and Mach Speed site are both different from what the Newegg site lists, mainly in the Audio and LAN areas. A little more digging on the Mach Speed site reveals these two quotes... "Mach Speed Technologies is one of the only American owned and operated motherboard manufactures." "Buy American-Buy Mach Speed!" However, I'm pretty sure their board is identical to the Jetway board from Taiwan. In fact the latest BIOS update is bit for bit identical to the same Jetway BIOS update... http://www.machspeed.com/biosupdates/k8t8as/K8TAIA08.BIN http://www.jetway.com.tw/evisn/download/BI...as/K8TAIA08.BIN So either they are really the same company, or use the same manufacturer. Or I guess it's possible that they are both using the VIA reference design and BIOS but I seriously doubt that.

Anybody ever heard of this brand?... MACH SPEED: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?...N82E16813187010 The features look pretty good I've never heard of them and their website is kinda crappy... http://www.machspeed.com/ It doesn't even list this board yet. On the positive side, their boards do have a lifetime warranty. Which, I guess is good, as long as they stay in business to honor it.

Check out this list of socket 939 boards that feature the VT8237 southbridge. Only nine at Newegg.com... http://tinyurl.com/ax8zv Plus some of them are the VT8237R, which I assume is the RAID version. In addition to Windows 98SE support, I'd like to have the option of running DOS 7 as the primary OS. I'd also like two serial ports, though that seems to be increasingly rare.

You might be interested in this page that has DOS drivers for many onboard chipsets and older sound card chipsets... http://vsynchmame.mameworld.net/ Do you have any opinions on the ULi M1689 or ULi M1695 chipsets? I have a Gigabyte GV-N68128DH that has a huge heatpipe on it. On my Abit IS7-E, the heatpipe heatsink on the back of the card hits the clips on the memory slots. It barely fits at all.

I'm running 768MB of RAM [which is the most my motherboard supports] with no problems at all. I've heard of people successfully using 1GB and I think I saw someone claim 1.5GB. Anything more and you're probably pushing it. Supposedly, the theoretical limit is 4GB but I seriously doubt that will work since consumer level motherboards that could accept 4GB of memory simply didn't exist when Win98SE was developed so there was no way to test it. Keep in mind that your results may vary depending on the quality of the motherboard, the particular chipset used on the motherboard, and the quality of the chipset drivers.

All I can say is WOW! I had never even heard of that chipset but the Asrock board certainly looks impressive and is very affordable. However, I guess I had better buy one soon since nVidia just bought Uli. I'm sure that they will be quickly dragged behind the barn and shot and we'll never hear from them again.

If you really want to compare apples to apples, you should look at the same driver version on each platform... http://www.nvidia.com/object/nforce_udp_win2k_4.27.html Windows 2000 Driver Versions # Audio driver 4.42 (WHQL) # Audio utilities 4.44 # Ethernet driver 4.42 (WHQL) # GART driver 3.77 (WHQL) # Memory controller driver 3.38 (WHQL) # SMBus driver 4.04 (WHQL) # Installer 4.46 # IDE NVIDIA driver 4.15 (WHQL) http://www.nvidia.com/object/nforce_udp_winxp_4.27.html Windows XP Driver Versions # Audio driver 4.42 (WHQL) # Audio utilities 4.44 # Ethernet driver 4.42 (WHQL) # GART driver 3.77 (WHQL) # Memory controller driver 3.38 (WHQL) # SMBus driver 4.04 (WHQL) # Installer 4.46 # IDE NVIDIA driver 4.12 (WHQL) I assume that the Windows 9x version must just use the standard Microsoft UDMA IDE driver which would limit you to PATA hard drives 137GB or smaller. This isn't really a problem. I'm not looking to use SATA anyway.

Anybody have experience with this motherboard based on the NVIDIA nForce3 250Gb chipset?... Gigabyte GA-K8NSC-939 ...or any of the the nForce3 Ultra variations?... Gigabyte nForce3 Ultra Chipset motherboards With Windows 98SE?

What is currently the best and fastest hardware that supports 98SE? I'm looking to put together a new system using modern hardware and the fastest CPU I can get, preferrably AMD. I know that CPUs with hyperthreading and dual cores won't work with Windows 9x. I also know that a lot of modern motherboard chipsets (nForce4?) do not have Windows 9x drivers. I'm thinking that the fastest combo would be something like one of the AMD FX CPUs combined with an nForce3 motherboard. Any ideas?

I use UltraEdit myself so I don't see the point in including MetaPad or Notepad2 in SP2. I see no harm in patching Notepad though. For people who just like using good ol' Notepad, the patches are a welcome addition.

Another registry only update for 2.0.3... From the Visual Studio 2005 Express "Known Issues".... 3.3 Cannot pass a structure to a variant property in an ActiveX EXE object On Windows 98, you cannot pass a structure to a variant property in an ActiveX EXE object. The problem is on a clean Windows 9X machine, the System DLL rpcrt4.dll was not registered by default, so the operating system is missing the registration key [HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\CLSID\{B5866878-BD99-11D0-B04B-00C04FD91550}]. The invocation fails because of this missing registration. To resolve this issue Go to C:\Windows\System and manually invoke RegSvr32.exe rpcrt4.dll.

I was just reading through the Visual Studio 2005 Express "Known Issues" and I saw this one regarding Windows 98. I was wondering if this registration was something that you might want to add to SP2.0.3. I don't think it could hurt... 3.3 Cannot pass a structure to a variant property in an ActiveX EXE object On Windows 98, you cannot pass a structure to a variant property in an ActiveX EXE object. The problem is on a clean Windows 9X machine, the System DLL rpcrt4.dll was not registered by default, so the operating system is missing the registration key [HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\CLSID\{B5866878-BD99-11D0-B04B-00C04FD91550}]. The invocation fails because of this missing registration. To resolve this issue Go to C:\Windows\System and manually invoke RegSvr32.exe rpcrt4.dll.

When a computer is starting up is when the heaviest demands are made on the electrical system. There's a big spike in the load with all the drives and fans starting up at the same time. It makes perfect sense that the computer would have trouble initializing a device that demands a lot of voltage like a video card. I still stand by my original assessments. Just for fun, get your system running "stable", then run the Prime95 torture test overnight and let me know it makes out... http://www.mersenne.org/freesoft.htm

The fact that it intermittently works leads me to believe that it is a voltage issue. Most likely that the AGP slot isn't providing adequate and/or stable voltage for that card. This can be caused by several things... 1) the motherboard's voltage regulators just don't provide enough voltage to the agp slot for your card. This may be a design flaw or the makers just didn't anticipate the needs of modern video cards. 2) inadequate/weak/failing/poorly-designed power supply. This is FAR more common than people realize. There are a LOT of crappy power supplies floating around. 3) failing capacitors on the motherboard. I've had this happen with three different motherboards. This is a huge problem will all kinds of devices that use capacitors, not just motherboards. In fact, power supplies are often affected. Just do a search for bad capacitors on google... http://www.google.com/search?q=bad+capacitors The solution to the capacitor problem is to replace the capacitors on the board. This can be a lot of work, even if you are able to find the right size and type of caps.

I just stumbled across some NTFS drivers for DOS and 98SE... http://www.sysinternals.com/Utilities/Ntfs...ofessional.html http://www.sysinternals.com/Utilities/NtfsWindows98.html http://www.datapol.de/dpe/freeware/index.html Does anyone know if they are subject to the 137GB drive size limit? I assume you would still need hardware that supports LBA48, either natively in the BIOS or via an add-in drive controller card.