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Mind if I jump in? I like opening the Control Panel in the traditional way and didn't like it when I tried having the links all in the Start Menu. I also would not like that Automatic Windows Update thing. I don't want a thing from Windows Update since so many of those are broken to start with. Ya think they'll try to carefully design Internet Explorer 6 updates so they work on 98SE at this point? They'll more likely to design them to destroy Windows 98SE so folks will get frustrated and buy XP or Vista. Heck, that's what I would do! Business is dog eat dog, and Redmond wants upgrades that give them cash. I barely trust WU on XP, preferring the RyanVM upgrade pack approach. Vista, well for now we need them but that's okay since that's where the improvements will show up from now on. We'd be much better off letting Windows Update stay broken on 98 so folks won't install anything from it. Updates from there would be more likely to break things than help. We have folks here who tear into new Internet Explorer updates and make them compatible and just as importantly make them work on 9x systems. So, less tinkering with how our Start Menu works and more making sure that we're getting all the necessary updates is what I suggest. There are other projects that deal with GUI changes.

My old HP Pavilion 4430 is like that. If I put any hard drive in there that's over 65GB the bios will only report 65GB as the size. FDISK and format will format to larger sizes and Windows will recognize and use it. However performance is sluggish and file moving operations will slowdown, freeze, fail, etc. I once used a 60GB Maxtor drive in there with no problems. Note that even if I put a single partition smaller than 60GB in, let's say, an 80GB drive, the system had the same problems. Only a hard drive smaller than 60GB did not have these problems. I think it's both a hardware and bios problem. This is a SiS5598 board used with an AMD K6-2/366 processor. It came with the 300MHz variety but I upgraded to the 366 and set the jumpers correctly. Note also that putting the maximum 256MB of memory (2 sticks of 128MB 66MHz Crucial SDRAM unbuffered) did not help as far as solving the big hard drive problem, so it's not a memory thing either. This system also did not function well with more than one cdrom drive. And DVD playback was full of hesitation and unsynched video/audio. The optimum is just one CD/RW drive and one hard drive less than 60GB. Just forget about DVD as I tried it with both a Voodoo 3000 PCI and a GeForce 2 MX400 PCI. Same sluggish playback. So I just used a CDRW drive instead and lived without DVD. VCD's played perfectly though! When used with a 3dfx Voodoo 3000 PCI replacing the on board SiS5598 Video and noting the above limits, it was pretty nice! The HP/Riptide Audio/Modem HCF card gave me awesome 2 channel sound, dos game play, pretty good Windows game play, and dialup modem. I did need to force ACPI by running setup /p j in order to avoid losing USB detection if adding a videocard. Only with ACPI enabled did the USB detect attached devices once a videocard was added. HP had Windows setup with ACPI using Windows 98 Gold, even though using a normal Windows cd without that /p j switch would only install Standard PC. I actually had a tech replace the motherboard before figuring this out but the new board exhibited the same USB problem unless Windows was forced to use ACPI. The ports showed as working properly but no device would be detected. This motherboard was useless for using a real SB16 card as the ISA ports would not output sound, although an ISA modemblaster provided good modem use when I replaced the Riptide with a SoundBlaster Live PCI soundcard. So the choice at the time was either the Riptide PCI dos game solution or the SoundBlaster Live version of the PCI emulation but a real ISA SoundBlaster would not work. I've used four of these motherboards and the ISA ports would not produce audio even though players, the device manager, etc all thought everything was working fine. Just no sound is sent to speakers. The same ISA cards worked on other motherboards so the problem was the ISA ports on this motherboard and not in the drivers. Windows thought everything was working great and WMP, games, audio software would think the sound was playing. Just couldn't hear anything! PCI audio worked perfectly and so was the only way to go. So, is it worth it to use this type of board today? No way. It's from just after the Dos heyday (around 1999) but is useless for real ISA dos gaming. Other boards from that period are nice to setup for old gaming like this. But even that is questionable as Dosbox has advanced to the point where it does dos gaming better than MS-DOS ever did. So why bother? Just use a modern computer with all its advantages and setup things on it to play your old software.

I have an Asus A7V880 that has that SoundMAX AD1888 chip. I'm not running it right now but used the SoundMAX at times when I did. I enjoyed the Sensaura stuff and even bought the updates from digibuy.com. But they only work in 98SE, 2000, or XP. In Vista you can update from Device Manager to the automatic Windows Update drivers for it. You know, right click the card in Device Manager, Update Driver, Automatically Search For Driver. That should work fine but if not then you can do it again and choose the manual search and see if the driver is already on the system but Vista hasn't been able to automatically recognize it for some reason. If you see that codec under the Sound And Video Controllers when you have it search then you just choose it and after some possible warning messages Vista should use it. Others have extracted the XP driver downloaded from the board's website or found on the motherboard install cd and directed Vista during that manual update to the WDM folder that just has the inf and driver files for it. I wouldn't bother doing what some others have done and run Setup as an administrator as all that system tray control panels and Sensaura effects stuff won't work on Vista anyway. Better not to bog down the system with non working software that will try to run all the time. Just use the driver. Folks have said that the XP driver sounds better than the Vista driver from Microsoft. Either way you'll control the speakers and stuff from Vista's Audio Control. You run Speaker Setup from there (unless you only use the default 2.1) and hopefully Vista will set it up for 5.1 or whatever you have. Your mp3's and other 2 channel sources will only play from your front 2 speakers but DVD's and 5.1's should use all your speakers. If you get a player like Foobar2000 you can use a plugin to get Stereo X2 so even your mp3's will play from all speakers. Or purchase a WMP plugin from SRS Labs for that, if they've updated to a Vista version.

If you're just using Ethernet Cable or DSL internet without needing to logon to networks and such, then even though Client For Microsoft Networks is there and needed for the ethernet driver you do not need to login to Windows with it. In the Network control panel switch the drop down for login to Windows Login. You'll no longer get the login dialog box on Startup but you'll still be connected. Most ISP's don't require you to login. I set mine up with Windows Login and it works fine.

Hmm, I think I was referring to Web Based Enterprise Management then. That's what McAfee Anti-Spyware 2006 said was required. Actually I don't believe I have ever purposely installed WMI myself. So if I had it then it likely was installed by some program that included it. I suppose I didn't have it after all. Only the Web Based Enterprise Management that is installed from the Windows 98SE cd if you do it from Add/Remove Windows Components.

All I know about ATI Rage is about a year ago I noticed I could find them at ati.com. You won't need those if you're going to use Dosbox. You'll want the Tseng 4000 drivers. Hey, just read up over there on Vogons and you'll see. You change dosbox.cfg to use the Tseng instead of S3, then you install Win 3.1 but with the SVGA3 driver, and then you extract the Tseng's to a folder in your Win 3.1 C: drive and in Win 3.1 you exit to dos and run Setup, switching the video driver to the Tseng by browsing to it. I think I remember that doing that during initial setup doesn't go well, nor does going right from the VGA driver to the Tseng. You install the Microsoft SVGA 3 one first (whether you do it during the install or after doesn't matter), then you change it to the Tseng one. Goes more smoothly that way. Another good thing about the latest Dosbox is you no longer have to apply the work around for the SB16 driver install. The Creative installer no longer chokes so the added patch isn't needed. Of course if you haven't seen the Win 3.1 guide on Dosbox yet you don't know what I'm talking about. But you will if you pursue this. Go ahead! I had fun with some of that stuff. You actually get the old Creative software suite with a cd player, wave player, midi player, etc. I had to go into Windows Driver setup to install the CD stuff which apparently isn't installed by default, but then that worked too. Kind of useless fun, but interesting if you want to relive old stuff or see what it was like.

Right, MaxPhysPage=40000 limits things to 1 Gig of Ram. Obviously that's what is desired since 9x cannot boot with over a gig used. So if he had 3 Gigs of Ram he would still type in MaxPhysPage=40000 so the system would not try to use more than 1 Gig of it. Sorry it didn't work. Most hardware actually works if setting things that way, but some, unfortunately, do not. There might be some other trick to it but I'm not aware of any. Time to use either VirtualPC or VMWare to run 9x if you want to use your hardware with it.

Do you dual-boot with Windows XP? If you do then Windows XP will delete what it considers to be invalid restore points every time you boot up to it. All Vista restore points are considered invalid by XP. A way around that is to not use the Microsoft dual-boot method and instead install both Windows versions to primary partitions and hide the other one and make the one you're booting to active each time you bootup. A 3rd party boot manager, using a Partition Magic floppy disk to boot your machine or manually copying PQBoot to a folder on each operating system and using that to start another operating system, or a Linux install using Grub as the boot loader can do that for you. If you're not dual-booting then there's another problem I'm not familiar with. Vista wouldn't do that unless it ran out of space on your entire Vista partition for restore points.

You'll probably get 9x to boot up and run fine if you make a few adjustments so it only uses up to a gig of memory. In system.ini you can change some stuff - Under VCACHE add: MaxFileCache=393216 Under 386Enhanced add: ConservativeSwapfileUsage=1 DMABufferSize=64 MinSPs=16 MaxPhysPage=40000 After those changes your system should work. If it doesn't then you'll have no choice but to only use up to a gig, but those things generally work. As for the NVidia card, I think the last 9x NVidia videocard driver was version 81.98, and that was the only version that officially supported the 6000 series of cards. My 6600GT works fine on 98SE with that 81.98 driver. This, assuming you have your motherboard agp and chipset drivers installed and working correctly. You need to do that first, before installing the NVidia driver. You also need Direct X 9.0c installed before the NVidia driver.

Yeah! The drivers and most of the Win 3.1 stuff you'll need have been prepackaged and there's a thread on those vogons.zetafleet.com forums that has all the links in one thread. The most recent ones were where I found the links all in one place in someones post. Somewhere, I've got the printed out guides I made from some of the threads and guides on that forum. No, I'm not about to sort through all my stuff looking for it. You'll need to do what everybody else does and browse around there and print out, download, what you need. There is a forum for guides, and also several threads regarding Windows 3.1, all within the Dosbox area of the vogons forums. I would grab 'em and post instructions here as I'm, heh, not a bad guy, but it's quite lengthy and the work has already been done for me on those forums. So if you'd like to learn the info go ahead and check it out. Mode? Well, 3.1 analyzes the system during its installation and automatically selects the optimum mode. That is NOT, unfortunately, 386 Enhanced mode. Oh, if you mean the mode for Dosbox then the latest version is set to auto. That will choose dynamic mode if the system and/or particular program it's going to run can use that. It does a pretty good job of auto detection but you can of course change dosbox.cfg or dosbox's autoexec to start whatever you want. Read the latest readme and also the new Dosbox downloadable HTML FAQ for more tips.

Ha, ha, ha, ROFL. "Who XXXX cares" kinda qualifies as the first, um, problematical comment, wouldn't ya think?

Uh, uh. Please read the manual! IE6 SP1, WMP9, all 98SE updates, etc must be installed BEFORE using 98SE2ME. Just wanted to get this in here before someone actually tried to install 98SE2ME, and then update Windows. The files installed from the Windows Me cd by 98SE2ME are the latest file versions available for 9x systems. Some IE and WMP files are later replaced after running 98MP10 by using certain files from Windows XP, but besides that any fixes applied will be OLDER than what is replaced by 98SE2ME. The vast majority of XP era fixes and files are NOT compatible with 9x and no updates include them. The exceptions are the specific files tested and included in 98MP10 and some of the work around unofficial Internet Explorer security updates. So there is EVERY reason to wait until you've finished ALL other updating of your system files, including installing Microsoft Office, BEFORE installing 98SE2ME. Just read the readme, do things as it states, and you'll be fine. And MDGx, thanks for clarifying the WMP updates for me.

eidenk, The only program that I've noticed used that on 98 was McAfee AntiSpyware 2006. Windows Management Instruction is available from the Add/Remove Windows Components applet. McAfee used it to monitor msconfigs startup list and would inform if a program attempted to change anything in there. Funny, but I usually install that in 98SE. There are newer versions but I saw a Microsoft KB that said the version on 98SE is the proper, bug fixed one that should be installed on it. 98 Gold came with it too, but they recommended downloading the updated version for it. MDGx has a whole set of WMI versions for the various Windows versions on his site. Unless there's a need from a specific program, like that McAfee one which won't install without it being there, I don't really see a need for it either. It's just one of those things that I've seen referred to here and there. I always installed it just in case it would prove useful to something. I figured there's got to be some reason it's available. Stupid maybe but then sometimes I just install some things without complete understanding. Especially if they come with the cd.

Yeah, I have fun with looking back that way. I do the same, being copying the Plus! Themes folder and the Lose Your Marbles game to XP, and now Vista. It was really something to see my Original Desktop Theme that I use to make before changing anything in 98. Just about all the stuff looks like an original 98 install, but in Vista! I also copy the Windows/Media and the Web/Wallpaper folder over, as well as the few Plus!98 cartoon screensavers that work in XP and Vista. All those folders include all the stuff from XP, Windows Me, and 98. The Underwater screensaver can work, but not with those files. I got the Kid's Plus! Demo package and I just extract the 2 Underwater files and the 2 Wildlife files to the System32 folder. Then I can activate the Wildlife screensaver and bam! There's that silly old Underwater screensaver. When applying the themes, you can just run them like any Vista theme. You don't need to apply Windows Classic first as Vista will do that automatically. I don't run them for long, as they are kind of boring compared to new stuff like Aero Glass. But its fun to look back. It's just as interesting to apply the Redmond themes on KDE in Linux. I get that Beryl transparency and effects with a Windows 98 look. Weird. Kind of like WindowBlinds on 98, but without the resource drag. Milos M., you mean you run the 9x Themes.exe in Vista?!? That thing works? Heck, I never even copy that over because I've thought it was useless. I've always applied the older themes with XP's and Vista's normal Theme drop downs. All but a couple of them worked fine this way.

Yeah, heh, I've gotten yelled at for being that detailed when asking for help. Especially when trying to lighten the heavy reading mood by adding in some unrelated personal rambling. I'm glad you got some info by reading it. No, it doesn't take me that long to organize my thoughts when writing. So, thankfully, it didn't take too long to type that out. Nice complement there. I'm not professional. I tend to get up to professional caliber in my hobbies but never figure out ways to make money from it! Oh well.

Didn't fall in love with my Dosbox idea, eh? Got to tell you it works great. Anyway, I remember there being ATI Win 3.1 releases for the Rage Pro series of cards. That's about the best ATI card you'll get for a native Win 3.1 install with real drivers. And those cards didn't have the greatest reputation but they were widespread due to a lot of OEM use. I think CompUSA still sells them today using their own brand. The last driver set is probably included on the CompUSA cd, but who knows whether that includes the Windows 3.1 driver. I think ATI has those on their driver download pages though. ATI even offered their DVD player software back then that worked fine with them. I have no idea whether that would work on the CompUSA branded cards and I don't think anything before Windows 98 supported DVD playback. In Dosbox you can get 1024x768 SuperVGA resolution in Windows 3.1 with the Tseng Video driver and a couple of the private CVS Dosbox builds that include support for it. Like I said if you visit that vogons forum you'll find all you need. That way you don't need to change your videocard. Dosbox doesn't care what you have since it simulates its own card, S3 by default. But it can be configured for the Tseng card to get higher than 800x600 that is the max on Win 3.1 with the S3 driver. If you don't need the 1024x768 then even the official Dosbox release will be fine. Then you'd just need the S3 Win 3.1 driver and the SB16 driver. Just as a caveat you can't use Win 3.1 Protected Mode or get internet access with Dosbox. But W32s does work anyway (somehow) and so some of those games that required it also work. W32s doesn't completely work all the time but its enough for some programs. You can ignore the advice to change the dosbox.cfg to EMS=FALSE as that no longer interferes with Win 3.1 in the latest Dosbox.

Pretty much you just run it. It extracts all its stuff to a folder that you can change to what you want during setup. I usually changed it to C:\AUTOPCH to make things easy. I never ran it from a cd, preferring to have it on the hard drive but since it places everything into that installation folder anyway it probably doesn't matter. When you run it the first time it will probably warn you of needing dialup networking 1.4. I just choose the option it offers of installing it automatically and silently. He has a lot of nice time savers toggled off by default. Therefore it is prudent to go through each screen and turn toggle on and change on or off the stuff you want. Lately soporific has been mentioning that the 98SE2ME section install is likely the best fix in the package. Well, I use it too but choose to toggle it off in Auto-Patcher and install the full version myself afterwards. Same with the 98MP10 section. I just like to install stuff once, especially since unlike Auto-Patcher these programs do not check for previous installations of themselves and will just redo everything including the backup files. I just find it less confusing to install those two myself. If you do not own a Windows Me cd then you'd better keep 98SE2ME toggled on in Auto-Patcher so you get that important Explorer fix. You can't install the full 98SE2ME unless you have a Window Me cd in the first cdrom drive or the contents copied to a folder on your hard drive. The stuff in the manual installs folder is important to install when you are finished. Just not the Dialup Networking 1.4 since you already had Auto-Patcher do that for you. I've been toggling on the SHELL98 fix to stop slow copying, Explorer freezing but some have experienced undesirable effects from that so it's up to you. It's off by default. Like I said, I turn it on and haven't had problems from it. I also turn on the stuff in the Windows Media section. I want the Legacy files (which is WMP7) and the WMEncoder 7.1 installed as I've found that some programs need WMEncoder and the only way it installs properly is if it is installed on top of WMP7 and before updating to WMP9. So I turn all that stuff on. I do not turn on the majority of the Tweaks as these are mostly done for me by 98SE2ME. I do let it install TweakUI and the System Policy Editor unless I've already installed System Policy Editor myself through my full version of the Windows 98 Resource Kit. The important tweaks to do if you also do not want to use soporific's choices are adding the following to system.ini using sysedit. Under VCACHE add MaxFileCache=393216 Under 386Enhanced add ConservativeSwapfileUsage=1 DMABufferSize=64 MinSPs=16 There is another addition added by the older Unofficial Service Pack and 98SE2ME but it is really for system with more than a gig of RAM. It sets Windows not to use more than that. With a gig or lower you're better off not messing with it. It is advisable to use your System Properties advanced tab to set the same Virtual Memory for both min and max. I use 3X my amount of RAM for both. This moves the Swap file out of the Windows folder and onto the root of C: and also stops unnecessary hard drive thrashing and is especially useful if you have plenty of RAM (over 256MB). Slows fragmentation too. Those are some of the things I do but the point is you're going to be easily able to keep 98 updated without tons of individual downloads and decisions about what to install when. Great program. For further questions about it I'd use soporific's sticky thread for it though. This'll get you started.

Yes, that's it. So if we know when a WDM driver was released we have a better chance of figuring out if it will work on 9x. We don't really know until we try it I guess, but the dates would at least give us a clue. And yes, it was REALLY experimental in 95 but was fully integrated into 98 First Edition then improved upon in Second Edition. That's why with a WDM Audio update and a USB patch the Creative WDM audio drivers actually work better than the VXD version in 98SE. More features too. I think Window Me improved things by providing more direct hardware interaction but recently MDGx added a bunch of WDM and USB fixes into 98SE2ME that likely takes care of that for 98SE as well.

Ah! That I can understand. Heh, nice 891711 analogy. Sheesh, when I was growing up we didn't need those yucky things anyway. Well, not if the other party took care of things anyway. I used to use the Adobe Photo Deluxe 2.0 which also installed that Adobe Type Manager. I do remember some unwanted effects which caused me to use other programs instead. I just don't remember what the unwanted effects were.

I think I can speak for all of us here when I say, "huh?" Free with Internet purchase? What, we buy the internet and they throw in Windows 98? I hope we don't have to wait for the rebate.

I guess that some checking of Adobe Postscript problems with OpenGL would be helpful then. Maybe there's a way to work around the problem without needing to stop using the Postscript driver. It's interesting that the name of the screensaver itself effects whether its OpenGL properties are invoked. No other unofficial patches? Wow. So you just use official updates then? What about the ones that were found to not install correctly and so not have the effect intended? Weren't a great deal of these fixed by unofficial versions of the Windows Updates? And what do you do with updates that occurred after Microsoft stopped doing 9x versions and have been patched with unofficial installers to work with 9x? That's certainly a different approach than what I've seen from most folks around here.

That would shock the heck out of me if true. I kind of think it would be impossible since lots of Windows stuff still in Vista today started with 9x. That's too much proprietary code for Microsoft to just release to the masses. Incredibly cool if it ever would happen though. I just think its too completely against everything that Microsoft has always fought for, meaning that proprietary we own the thing so you can only use it as long as we like you and keep paying us money kind of attitude. Nah, the guy must be mistaken. Or he read someone's April Fool's joke.

Yeah man, virtualization is the way to go for something that old. But, even better, run Win 3.1 in Dosbox! I've used Windows For Workgroups 3.11 in a regular modern day computer. It was slightly older than my current system and I was using a Radeon 7500 at the time. It was the good old Abit KT7A with a T-Bird 1.2 processor. Gosh, that was a nice machine! Anyway, although I had internet using it that way (cool browsing around with the old Netscape), I didn't stay on for long. I didn't want to be hit with a nasty from that environment. Another reason for that experiment being short lived was that crappy display resolution you're talking about. ATI just never bothered (and who could blame them) with 3.1 drivers for the Radeon. Well, I also ran into the problem that my SBLive MS-DOS driver that worked fine in Dos would choke Windows 3.1 so it wouldn't start with the driver active. So running Windows with a crappy display and no sound wasn't worth my time. However, in Dosbox it runs great! There's no internet like you can setup in VMWare but it'll run your Win3.1 games better with full sound (with the Creative SB 16 Driver) and pretty video! You do need the CVS version of Dosbox with the patch for the TSENG driver installed to get the better resolutions. And you need to get the SB 16 driver as the plain SoundBlaster driver included in Windows 3.1 just doesn't cut it. You can learn all you need to do this and get links to the drivers by browsing around in the vogons.zetafleet.com dosbox forum. Heck, I had the 16 bit QuickTime and Real Player working too. The "Where In the World Is Carmen Sandiego" up to date version has a Windows 3.1 installer in it and the game played just as well as it does on modern Windows. If you tried Dosbox for dos games in the past and had problems, the latest version is very much improved. If you have a computer of let's say a 5 year old vintage then a lot of problems have been solved with speed and stuff. If you're running a really old circa 1999 computer then you will have problems. Dosbox does need a speedy processor for really late Dos era games. But the older less video intensive games will play fine even on that older computer.

Yes, the WDM spec originally was intended by Microsoft to consolidate the driver development under one model. However, WDM developed in ways that in most modern drivers are not compatible enough in Window 9x systems to be usable. If Microsoft had been interested in maintaining 9x compatibility in WDM development they wouldn't have allowed the incompatible portions. However, that would have stilted the development of technology. The WDM drivers that are not 9x compatible have advanced features. Some of the features are probably possible to implement in the older VXD ways but, heh, no ones gonna make money doing that, eh? So some WDM drivers will work and others won't due to the development of the WDM spec beyond what 9x is capable of working with. Not the original intent, but that's what was allowed to happen.

Hmm, well at least you got it to work. Does it come by default with a space in the filename? If so you'd think it would work as designed. We know 16 bit programs often balk at long file names or ones with spaces in them without that _ between the spaces. 9x is designed to get around that by detecting when quotation marks are needed around the filename, such as when there are spaces or the name is greater than the MS-DOS 8.3 filename design. In fact I think it actually includes two FAT's for files, one with long file names and the other with the same file with an 8.3 style MS-DOS file name. Have you tried some other programs that have spaces in the filename recently? Something else that could have occurred is if you applied one of the patches for Kernel32.dll that are unofficial fixes for certain 9x bugs. Perhaps the small change in the Kernel32.dll file unknowingly changed its behavior in more ways than was intended by the patch. One of LLXX's patches used to get rid of the nice GUI button effect on the Close Program box's buttons. After using her patch the buttons would be the flat Windows 3.1 style. When I asked about it she said she built that into the patch because she preferred that button appearance. Not me though, so I used the MDGx version from that anonymous author instead. It's unlikely that anyone would purposely mess with filename handling, to the point of partially breaking it, though. Another thing to make sure of is that no nasties invaded either that screensaver file (they love screensaver files) or that Kernel32.dll file, so a virus scanner check on those files and a scan for virus's and another one for spyware on the whole system wouldn't hurt, just to be sure it's nothing like that going on.