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would anyone if whether or not a prescott pentium 4 without hyperthreading would be faster than a pentium 4 northwood without hyperthreading at the same clock speed of 3.06 Ghz if using youtube playback on firefox 12.0 ( last official version to work on windows 2000 )? reason why i ask this specifically, other than my previous knowledge on prescott vs northwood efficiency is to see whether the lagging im getting and unplayable framerates has to do more with the simple combination of a slow pentium 4 northwood at 3.06 to begin with and only 1 GB ram on windows 2000 with mobility radeon 9100 with 64 MB video memory, or is it possible that sse3 instructions are really needed to make up for the slowness im experiencing in the videos taking long to load all information, comments, and playback? so my direct question would be if i could get smoother playback if i upgraded from the 3.06 Ghz northwood with 130nm architecture, 512 l2 cache, and only sse2 instructions to the 3.06 Ghz prescott that has 90nm architecture, 1 MB l2 cache, and sse3 instructions. and yes, i know that many people say that the prescotts are slower in general and the extra l2 cache is supposed to make up for the slowness of the architecture, but im just asking again a direct question, will it be faster with the prescott and fix the choppy unplayable frames im currently getting with the northwood, or will it not? i feel like the sse3 instructions would help with this. the laptop seems to have very limited upgrade choices, i know there are up to 3.46 Ghz mobile prescotts and 3.33 Ghz, however i don't even know if the laptop would support higher than 3.2 Ghz for prescott with HT. http://www.ncst.com/sites/default/files/pdf/Archives/Laptops/Compatriot MN Series/compatriotMN_nbc118ts06_09.pdf

anyone know if there is a windows 95 driver for the audio device with hardware id of "PCI\VEN_1002&DEV_4341"? i've downloaded a package, for both the w95 and 98 folders, they reference to cmi9738 for the audio device next to the hardware id, however, only the 98 package shows "PCI\VEN_1002&DEV_4341". the hardware id links to AMD ATI® IXP150 AC97 Audio Controller from a quick google search. im not sure if the chipset of this laptop im working with is even supported for w95 or if it was mentioned anywhere in this thread or elsewhere, so im also trying to see if there are working chipset drivers for the laptop, gpu drivers, or other drivers. for example, i've been able to get the mobility 9000 and 9600/9700 to work on w95 before, however this laptop has a slightly different model, its the ati mobility 9100. the laptop has a current installation of windows xp so i was able to get some info beforehand, though i dont have the laptop just yet to see all hardware ids and devices. i've found an earlier chipset package of gart9x, it mentions "windows 95" inside the inf file text and also has vxd files in the package, so i would assume it might work. interestingly, for the ati mobility 9100 or radeon 9100 in general, i've found many many different hardware ids. this was somewhat a similar problem with the radeon x600 or x700, where only certain hardware ids are supported under 98SE apparently. i think lonecrusader was the one that mentioned he couldnt get any drivers to work on his mobility x600 or x700 on one of his laptops, and so i was using him as this example. i also researched and found out that apparently the radeon 8500le is literally the same exact gpu at the radeon 9100 or very very close, just differentiating mostly in transistor fabrication mostly. i was thinking of taking one route of possibly using the official 8500le w95 driver to install it for the ati mobility 9100. other options are to use "PCI\VEN_1002&DEV_5834", "PCI\VEN_1002&DEV_516d", or "PCI\VEN_1002&DEV_514d". all of these apparently had official windows 95 drivers or proper packaging with vxd files that would otherwise support w95. another thing is that the hardware ids also sometimes change based on the operating system, ( this was the case for the ati m6 or radeon 7500 when tested on 98 vs 95 ) so its possible that windows xp showing the ati mobility 9100 as "PCI\VEN_1002&DEV_5835" is really the "PCI\VEN_1002&DEV_5834" that is provided in these w95 packages i have, therefore providing a possible working driver. the laptop either comes with up to 100 mbps ethernet or 1000, im hoping its the 100 with realtek 8100 as it will have a w95 driver and i was hoping to get w95 installed on this laptop from the start. the chipset i think is rc300m or sb200, i couldn't find much info on this particular chipset. please let me know if i should progress this topic into a separate thread or if its ok to get answers directly in this thread.

there was a separate thread on a user getting the nvs110m working on i think the same laptop or similar model for 98SE using 82.69 driver, so yes, it does work, however, i would aim for laptops with the 128 MB version of the nvs110m as i think the dell d620 only has 64 MB of video memory?

winrar 3.80 was the last i got to work on my windows 95 osr 2.5 systems, newer versions did not work for me, although i don't remember which exact version(s) newer than 3.80 that didn't work, although you listed 3.92 as working. i use version 3.80 on 98SE as well. xnview 1.82.4 was the last version to work on windows 95 osr 2.5, i personally have xnview 1.11 in my archived contents as its more lightweight and the first version to support screen capture, however, its obviously less advanced in features than 1.82.4.

hi, do you know what exactly the "Visual C++ .NET 2003 Redistributables" does? does it update important files in the system? i did a general search up of what it microsoft visual c++ was through wikipedia, but i just wanted to know more specifically if its something that is recommended to install on any w95 system excluding anything else that it might need to function completely, but just the package you had put down, its only about 1 MB.

interesting, i didnt know there was a adobe reader 5.1 version for w95, i thought 5.0 was the last, however i just checked now and for adobe 5.1, it doesn't mention as windows 95 being supported, i checked 5.0.5 and does mention windows 95 as being supported. "ar505enu.exe" was the filename for the adobe reader 5.0.5 that i downloaded from oldversion, however from adobe's official site, it lists it as "a5u1tl.exe" for the 5.0.5 update. whats the difference? adobe's site says you need 5.0 already installed to install 5.0.5. i compared the two files and the oldversion one is smaller, only about 8.5 MB or so, but the one from adobe directly was about 13 MB. i renamed the adobe reader 5 when i first got it from the past that i have been using up to this point, im sure its got to be the 5.0 version exactly because the oldversion i just downloaded right now to compare was the same size, at 8.41 MB. anyone have experience on which versions they use exactly? honestly, i dont care if the 5.1 doesnt work, at least if i can get the 5.0.5 one that is only 8.5 MB or so, then it will still be a upgrade in compatibility and fixes, without sacrificing much of any space but the 13 MB one is significantly bigger and wouldnt want to use that one. here is some other stuff that works on 95 osr 2.5: . aida32 3.94.2 . hd tach 2.61 . imgburn 2.4.4.0 . sisoft sandra 2001 . speedfan 4.28 . cpu-z 1.32.1 . msn messenger 5.0 ( not sure if it works properly still )

thanks for the information. i will make the necessary changes in my docs based on these values and numbers.

i didnt have any hanging issues with the unofficial sp 3.56, at least in the most recent tested builds, there is a confirmation dialog to ask to keep new or used files in conflict which i always select no when this happens for any updates but this is a universal thing which can happen when installing drivers, etc. the things that i would like to be different or would find better is if there was a lighter version of the unofficial service pack, for the most recent or newest ones, such as removing office 97, ntfs update, windows 2000 / me themes, the tweak ui and performance tweaks, and some other unnecessary things. i feel like the folder icons dont look good after the unofficial service pack update, even after unchecking most of the optional stuff, it still changes the way folder icons look and i havent found a way to change it back to the original icons, also, it seems that you cant view all pages in the web format after the update, even if choosing the web format option in folder options, it seems to show pages in classic way? other than that though, its a convenient way of installing many important updates, as well as directx 9.0c, etc.

hi rloew, can you explain why i should use 44000 and not 4300 for maxfilecache for 1 GB systems? would the minimum for both the minfilecache and maxfilecache not be 1/24 of your system ram? i thought 4300 was about 1/24 of 1 GB of ram? that being said, the systems i ran recently with the 4300 settings ran fine, however i suppose they could have run better with higher settings? one thing i noticed i didn't seem to have was the weird virtual memory problem of it becoming disabled and having the main partition running in compatibility mode, i feel like it was fixed by using the 4300 settings, because before, when i had used "minfilecache=0" and "maxfilecache=0", on every system that had a main partition larger than 32 GB, it would cause the virtual memory becoming disabled problem, unless ram was limited to 384 MB, who knows? how do i calculate the numbers for min and max file cache? i know that for maxphyspage, 40000 = about 1 GB, but 44000 apparently uses different conversion in the min and max file cache?

im not sure why the gigabyte boards would have a problem with nvidia adapters, all of the regular desktop geforce 6000 series gpu's have official windows 98SE drivers, i would use the oldest one possible, forceware 66.94 should be good, although i've heard up to 77.xx can be used without modification and works properly still, although there IS a shutdown patch for the 81.98 driver, i dont remember if it fixed this AND the utility problem i believe it has, i would still try forceware 66.94 first and make sure its the 9x version. the most recent unofficial service pack is 3.56 i believe. you do not need to limit ram to 511 MB, up to just under 1 GB can be limited and still the system will work fine, the "minfilecache" and "maxfilecache" settings are what are just as important. i set mine to 4300 for both settings which is about the minimum you should put for 1 GB systems and my systems have been working fine with this recent setting. "maxphyspage=40000" should be a good setting for the ram limit. i also set the option in folders to show all system files and smooth edges of screen fonts, also you can delete the favorites menu from the start menu, make sure to allocate dma memory in device manager for direct access memory controller as well as enabling it on the drive, you can also check the setting for write cache enabling on drives in the performance menu and set the drive performance to network.

it seems networks speeds are limiting performance from applications from the internet, the speeds im getting are a lot quicker than the op but should still be faster, for ethernet, on my 24 mbps service, i only got about 4 mbps upload and download speeds, interestingly, when i tested with wifi very close to the router, it was 4 mbps on both upload and download as well, i would have though the ethernet would have been significantly faster but they were like the same speed. this was all tested on the dell precision m70 laptop. i can watch youtube videos up to 720p hd settings fairly smoothly, although could be a little smoother, and i don't think it's the hardware that is the limiting factor as the specs are pretty high end on the laptop, but rather the network speeds being the bottleneck. for some reason 1080p hd doesn't work on youtube, it just gives an error on firefox 3.5.19 with flash 11.

very good news, the rtl8185 mini pci card works using driver version "5.1103.1210.2007" and can connect to routers using wpa2 settings with the odyssey client manager 4.56. the wireless utility is very nice and easy to use.

so now i have the system installed with the default ACPI enabled and got everything working well with the bonus of the battery status showing now, only the wifi card is incomplete which i am waiting for the arrival of the rtl8185 mini pci card to test instead of the bcm4318mpg rev4 model. i was gonna see if anyone knows the latest driver version for the rtl8185 that works on 98SE or just any of them that they have experience as testing working, the regular hardware id is "PCI\VEN_10EC&DEV_8185", driver version "5.1114.0917.2009" was the last one i had checked that had windows 9x in the inf file, but the folder i got it from was labeled XP, the last one i checked that specifically was inside a folder with W98 labeled for it was "5.1103.1210.2007" there were some manual things i needed to do after installing with the default ACPI being enabled, however it wasn't too difficult and was able to fix them ( not easy on every laptop ) which was resource problems related to the hard disk controller, display adapter and system board extension for ACPI bios, you have to remove the usb entries and controllers in safe mode though as it freezes for the pci universal serial bus controller in other devices, i did this for both the chipset inf update portion and unofficial usb mass storage devices. so you just need to have copied the inf update and unofficial usb updates into the storage somewhere, remove any usb entries, and run the updates, obviously going with the chipset inf update first, completing everything, restarting and proceeding onto the unofficial usb one later on ( depending on how you update your system ). for the others related to ACPI: . you may get duplicate entries in device manager, if there are two display adapters, remove the working display adapter, restart the system, it will re detect a monitor, then device manager should be rid of conflicts for the display adapter portion . for the system board extension for acpi bios, note of which entry has the yellow exclamation mark with the resource conflict in device manager, go into safe mode and set configuration for the device where it has the message that this device is currently enabled or has a problem, then restart the computer and it should get rid of the resource conflict. it is not required to disable ACPI, however if you wish to install 98SE with ACPI disabled, run "setup /p i". this will prevent the battery status from working. if there is a resource conflict for the ultra ata storage controller after doing a chipset inf update, change the controller to the primary ide controller, restart system, then go to the add new hardware wizard, select no and have windows search for the device, click finish at the end, you should now have both the optical drive and storage device visible with no resource conflicts.

yeh i had tried that method you gave to enable ACPI before and it didn't really go too well this time either, it didn't detect anything new and so i manually had selected the ACPI 2004 bios option which did detect new things, but after restarting the system several times and trying to follow directions such as removing duplicate entries, all it did was create a mess and make it more complicated to work with the system and fix things. right now i erased the storage and starting out fresh, im trying to see if i can install with the default ACPI enabled, so running without "setup /p i" and simply running setup.

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.