cov3rt

i was gonna experiment with nt 4.0 next, though i gave up halfway because i couldn't even login to the operating system and i couldn't find out what exactly i did wrong for that to happen. i think i used the terminal server edition, i picked that one because i thought if i picked the newest or a newer version, i would encounter less problems in general. i think i may try out the regular server version next and see if i can get it even past the login phase lol, there seems to be a lot of limitations though from the research i have done such as the 7.8 GB hard drive limatation which i still have not find a clear answer of what exactly you would have to do to get past it or fix it, like some source said if you have the install disc with service pack 4 at least, then you just format it as the largest it can take without necessarily setting a manual size and then after your within the os, put sp6 on it and it fixes the issue and displays the full size? i do find it attractive though that you can install lots of ram, up to 4 GB i believe without issues ( or at least, that is what wikipedia said ). is this true?

even those specs are slow for windows 95, even those specs are weak for windows 95, i wouldn't recommend anything less than a pentium III for windows 95, unless your strictly doing it for educational purposes and not to re sell it, then the pentium 133 Ghz on w95B or C is fine, for windows 98, i would not use anything less than a pentium 4 or a processor that doesn't have SSE2 instructions, with SSE, its ok with w95 because most people probably won't do much or can't do much extensive work on the internet anyways, your limited to fairly basic sites like craigslist, wikipedia, youtube ( with basic 240p video playback ) if you use the unofficial flash 7 plug in, and other basic sites.

I had wished you would say: "Unless it's a *really new* PC, I prefer Win98SE..." as far as i know, windows 98SE can be made to work fairly modern with all the unofficial updates and work that has been done to it so far, so you can have a near "modern" working pc with the nostalgic feel of a old operating system, 1080p video watching in youtube, playing fairly new games online or offline, use and browse most sites properly like facebook, hotmail, ebay, etc. windows 95 as of now just has too many limitations to make it practical to work as a near modern pc, some of them would be directx 8.0a ( although there are a few dx 8.0a games that look nice ), 8.0a is slightly old for extensive graphics and functionality, no or limited wdm support ( someone correct me if im wrong ), fewer API codes, and just generally harder to build more stable or newer in functioning.

i don't know about the toughbook cf-29 but i had some difficulties getting the intel extreme graphics 2 driver that the toughbook cf-29 also uses to work on windows 98SE on other laptops. either the driver would not work properly despite downloading a windows 98 version, where you would need to find another very specific windows 9x driver or it would work but freeze intermittently on playing videos or any flash related stuff and also dxdiag would indicate it using like no video memory, i think i remember it was only like 9 MB or something ridiculously low, but that could just have to do with using newer unsupported dell dimension desktops with picky bios's on windows 98 which would be a no no, maybe if it was like a asrock 865g board, it would work better, but i dont know. as far as the gpu goes, you should be able to find a working audio driver and ethernet, although be prepared if finding a driver is more difficult than you expect. you will find many pcmcia, usb or mini pci wireless wifi cards that will work on windows 98, though i would avoid pcmcia as my experience with it was not too good, i got resource conflicts and system lockups when trying to confgure pcmcia wifi cards, usb is good but doesn't look practical to me for a laptop. mini pci would be best as its internally and securely installed in the laptop but the problem is some cards not supported, even if they physically fit into the laptop, you will get a message upon booting that the mini pci device is not supported and it has been disabled.

i just checked now and there seems to be an official driver for the geforce 8400gs under windows 2000 basing off the inf file and readme of forceware 163.75 so i think your set for the graphics card.

just looking at the specs and not factoring much of other things, windows 2000 would be the best choice. being that the board you use is an ich7 chipset, it is supported for the chipset part, 4 GB of ram will WORK on windows 2000 ( but may be a little less though, like 3.5 GB or so ), geforce 8400gs might work, but im not sure, i know that the 7000 series are supported officially. even then, it would be easier to make newer hardware to work on windows 2000 than to do the same thing on windows 98SE so there may be a slight advantage of using windows 2000 in general. with all that said, even if you dont use the geforce 8400gs, the gma 950 is supported on windows 2000 which your motherboard uses. the older operating systems have too many limitations and modificiations needed to make it practical to work for your particular setup.

Sorry for the late reply, timezone's fault (and my cat's too). I'm afraid you misunderstood the utility of the tool. It does not search the web for drivers - it merely reads the registry and displays the information found in there. It's possible that Win95 behaves a little differently than 98 and later. When devices are detected and no drivers are found for them, those devices should appear as 'Unknown device' in their corresponding sections. Their VID & PID or VEN & DEV, if known, will be displayed below as a hint for the user so they know what drivers to look for. When an Internet connection already exists, the application tries to silently download the current vendor and device ID database from www.pcidatabase.com (may not be the most up-to-date list though and behavior may change in subsequent application versions) in order to be able to provide the aforementioned feedback. If there is no Internet connection, the application will use an internal database or - if previously downloaded - the database (VendorID_DB.txt) found in application's folder. The USB_devices.txt database is not updated currently. a lot has happened from the other day, i replaced windows 95 on the laptop with windows 98 to see if i could get more support which i couldn't get it to work properly, could not find a working sound driver still, for some reason java 1.5.22 that would work on previous builds wouldn't install completely, it would just freeze the pc at near of end of setup where only one bar was left i believe, i eventually got a older version of java to install, i believe 1.4.19 AFTER deleting all java linked files in the find option and uninstalling any of them in add or remove programs but net 2.0 didnt want to install and i just didnt want to work with the pc anymore so i decided to install windows 2000 SP4 to see how it would function and it didnt even fully install windows 2000, it got stuck on the starting up windows 2000 logo part with i think 10 bars where i tried to restart the system a few times with the same results so i just decided to install windows 7 and currently, its in the gui right now but the windows update is taking a long time, i did increase the ram to 1.5 GB ram before installing the os. it was 1 GB on windows 98 and 512 MB on windows 95. i find it interesting that it ran with less problems on windows 95, than on 98, and 2k. the good part is, at least i have the drivers that did work on windows 95 as i may plan on testing it out on the same laptop again sometime in the future, although windows 98 would be better because of the better support of wdm. i will have to see.

i found a ich3-s motherboard with sata ports lol, although it would be extremely expensive to buy - http://www.supermicro.com/products/motherboard/Xeon/E7501/X5DPL-TGM.cfm

wow, that is a nice Intel D845PEBT2 motherboard with sata ports with release information mentioning september 2002 and ich4, i thought 2003 was the earliest for sata ports in motherboards but i guess intel implemented them a little earlier, i also thought ich5 was the earliest for sata ports but that board uses them with ich4, btw, i checked those two chipset software utilities but basing off the devlist, it only mentions up to ich3, nowhere does it mention ich4 and no windows 95 folders within the package. the one i use does use windows 95 folders under the name of win95cur and win95old with the same devlist info, although i renamed the chipset inf package, so i dont know which version it is anymore. are you sure there are ich4 drivers specifically listed for windows 95 or maybe they are not listed specifically, but still work to internally suit ich4 builds?

Technically no. The last Intel chipset with official 95 support was the 845 ICH4 Pentium 4 chipset. I have several 845 chipset based boards that have working 95 drivers for every single device except the USB2.0 conrollers.If you're just looking for chipset support, it is simple enough to create INFs (or modify those for later OS'es) to properly name all of the devices. The problem comes when other devices on the board no longer get along well with Windows 9x, whether it be integrated Audio or Network cards, or more obscure non-configurable things like the ACPI controller. I have successfully used Windows 95 without any such problems on an Intel 875 chipset board. Not all drivers were available, but there were no resource conflicts or other such annoyances. thats interesting that you got up to ich4 chipset drivers working, i was only able to find up to ich3-s and ich3-m in the packages, but i guess i haven't looked enough up to this point . looking at the list of intel chipsets on wikipedia indicates ich4 was brought out in 2002 so it does make sense that windows 95 was still supported as i read somewhere that windows 95 still received updates till december 31, 2002, and not 2001, or at least, some of the hotfixes i have, link files to dates of 2002 and newer, the one im looking at right now links to 2004, q837209, with all this said, i do thank you for bringing up that ich4 is also supported on windows 95, although i work more on laptops now, i now a newer chipset to work with on w95 desktop builds, but would ich4-s and ich4 be the same in driver support? reason being is that the recent laptop i worked with, the dell inspiron 600m with 855gm or pm chipset, i was not able to find a driver for the smbus which is usually updated after installing the inf update on older chipsets, but i guess that answers my question on ich4-s vs ich4, ich4 IS supported, ich4-s is not? btw, did you use ide drives on that 875 chipset or sata in compatiblity mode / legacy mode? would be nice to to use a board like that and have sata drives in ide mode.

i ran the hddb exe file, it brought up a similar device id indentifier like the unknown devices i use but did not connect to the web for a update and gui. i did not find any unknown devices in the list, however, it does list more detailed device id's that i can possibly look up to see if i can find a working driver. does this hddb tool actually go on the web and find updates for windows 98SE though?

yes, i did download some of the official xp drivers to see if i can find instances to older drivers but with no luck so far. originally, i had a little hard time finding a lot of information for the laptop before obtaining it, i was unsure of the gpu portion for one, though i was sucessfully able to find a working w95 driver, under the name of m10 in device manager or mobility 9600 for the other name. i did check the ethernet driver and it had w95osr2 supported and i also have it working, one thing new is the laptop is apparently based on an ati chipset, which i rarely encountered when working with desktop or laptops, or at least, i always choose the intel based ones because they just seem to more common and wikipedia ( list of intel chipsets ) always helps me with the support info . basically ich3-s and m would be the last to support windows 95 ( as fas as the chipset portion goes ). what would be nice is to see if i can find if there are motherboard chipset drivers for this laptop as i also don't know where to look for this portion. one way would be to use an ati based chipset identifier so i can maybe get some other important updates. does anyone know if there is a chipset identifer under w95 that works with ati chipsets? im open to try out suggestions that can help with any of the issues i need help with. btw. thanks for the info drugwash.

i was wondering if anyone can help me find some working drivers for a few missing devices on a hp compaq presario r3001 laptop with windows 95 installed. the ones i have missing are listed below - PCI Multimedia Audio DeviceUnable to Detect, Hardware ID: VEN_1002&DEV_4341 PCI System PeripheralUnable to Detect, Hardware ID: VEN_104C&DEV_8201 Unknown DeviceUnable to Detect, Hardware ID: VID_049F&PID_0086 the audio on hp's site indicates ad1981b, though i could not find a vxd version / windows 95 one with the same hardware id. devid.info site has not worked all day so i couldn't check there as i usually check there for hardware id's. pci system peripheral links to some hp firmware loading device but from the few packages i downloaded, they were not detected in the device manager manual inf finder and i also tried two of them using the setup option but mentioned other devices that werent compatible and nothing changed after installing them. unknown device links to some bluetooth usb device, the earliest package i found had the inf of 2003 but still did not work after restart. although i did find a "working" driver for the pcmcia controllers, i still dont know how to get the pc cards to work. i have (2) texas 1620 controllers, a pcic to pcmcia controller ( which was there from when i first installed the operating system, the other 2 texas 1620 controllers were part of other devices that i found a working driver ), and just recently, a pcmcia card services with 2001 driver date working ( which came up when i plugged in the intel pro wireless 2011b pc card that im trying to get to work ). i downloaded the intel wireless drivers for the pro 2011b, ran setup but as i don't the card specifically listed in device manager, im lost on trying to install the driver and get it working.

Beats me. Mr. Loew, you got the floor. when you say win95, does that mean forceware 82.69 / 82.16 may work on windows 95, but may not support geforce 7000 series gpu? or is it meant to only correct shutdown problems with official driver releases such as the 81.98 forceware? not that you would need anything better than like a fx 5200 on windows 95 lol. the best games i have researched only recommend 32 MB graphics cards with dx8.0a, so a 64 MB video card on windows 95 would be good enough for most things. which brings up a question, does anyone know any games that recommend 64 MB of video memory on windows 95?

i found two files that you uploaded drugwash, from what i downloaded, the only thing that you would need to do is run the autopatcher from "shutdownpatcher1450" to fix the shutdown issues, so what is the other download for with the file "ShutdownPatcher1450_src"? and this is for the forceware 82.69 under windows 98SE right?

virtual memory shouldn't be disabled in any circumstance in win95 / 98, from what i gathered, every build i had that i disabled virtual memory to see if it would fix anything would actually mess up everything and crash almost anything i ran. if your using 2 GB of ram, regardless of limiting the maxphyspage and min/maxfilecache will probably still give you a malfunctioning computer or insufficient memory errors because for some reason, even though the extra ram is limited, it still seems to interfere within the operating system. try to see if you can run only one stick of ram if your using 2 sticks of 1 GB so you only have a max of 1 GB, although every windows 95 i worked with would not boot with more than 512 MB ram from the start, only windows 98SE would. all my recent windows 95 builds had the ram limited to 384 MB with one 512 MB stick of ram ( which is how much you would have to begin with in the first place ), any more than 384 MB, like 392 MB or higher would make the computer malfunction / give out of memory errors, and i think virtual memory even got disabled.

ok, i changed the driver to the detected inf of "VIAudOEM" with the date of 12/19/2003 and file version of 6.14.01.4000 and the audio is working again.

update! sorry to say but the driver is actually not working anymore, the issue appeared after the system crashed running dxdiag where upon reboot, the driver had a yellow marking in device manager with code 10. im gonna see if i can find a older driver as 2007 does seem pretty new and maybe an older one would work more properly / stable.

thank you very much, the link to that driver you gave me was accepted and the audio is now working .

so i thought i'd make a separate thread that's more appropriate for troubleshooting / experimenting. what i need is a working audio driver for the dell latitude d810 laptop with windows 98SE installed. dell lists the audio as sigmatel stac 975x ac97 and from my research, the name of the audio device could also be stac 9751? i have tried a few driver packages and none of them worked so far, i also tested a modified one from a forum that someone made for another person but neither way in device manager worked to install it them, either windows could not find a driver for the device or manually selecting it and rebooting would bring a yellow marking on the device. that being said, im still open to driver packages to test out in general because there may be a few i have not tried. the hardware id of the audio is listed below - Hardware ID: VEN_8086&DEV_266E&SUBSYS_01861028&REV_03 also not absoluted needed but i also have not found a working driver for the pci card which i believe is a modem, i did try two drivers that were detected but when installing, device manager would crash and give an illegal operation error in which i had to remove the device in safe mode, the id is below - Hardware ID: VEN_8086&DEV_266D&SUBSYS_542314F1&REV_03

good news! i was able to get a working driver for the mobility x600 graphics. i downloaded the catalyst 4.11 for windows 98, selected have disk option from device manager, clicked the c8_19079 inf file which gave me a list of display adapters, i selected the abit radeon x600xt 128 MB, it installed all files, i then rebooted back into the desktop and all i needed to do was manually change the resolution and currently i have it set at 1024x768 in 32 bit color, but it can go up to 1280x1024. dxdiag also shows it using approximately 126.5 MB of memory .

thats' what I do too...can watch a dvd....except DMA isn't enabled so burning a cd has to be done at 8x speed or less x600 should be in C5_30314.inf from ati catalyst 6.2 (6-2_wme_dd_cp_30314.exe) the closest i found was the radeon x600 series secondary with rv380, but no inf files mention the same hardware id im looking for or the name of the device which would be ati mobility radeon x600 ( from the C2_19748 inf ) driver version 6.14.10.6483. im hesitant on testing one of the drivers because i fear the system may get messed up and i wont know what to do, but i think i may give it a try.

new update, i selected only primary ide controller and was able to get the hard drive to be detected in device manager and working properly with virtual memory enabled but without the cd rom. then i tried adding new hardware and have windows find the hardware and to my surprise, it successfully installed the cd rom and a new standard esdi controller with no conflicts. so for now, my system is working fine with both cd rom and hdd detected.

i did not find any vxd format drivers in the mobility x600 package, however i did find some instances of vxd in the text document inf files of catalyst 6.2 which linked to VX as the type of files, are they the same? i also found one virtual device driver called atiicdxx.vxd. besides this, why is that there are multiple inf files? is it because notepad cant open more than a certain size? i did do a quick google search and it mentioned 54 KB on one of microsofts articles, but there is a 64 KB one in the catalyst 6.2 package, but i guess thats not too important. i noticed a sourcediskpath and mfg section which mentions the name of the display adapter and the hardware id, would i just copy and paste the info from the mobility x600 package into the mfg section and add the necessary files into the sourcediskpath and thats it? i did a quick search and it seems that the mobility x600 uses the rv380 architecture which is mentioned also in the catalyst 6.2 inf document as ati radeon x600 secondary but with just a different hardware id to be honest, i have no idea what to do with the driver issue and just right now, the computer got messed up after doing the inf update, the hard disk controller came up with a yellow marking in device manager with the cd rom and hdd not showing and trying to find a free resource just freezes the computer. so its unlikely it has anything to do with the size of the hdd or ram, but simply resource problems that windows 98 cant take care of and just other issues that have to do with assigning the right addresses to devices. im about ready to give up on this build and just put a newer os on it and sell it as is.

i did not find any vxd format drivers in the mobility x600 package, however i did find some instances of vxd in the text document inf files of catalyst 6.2 which linked to VX as the type of files, are they the same? i also found one virtual device driver called atiicdxx.vxd. besides this, why is that there are multiple inf files? is it because notepad cant open more than a certain size? i did do a quick google search and it mentioned 54 KB on one of microsofts articles, but there is a 64 KB one in the catalyst 6.2 package, but i guess thats not too important. i noticed a sourcediskpath and mfg section which mentions the name of the display adapter and the hardware id, would i just copy and paste the info from the mobility x600 package into the mfg section and add the necessary files into the sourcediskpath and thats it? i did a quick search and it seems that the mobility x600 uses the rv380 architecture which is mentioned also in the catalyst 6.2 inf document as ati radeon x600 secondary but with just a different hardware id