pangoomis

Two most common issues regarding long boot up times in 98SE: 1. DHCP - you must assign the IP address of the device manually in Network control panel rather than using DHCP as that cause a long delay in boot. I think this was fixed in Windows ME, but I'm not 100% sure. 2. Leaving USB flash drives plugged in when the unofficial USB drivers are installed. As for the shutdown problem, you can try these things: 1. Installing the Windows 98 SE Shutdown Supplement. 2. Reinstalling Windows 98 SE with the /p i switch to avoid installing buggy ACPI which may cause problems with shutdown. 3. If you have NVIDIA GPU, using the Shutdown Fix. 4. Using different unofficial USB drivers.

This is a Windows 2000/XP driver, not for 98SE, it will most likely not work. You're mistaking Intel PRO/Wireless 2100 (which is 802.11b only, useless for today's Wi-Fi networks) that HAS Windows 98 drivers with the WiFi card that you have which is the Intel PRO/Wireless 2200BG (that is 802.11g, usable with today's modern 2,4GHz WPA2 Wi-Fi networks) that DOESN'T have Windows 98 drivers. Intel PRO/Wireless 2200BG was a very popular Wi-Fi card back in the day included in many laptops. Many people tried using it with Windows 98, no one succeed. As I've said, ditch that Wi-Fi card and replace it with something like NKRCM9 or a similar one that has the Atheros 5004/5213 chipset. That's what I'm using and Odyssey Client works flawlessly with it.

Different link: http://lonecrusader.x10host.com/fix95cpu.html I think it should be included in the first post?

That's not a wifi icon, that's the View Channels button linked to the Channel Bar and channels in general, heavily promoted with IE4 that came with 98 First Edition, 95 OSR2.5 and as a free download for 95. It was removed in 98 Second Edition from the Quick Launch, as the focus on the channels and channel bar seems to largely disappear once IE5 came. 98 SE does not show Channel Bar at the desktop by default for example.

Format the hard drive from the Win98 CD with the /S command so the hard drive becomes bootable with the DOS version from the Win98 CD. Make sure to check in FDISK if the partition is set to active. Then, copy the win98 folder from CD to the hard drive, and run the setup from the hard drive and not the CD. If there is still the same error, plug the hard drive to main PC (or in any other way) put HIMEMX.EXE on the root of it: https://sourceforge.net/projects/himemx/ and put DEVICE=C:\HIMEMX.EXE to CONFIG.SYS (create CONFIG.SYS if it doesn't exist). If HIMEMX.EXE doesn't solve the problem, try with the XMGR.SYS from here: http://optimizr.dyndns.org/dos/drivers.html

Try to install with the "/p i" switch as mentioned by SweetLow. It seems that you are using the unofficial repack of DOS 7.1. It has some bloatware. Why do you need DOS 7.1 in the first place? The OEM Full CD image is bootable and will install 98SE on a PC without any operating system. Delete all existing partitions, create and format a new clean one, just make sure the partition is less than 137GB.

Best way is to check the setup executable/files and see if it makes any checks regarding system locale. Game/program boxes can lie!

There are no Windows 9x drivers for Wireless 2200BG. End of story. For best results, replace your mini PCI wireless card in your laptop with something like NKRCM9 or a similar one that has the Atheros 5004/5213 chipset.

I can also suggest HP System Diagnostics. This and other suggestions you can find here: https://msfn.org/board/topic/179593-alternative-device-manager-for-win98/

Try installing Windows ME with the "/p i" switch. Note the space between p and i.

Try such URLs with XMPlay.

What PC/virtual machine are you using? What are the specs?

VBE.vxd is not needed for VBEMP to work. VBEMP.DRV is enough. It's the minidriver I think. Minidriver is what I think is seen at the top of the list if you look at a GPU Driver File Details list in Device Manager:

This is what you're probably looking for: https://soggi.org/files/driver/Intel_i810-i925_6.3.0.1007_Win98SE-2k3.7z

In addition to reinstalling Windows 98 SE with the /p i switch (there must be space between p and i), set the SATA mode to AHCI in BIOS. Then, after the installation is finished, install the AHCI driver from here using Device Manager (Update Driver): https://archive.org/details/ahci_win9x The device you'll be installing the driver for will be one of the "PCI Card" devices with yellow question mark. Just try each one (there might be many of these), until it is detected by the driver as an AHCI Controller. After the driver is installed and system has rebooted, hopefully you'll have full 32-bit disk access in the Performance tab in the System Control Panel. With the AHCI driver, you are bypassing ESDI_506.PDR entirely, saving a lot of headaches.

This driver pack is out-dated, use this one by the late rloew (Rest in Peace) : https://rloewelectronics.com/free.htm

While the content is...questionable at best, it is a good showcase how a "legacy" website can look quite good while being compatible with old browsers: https://razorback95.com/

For an alternative to Winamp I'm recommending again XMPlay from: https://www.un4seen.com/ Plenty of plugins for all sorts of music files, and still in development, doesn't require KernelEx.

That source might have been me Although it is probably incorrect, as I got VBEMP working with its .VXD file totally removed, leaving just the .DRV file. So it must have at the very least a .DRV file, not necessarily a .VXD file. I think the .DRV file is what is displayed in details in the Device Manager for a GPU.

Try installing the graphic drivers and see if it still happens.

MDGX's unofficial updates use NIRCMD to kill some processes, maybe that's the problem. Try with this update, does it happen also?: http://www.mdgx.com/files/VBVM60.EXE Does this happen even if GPU drivers are not installed? (using default VGA drivers)

HIMEMEX sounds interesting, will have to try it out (as well as XMGR.SYS) if it can fix the startup hang problem on my motherboard.

Time-bomb? What? How can I experience something like this? I've read the rloew's post about it but it only deals with ramdisks and EMM386, I don't use both on 98SE. I've been using HIMEMX.EXE without any problems for many years, it is necessary in my case, as normal himem.sys makes 98SE not bootable on my ASRock H110M-DVS R3.0 motherboard. Without HIMEMX, it just hangs on the startup screen, regardless if I use the RAM patch with the /M option or not. I haven't tested XMGR.SYS yet, would it be better?

As dencorso said, right after installing 95/98SE, just run PATCHMEM.EXE /M and forget about anything else. Don't bother with SPLIT8MB, Min/Max FileCache, or MaxPhysPage. For many years been running 98SE without ever tweaking FileCache settings, even before the RAM patch became available to public.

Huh? You don't have to change ACPI settings in BIOS to make setup /p i work correctly. It will simply not use ACPI at all. I don't have options to turn off ACPI on my ASRock H110M-DVS R3.0 motherboard BIOS yet Windows 98 SE installs just fine