CamTron

Where does it hang? Does it get past POST and hang during the Windows 98 splash screen?

I'm successfully using Windows 98 SE with U-verse. My D-Link AirPlus WiFi card supports WPA2 encryption on Windows 98, so it just works right out of the box. However, you can (at least on my modem) downgrade to WEP if your card doesn't support WPA. Connecting directly via ethernet should also work. I don't think wired ethernet uses any fancy encryption protocols, so any system should be able to get online.

Monitors. They just keep getting wider and wider, don't they?

I'm pretty sure he used Ollydbg or a similar program to disassemble and debug the code, search for a specific function call, and from there you can change some opcodes and know what offset and bytes to patch.

I've had similar problems in the past. Getting standby to work properly in Windows 98 can be a pain. It could be something unrelated to the graphics driver, or something causing Windows to lock up when you wake it from standby before it has a chance to turn on the monitor. Try dropping the RAM down to 512 MB and see if that makes a difference. Do you have the latest BIOS update?

You can set MaxPhysPage=20000 in System.ini to limit Windows to 512 MB of RAM. Many BIOSes allow you to set the AHCI mode to legacy IDE which allows operating systems to be installed without SATA support. As far as I know, Windows 98 doesn't have a limit on CPU speed like 95 does, so it should be able to run on any processor. I've never tried installing Windows 98 on hardware that new, but you'll likely not have any power management support or USB support. Do you have any PCI boards plugged in? Try removing all devices and see if Windows will start.

HarryTri, That's not possible because my XP installation doesn't have SATA support, and switching to SATA mode in BIOS causes a blue screen of death since Windows can't read the hard disk. I tried both modes in Linux and didn't notice much of a difference, so I'll leave it with IDE mode. If I ever need to reinstall, I'll slipstream the drivers and use SATA mode.

I meant that you could try using your normal Win9x compatible driver, but replace the client utility with a newer version that supports WPA2. Since the client utility is a user mode program, KernelEx may be able to run that.

What about KernelEx? Do any newer versions run with KernelEx or Kext?

Thanks, submix8c! That driver seemed to do the trick. I managed to get Windows XP x64 installed, along with all of the drivers, but my audio issues remain. I am able to play sound with the laptop's internal speaker in Linux, so I know it's not a hardware problem. I have another laptop with Windows 7 that has IDT audio, but it has this IDT Audio Control Panel. The XP driver doesn't seem to install any such thing, so I wonder if that's an issue. None of my hotkeys work in XP, though I am aware of some third party applications that allow you to manually assign functions to them.

Continuing my current obsession with Windows XP, I decided to load my old copy of Windows XP Professional x64 edition on to this machine since Windows XP Home was only detecting 2.7 GB of RAM when I actually have 4 GB. I created a new disk, slipstreaming the SATA drivers with nLite. The installer ran without a hitch, and installed successfully. However, when I try to boot into Windows for the first time, I get a blue screen of death with these codes. *** STOP: 0x0000007B (0xFFFFFADF91C0F3C0, 0xFFFFFFFFC0000034, 0x0000000000000000, 0x0000000000000000) 0x0000007B stands for INACCESSIBLE_BOOT_DEVICE. I have no idea what the other numbers mean. I don't know why the installer would be able to correctly read the hard disk and install Windows, but the resulting Windows installation fails to read the disk and boot up. I followed this guide http://h30434.www3.hp.com/t5/Notebook-Operating-System-and-Recovery/SATA-drivers-for-XP-solution-on-0x0000007B-BSOD/td-p/114120 and installed the drivers for XP Home from 11.2.1006_f6flpy-x86.zip, which worked. However, I could not find a x64 version of the exact same driver, so I tried this one https://downloadcenter.intel.com/download/18668/AHCI-F6-Floppy-Disk-Utility-for-AHCI which allowed me to successfully install Windows XP x64, but I get the BSOD upon initial boot up.

After trying again, I've gotten the official HP driver to install successfully. I don't know why it failed before. So, now there are no yellow question marks in Device Manager. However, I still have a problem. I can plug in headphones and hear sound through them, but with the headphones unplugged, I hear no sound from the laptop's internal speakers.

I have an HP mobo, which has almost all Intel hardware. Actually, I posted the IDs wrong. The audio is actually Vendor 111D and Device 7605. I don't know how I got those values in the first post. Driverpack couldn't find drivers for it. I'll try grepping some inf files for the vendor and device IDs.

After installing the Intel Management Engine driver, I no longer have the yellow question mark by the SMBus controller, but still no audio. Thanks for replying, but what's your reasoning behind that? VIA's vendor ID is 1106, while the audio system in my laptop has a vendor ID of 8086, which corresponds to Intel.

I've just installed Windows XP SP3 on a 2011 HP Pavilion g7-1338dx laptop (with Sandy Bridge chipset). I've slipstreamed the SATA drivers into a XP SP2 installation image, installed, upgraded to SP3, and installed all updates from Microsoft. I've gotten drivers for almost all of the hardware installed by downloading HP's official Windows 7 drivers for this laptop which also happen to contain XP drivers. So far, everything that I need works except for sound. There are two items in Device Manager with yellow question marks. The first is "Audio Device on High Definition Audio Bus" (Vendor ID: 8086, Device ID: 2805), and the second is "SM Bus Controller" (Vendor ID: 8086, Device ID 1C22). The audio driver from HP installs without any error, but I still don't have sound, and the device manager still shows a yellow question mark. I think the SMBus controller is something that allows the OS to control fan speeds, monitor temperatures, etc. I can live without that, but I'd really like to install a driver for it if at all possible. Any ideas on how to get this to install?

What's wrong with SP3? I have never noticed a performance drop when upgrading service packs, even on my Eee PC with its wimpy 900 MHz Celeron processor.

I have an Acer Aspire 5920 laptop from 2007 which came preinstalled with Windows Vista, and I decided to wipe the hard drive and downgrade to Windows XP today. As we all know, Windows XP lacks builtin SATA drivers, so it's impossible for the installer to detect SATA hard disks without either slipstreaming the drivers or loading a driver from an obsolete floppy drive. The BIOS in my computer allows me to set the hard disk to legacy IDE mode, so that it appears to the software as a PATA drive. I didn't want to go through the trouble of slipstreaming the drivers and burning another CD, so I set the hard drive to legacy IDE mode in the BIOS, and installed XP that way. Now I want the extra speed boost that SATA offers, but I'm having trouble installing the driver. I downloaded the Windows XP SATA AHCI Driver from Acer's website (link), but it refuses to install, giving me this error. Im puzzled, because Windows XP Home Edition is listed as a supported operating system, and I downloaded the driver from the Windows XP section of Acers driver list for this laptop.

Wow, I would've never thought that the order of menu items would be such a debatable topic.

I don't really remember that well. You were able to change the main color of the UI elements to orange, black, green, or whatever. I'm glad to see that the text is black again!

By the way, what happened to that option to change the forum skin? Did that get removed?

I just updated my BIOS with revision A06, and the issue seems to be resolved.

If I understand right, that device is basically a wireless ethernet bridge. In that case, there are bridges out there that support Wireless AC, which would give much better speeds than N, and would work on any device with an ethernet port.

Most users probably wouldn't need to remove the USB driver, but can you make this uninstallable for the next release? Trying to uninstall via Add/Remove Programs does nothing.

I've reinstalled Office XP (2002) on my old computer, but I'm having trouble getting it to activate. When attempting to activate over the internet, the activation stalls indefinitely at this dialog box. The system is running a fairly clean install of Windows 98 Second Edition with KernelEx and NUSB drivers installed. I am connected to the internet, so that shouldn't be a problem. Did Microsoft stop allowing Office XP to be activated?

Hmm... I seem to remember just being able to change some build options to get the output executable to work on Win95. It's been a long time since I used with Visual Studio, though. Anyway, I was just thinking that a newer version of Visual Studio might support more modern C++ features, which would make it easier to compile new code. (Maybe not, considering how long it took Microsoft to finally add C99 support.) But If it's easier to fix the code to work with VC6, then go for it. Yeah, I know what you mean. Almost every API on MSDN has either Windows 2000 or Windows Vista listed under Minimum supported client, which is completely wrong 95% of the time. Microsoft used to offer the entire MSDN library for download, so if you can track down an old version of that, it will likely have correct information about older versions of Windows.