cov3rt

thanks for the information, i do not have the rloew patch and don't have any plans on using it yet, however if i do, i will use take this info into consideration. there was actually another card i just purchased that is on the way to test on the m70, it is a mini pci card based on the rtl8185 chipset which i read that one of the regular pci wireless cards with the same chipset could connect to wpa2 so i am hoping the same can be done with the mini pci version, however there is a chance that either the card won't even be accepted by the m70 and / or the driver will cause the similar hanging problem and / or even if there is no hanging problem, i may not be able to connect to a wpa2 router or use wpa2 settings, ( i will be testing odyssey client 4.56 with all this ). you mentioned the ACPI part, i actually didn't realize you could just enable ACPI after installing the os for the battery part. i could google search it and find out, however, do you know yourself on specifically how to do this? could anything go wrong? also do you know if this boot problem or boot failures are only specific to the bcm4318 ( dell truemobile 1370 ), or if it is common problem in the entire family and / or the specific driver version being used, such as the dell truemobile 1390 or 1150? this is mainly why i bought the rtl8185 card because i felt like if was gonna test something different, that it would be something that is in a different family of network cards and uses a different driver. i used driver version "3.104.64.52" for the bcm4318 card i have with hardware id of "PCI\VEN_14E4&DEV_4318".

good update, i have gotten youtube videos to play now on firefox 3.5.19 with flash 11.1.102.63 non IE by following a solution provided in another thread. basically, you just need to type ""&nohtml5=1" without the quotes at the end of each youtube video, press enter, and upon the new page, it should automatically load videos or have the option to play them. i was thinking this same method would also work on windows 95 with the flash 7 spoof plug in or nt 4.0 with flash 8 ( requires other modification too ), as youtube did stop working with the flash 7 spoof on windows 95 a while ago too, i didn't test nt 4.0 for a while but i would assume the solution may work on both OS, unfortunately, the wifi problem is still there when installing the driver for the bcm4318 mini pci card ( dell truemobile 1370 ), it prevents the system from booting and will just sit at the splash screen for hours, although eventually it goes to the other screen where it mentions Wbem in the c: drive, but still sitting for long periods where i had to shut down the system or restart. i was gonna test another card, some toshiba mini pci card, but that card's antenna ports were too far from the laptop's antennas, even though the card was accepted, and the card is one of those cards that requires an extra cardbus driver but installing that causes a resource conflict where you can't use it unless the original cardbus controller of the laptop is disabled and doesn't have the driver installed. i can't think of any other cards that would support wpa2, i don't remember if the intel pro 2100 supports wsc gaurd 4.0, and i never tried it with oddyssey client 4.56, because i was thinking of trying the intel pro 2100 as i usually used this card often in my laptops, there is the cardbus route, but i don't like the practicality of cardbus because of it sticking out from the laptop, being less secure physically, and taking up a slot when someone can use it for something else while having wifi in the mini pci slot. there is some other cards that i could test, although some of them are in the same family and i feel like it would less likely to work if i tried a different card in the same family such as the dell truemobile 1390, driver version "3.90.38.0" was said to work with wsc gaurd 4.0 i believe from one source. one random card that isn't in the same family as those broadcom is the "TNETW1130" model, which uses the hardware id "PCI\VEN_104C&DEV_9066"

i ran into an unfortunate problem, the bcm4318 mini pci wifi card seems to prevent the system from booting into windows after driver installation. everything else was fine, except for the wifi part. could it perhaps be a faulty driver or resource conflict? i noticed when trying to install the driver again, it installed it all the way but freezed the system so i had to manually turn it off but still would take hours to try to get to boot into windows where i had to just turn off the laptop or go into safe mode and remove the driver references which then allowed booting back to normal windows mode. i believe i used problemchyld's driver, im not sure if i spelled the person's name right but i obtained it from him i think from a different forum, it may have been a modified version? i was thinking of using a different driver version. interestingly, i had gotten this same driver working though on a different laptop, so i'm not sure why im getting the problems im getting on this laptop. any thoughts or solutions on this? also just now i just tested the ethernet which worked fine with firefox 3.5.19, however when going on youtube and trying to load a video, it wouldn't and just stayed black. i have kernelex 4.5.2 installed with the latest update i believe with adobe flash player 11.1.102.63 non IE, this flash version was the newest one i got to work in the past with kernelex 4.5.2 so i always used it, however it doesn't work anymore today.

i went ahead and got the dell precision m70 myself. so far, configuring and setting up the laptop has went pretty smoothly and quickly. it has been one of the easier 915PM chipset laptops i got working on 98SE. i did install with ACPI disabled, "setup /p i". other things were setting usb emulation to off in bios, setting video to onboard video. i was initially gonna try out the unofficial 82.69 driver for the fx go 1400 gpu, but i went another route to which i believed would work better possibly, which was to use the official forceware 66.94 driver and manually select the geforce 6800 since i read somewhere that a similar approach was done, just for different reasons on a different os, and it worked! selecting "NVIDIA GeForce 6800" in the devices shown in device manager installation steps through the have disk way worked after restarting the system, a new monitor was detected and resolution and functionality has been fine so far, showing 240 MB of video memory in dxdiag, resolution can be set up to 1280x800 with 32 bit color mode which i currently have it at and offers a good resolution, not too small where it's hard to see things on the screen but not too big where you have to scroll a little more around the screen to get to something, etc. i am still updating the system, basically all drivers are working, the dell truemobile 1370 ( bcm4318 ) mini pci card is accepted, i just haven't installed the driver or ran the odyssey client 4.56 ( would be first time using this wireless client ). so far, this is the fastest laptop that i've been able to successfully get pretty much full support for it in 98SE, it's also nice because it doesn't run too loud either, the cpu/gpu fans run at a steady acceptable noise level. i suppose it would've been better if i got it to work with ACPI enabled so that the battery status can show, but that's left for some other experiment.

would be even nicer if we got crystaldiskmark to work on 95 osr 2.5, it's the only benchmark i've found that can do 4k queue depth 1 speeds for random read and write that can work on 98SE or newer but not 95 osr 2.5. atto i think only goes down to queue depth 2. there is as ssd, i remember getting it to work on 98SE ( 95 osr 2.5 did not work ), though it performed a bit buggy and extremely slow in giving results in 98SE so i got rid of it and just used crystaldiskmark, as ssd seems to work better on windows 2000 and newer from my experience. i originally wanted to use and keep as ssd since from what i observed, it's benchmarks measure more of the worst case scenario so i like to use that approach more when accessing the performance of the drives as i noticed as ssd will almost always give lower results compared to crystaldiskmark. hd tach 2.61 isn't bad as i mentioned it in the other thread jaclaz linked to, though it only measures sequential speeds i believe which isn't what i care about too much.

this is a bit late of a reply but i was gonna say i made a mistake on mentioning the dell latitude d830 laptop, it's actually the dell latitude d810 model that i was referring to, not the d830.

it may have been better to post this in a separate thread / other thread, however i can answer some questions from your post, 98SE seems to do best and fine up till ich5 or 865 chipsets, ich6 is officially supported but tends to be harder to setup, both stability wise and driver wise, the dell dimension 2400 is actually fairly easy to get working with 98SE, i think i remember actually trying to get it fully working on windows 95 osr 2.5 but never got the gpu driver to properly work despite many sites mentioning win95 as a drop list in the driver section specifically towards the 845 graphics, it could perhaps have to do with the ACPI part which you mentioned was the solution to the gpu part, i remembered a problem where i eventually got the driver to install, however dxdiag showed it using something like 9 MB of video memory or some very low number, i don't remember if it was the dell dimension 2400 but it was either a laptop or desktop with 845 chipset and graphics. i didn't bother with using the 845 graphics on 98SE anyways up to this point because of not only the unsuccessful attempts in getting it to work properly but also the poor performance of the integrated gpu itself. i've been only focusing on the fast gpu's like the mobility x600, geforce lineup with official drivers, etc. for the solid state drive part, you don't necessarily have to get an adapter, you can actually get one of those pata dom drives ( disk on module drives ) which are essentially 40 pin pata solid state drives that plug into a typical desktop motherboard and come with a power source which is a molex power connection, i recommend the 32 GB one, although a bit expensive, the reason why i recommend specifically a 32 GB one or up to 32 GB is because of some weird bug that shows up ( in my experience ) when you have a primary storage partition of larger than 32 GB and more than 384 MB of system ram on 98SE that causes virtual memory to become disabled and the main drive runs in compatibility mode, making usability almost useless ( you can't open and work with most programs ), however if the partition size is limited to just under 32 GB, you can then have up to about 1 GB of system ram and won't have the bug either. i haven't seen anyone else mention this specific problem, however i thought of mentioning again anyways.

i remember when i used to apply almost all available official 98SE updates individually and had to restart the system almost every update but i gave up on that and went with the unofficial 98SE service pack because there were just too many updates and i didn't even have all of them either, the only thing i don't like about the unofficial 98SE service pack is how it changes the way the folder icons look and some other random "unnecessary" add ons that could be removed or an alternative light package could be made instead as there are some files that i can't put in my archived 98SE folder because it becomes too big to fit onto a burned cd-rw, mostly from the 98SE unofficial service pack containing some updates or things that aren't necessarily important or needed, however i still update my 95 osr 2.5 systems with the individual updates way which does takes some time with restarting the system after almost every update but i still prefer to use it and i'd rather not experiment with the unofficial service pack way which would require some other experimenting to get things right.

ok, i can understand the more specifics when calculating actual sizes, but setting 40000 for maxphyspage would still be ok, 43691 would just be the "Better" setting?

sorry for the error on my behalf for the maxfilecache, though why would 40000 not be a proper setting for maxphyspage?

a quick google search shows the sis m650, nvidia geforce fx go5200, go5600, and geforce4 448go as listed for gpu options for the acer aspire 1700, i am not sure of 98SE driver support for all of them but there is definitely a sis m650 driver that works as well as chipset drivers for that laptop, fx go 5200 and 5600 may or may not work, but more than likely should work with or without modification ( inf editing and / or manual device selection through device manager ). the geforce4 448go may or may not work, though i wouldn't know on a order on which gpu is more likely to work, except for the sis m650 which there is an official driver for. i won't go on the update installation steps / process / order, however for system.ini settings, i've always used minfilecache=0 and maxfilecache=0 and didn't experience any problems that needed attention, though i was told 1/25 of your ram should be the minimum for maxfilecache size and so i would recommend that to you. for example, if you have 1 GB of ram installed ( using 1024 MB as 1 GB ), a good maxfilecache size would be "maxphyspage=4300" or higher in the system.ini which is about 41 MB i think, i also use "maxphyspage=40000" in all my 98SE builds.

those switches are used when running setup to install the operating system, so if you normally just type setup in dos prompt, you may have to run one of those switches i mentioned, though it may or may not be needed depending on the laptop. for the dell latitude d810, i was able to get it working properly with either ACPI enabled or disabled, however, my last experimenting with the d810 only yielded successful operation with ACPI disabled which you would run at the dos mode after formatting the drive and then you would type "setup /p i". the route i install with 98SE is the ms dos install without floppy way with a cd, i use the same method with windows 95 osr 2.5. i am not aware of the video ram limit in relation to 98's ram limit. rloew has several patches that apply to many different things, it's possible the rloew ram patch you have may help with the video ram issues or there may be a more specific patch that he offers that is supposed to fix it. other than that, there may be some things you need to manually do like setting resources, unchecking a device in device manager and finding a free resource or changing configuration type or editing some inf files to properly detect devices during driver installation. my only experience with the unofficial forceware 82.69 driver was that i used it for a geforce 7300 gs or gt with 256 MB of video memory and it installed the driver and it worked fine, although from what i remember, it was a pain in the a** to get it to work due to resource problems or configuring, however the person i gave it to later on also mentioned that the gpu driver wasn't working with several resource problems, i believed the reason to this could've been explained from a worn out cmos battery but also from the nature of 98SE that can run erratically or sketchy sometimes. i would assume resource problems would be less of a problem or with the previous generation gpu's like the fx go 1400 or 6 series nvidia mobile versions but i really don't know.

the m70 seems to be even faster than the nw8240 i just worked with, making it the fastest 98SE compatible laptop i've seen, though, that is if you can the gpu part to work, at least through a external monitor which had to be done on the nw8240 as i couldn't get display on the laptop screen after installing a modified catalyst 4.11 installation ( inf editing ). i would assume the unofficial forceware 82.69 may work for the fx go 1400 that is based on the go 6800, as the 6 series were the last officially supported and the package allows up to 7 series nvidia and up to 256 MB video memory based systems to work fine without needing extra work or patches to be done, many 7 series nvidia cards have been known to work fine if they don't use more than 256 MB of video memory, however i'm not sure. the 915pm indeed is one of the picky chipsets for 98SE but IS supported officially by intel, it just may be harder to get running properly or stable on 98SE. you may have to install with acpi disabled "setup /p i" or some other installation process, i had to use "setup /ip" ( bypass unsupported plug and play devices ) for the nw8240 because "setup /p i" wouldn't allow finishing of setup and would constantly freeze and reboot on the plug and play installation / configuration part. the official site lists the dell wireless 1370 as supported on the m70 and so you should have better luck possibly with this laptop than the nw8240 that doesn't officially accept my dell wireless 1370 mini pci card for the wifi part as there is a driver for 98SE for the 1370 card with an appropriate wifi utility to connect up to wpa2 based connections using wpa-aes, wpa-psk, etc. i'm not sure why i didn't test the m70 instead of the nw8240, i guess i couldn't find any ones for sale in decent shape or price for me or perhaps some other compatibility issue. i guess another issue may arrive from the video memory being high, i think some people mentioned having problems with gpu's with large video memory sizes ( more than 128 MB ) on laptops.

so now i was able to get image on the screen, that is, only from using an external monitor which someone else on a different thread used the same method for the mobility x700 they had on a different laptop when using either windows 98 or windows me. im sure it's possible some way to configure the system to not need an external monitor to get proper image display on the laptop's screen but at this point, im more or less down experimenting, at least for the gpu portion, although it may be worth of a try to install to test another laptop such as the dell latitude d810 again with ACPI enabled instead of ACPI disabled which is the last way i got it to work "properly", that way, you can benefit from the ACPI features like battery monitoring and can possibly still get the gpu to work by using the same method of removing the duplicate display adapter through safe mode to which i did just recently on the nw8240, i originally did get the mobility x600 on the dell latitude d810 to work with ACPI installed but somewhere between the builds and experimenting made it difficult or unsuccessful, probably freezing, crashing or setup not finishing where i had to go with ACPI disabled to get things working properly. so again, the laptop basically has near full support for windows 98SE, i was able to insert the dell wireless 1370 mini pci card ( broadcom 4318 ) while the laptop was on several times before the boot process to get the driver installed, you have to insert it when on that screen to which you press f8 and it gives boot options, then you would proceed on normal boot and so on. risky, but worked. although i did get the driver to install and apparently working, wsc gaurd 4.0 didn't work to allow me to launch up the utility and configure a connection, despite another user mentioning on a different thread that they did get it to work with the broadcom 4318 card. i have attached the exact error message below. it previously complained about having only one instance or something along that lines, i only took a picture of the last one after the final boot though. perhaps i could try Odyssey client 4.56? other than the mini pci wifi card still not supported properly and no bios update / patch for it obtained yet and the gpu part, there are working 98SE drivers for pretty much everything else, you may need to edit some of the inf files for the devices to properly detect them upon device manager driver installation. also attached a photo of dxdiag ( external monitor ) showing the firegl v5000 / mobility x700 listed as the x700 secondary instead and of course the model of my lovely white height adjustable monitor :). also forget to mention, i used specifically catalyst 4.11 for the gpu, i added specifically the hardware id of the nw8240's gpu directing to radeon x700 secondary series ( SE ). i didn't use the have disk way but the other way of driving installation of just selecting the standard pci graphics adapter (vga) and pointing to the modified catalyst 4.11 driver folder, below is what i added to the inf: "RADEON X700 Series Secondary " = RV410_ENU, PCI\VEN_1002&DEV_5653&SUBSYS_0940103C&REV_00 "RADEON X700 Series Secondary " = RV410_ENU, PCI\VEN_1002&DEV_5653

^i tried this above but setup had a hard time configuring the system after completing the installation, almost all devices were not installed and it was just too complicated to figure out how to get everything back to normal. i went ahead and started from scratch and did "setup /ip" again, so ACPI was still installed, this time i was able to successfully get rid of the duplicate vga display adapter in order to get the other one with the exclamation mark that was conflicting with the main device which the exclamation marked device was the actual mobility x700 / firegl v5000 with hardware id of "PCI\VEN_1002&DEV_5653". i can give the details and steps to this if anyone is interested. with that getting fixed and feeling more confident and optimistic, going with the catalyst 4.11 and selecting the first radeon x700 secondary shown through the have disk option upon reboot caused a black screen which is still black as of now after a half an hour or so, interestingly, the system felt like it fully booted to the desktop based on the way the hard drive was working and processing information through acoustics like it would when you are about to load to the desktop or just loaded into it, but the screen was just black this entire time, not from the splash screen but right when you load into the windows desktop part, it turns black. i choose the radeon x700 secondary because based on wikipedia, the clock and memory speeds were closest so i would have assumed it would work fine from that.

please, can anyone tell me what setup command i would need to type in order to combine disabling of ACPI and bypass unsupported plug and play devices? i was only able to get 98SE to install when using "setup /ip" which bypasses unsupported plug and play devices but still installs ACPI, starting from scratch again and then trying "setup /p i;ie" this time causes setup to freeze again at the 10 minute mark on the plug and play part so it appears i'm not typing the setup switch(s) correctly. i've gotten all drivers to work except the gpu when using the "setup /ip" route, couldn't get bluetooth "03F0&PID_011D" to work, but i will be testing a package directly from hp's site for the nw8240 which contains a 9x driver, though i had to compile my own folder with specific contents because of too many unnecessary files. also can't find a driver for "VEN_104C&DEV_8034" but this device may not be important, all the other drivers have been found, sound, ethernet, updated cardbus, usb, modem, etc. the mini pci wifi card dell wireless 1370 is left out but that's an obvious, i could test it by inserting in the laptop while it's on after post in 98SE but it's risky and not necessary anyways because the driver should work with wsc gaurd 4.0 or odyssey client 4.56.

edit/update, i was able to get setup to fully install using the "setup /ip" command, i wanted to have ACPI disabled too and startup disk, but i didn't know how to combine those which i was see if one of you guys would know the specific command i would have to type to do that, the only specific example i saw that made sense to me for multiple switches was "setup /p a;b" ( combing "PA" and 'PB" ), would this be correct? - "setup /p i;ip;ie" in order to have ACPI disabled, startup disk disabled and also bypass unsupported plug and play devices?

what exactly is vcache anyways? i always thought vcache was unnecessary on systems that already had fast components and was something more useful for lower end systems such as using a pentium mmx with like 16 MB system ram, is there a more optimal setting i should use for maxfilecache, particularly for my 1 GB systems?

i've always used that setting and didn't see any problems with programs, applications or in general. i got btw, i wiped the hard drive again and started over with 512 MB of ram installed instead of 1 GB this time on the nw8240, ran setup and had the same exact problem, apparently no difference, it freezed at the 10 minute mark and then keeps restarting endlessly towards the same point. i used "setup /p i", im gonna try out "setup /p i;a" to see if there is a difference. it sucks the op couldn't give a little more info on more specific specs of his nw8240 laptop he was using, specifically how much ram he had installed.

i always use "minfilecache=0", "maxfilecache=0" and "maxphyspage=40000" in my 98SE builds and i haven't really ran into any specific problems that needed fixing, though mind you, i may have not used the systems thoroughly enough to find out, however, i also have to limit the storage space to just under 32 GB or else some weird bug occurs where virtual memory becomes disabled and the hard drive runs in compatibility mode and i haven't found any solutions to this other than limiting the ram to "maxphyspage=18000" and then virtual memory works fine again and compatibility mode goes away for the hard drive, however doing this doesn't make sense on 98SE because of many applications that can benefit or run at all with the extra ram, just so you have extra storage device. on windows 95 osr 2.5, the only difference is i can only run up to 384 MB of system ram and max of just under 32 GB partition size of storage before i start experiencing problems. btw, that problem with virtual memory becoming disabled and hard drive running in compatibility mode only seemed to come up after restarting the system in the update process, in other words, i could have a 120 GB hard drive installed as an example with 1 GB of ram with the system.ini settings i use and the system running fine up to a certain point, then after one point of updating the system and rebooting, the system runs weird or crashes quickly which then becomes evident from the problems i just explained. i think it happens after i install chipset drivers, i have left this problem entirely by simply limited the storage partition size to just under 32 GB for my builds which for me is still a decent amount of space in general.

so then it IS a ram problem? i actually ordered 2 sticks of 512 MB ram yesterday that should be coming in soon, so i can install only 512 MB of system ram at first, see if 98SE will fully install and if it does, edit the system.ini and install the other 512 MB ram for a total of 1 GB as i only had a full 1 GB ram stick on the system from always and no ram sticks with less memory.

well i tried to reinstall 98SE from scratch again on the nw8240, this time after deleting the partitions, i ran "fdisk /mbr" as it was mentioned as helpful for several situations for clearing a hard drive of viruses or in general for starting from scratch, ran "setup /p i;e" like before ( acpi disabled and floppy disk creation, although it still runs the floppy disk message so the "e" command seems useless? ), but same problem of getting stuck at 10 percent, and then trying to turn off the laptop and re run the setup would just cause an infinite restart loop cycle without even getting past the 16 minute mark or so. i couldn't really find specific solutions to this problem, however, i do have a feeling it may be related to the system ram or ram problem in general. the system has 1 GB stick ram installed, i read on msfn forums on trying to edit the system.ini while in dos before the operating system is fully setup to make it seem like the system has less ram as setup may complain about memory related errors but apparently this made no difference, i don't know if i didn't do it correctly and / or there are other problems separate from the ram issue, regardless, the steps were a bit complicated and didn't make sense to me and i don't know if i want to go back and try to make sense out of hit without having a clue what im doing in the process, i've already spent a lot of time and effort on this laptop, i had decided to temporary hold off the 104 unsupported wireless adapter problem because i wanted to see how much support and functionality i can get within 98SE without having the wireless adapter at hand, but i can't even get the OS to install, i've attached a picture of the specific error message which only seems to come once when trying to run the second setup phase right when it freezes.

ok, thanks for the info, i also removed the extra information in my previous post.

hi, is this updated kernelex version a direct replacement to any of the older kernelex versions? i noticed it's only 195 KB instead of 206 KB found in the older kernelex 4.5.2 i have in my archived files, giving me a tiny bit more room to work with if i can replace it with the older one.

does anyone know if odyssey client 4.56 is compatible with all wireless adapters for 98SE? i would like to use it instead of wsc gaurd 4.0 if it can do direct wpa2 support and support ALL cards where as with wsc gaurd 4.0 that only supports certain wireless cards, also odyssey client 4.56 is a little smaller in size, making it better for archived packaged contents for burning on a cd-r or cd-rw, also a little off topic but does anyone know if there is a lighter or more compact package for the unofficial service pack for 98SE? it has increased so much in size from all the versions, i don't need some of the packaged contents like office 97 or ie 5.5 core files, etc.