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WDMEX is still in development, so there are no guarantees, but updates are free. These specific Drivers do not currently work even with WDMEX or I would already have them on my Website. WDMEX can be used along with a debugger to help find a solution. Feedback is always welcome and customizations to facilitate debugging will be considered.

Newer Hardware Advantages: 1. Faster CPUs with more instructions. 2. Multiple Cores. 3. Bigger and faster RAM. 4. Bigger and faster hard drives. 5. Better performance when virtualized. 6. Can be multi-booted with other OSes that can take better advantage of the above features. Disadvantages: 1. Needs my Patches to run 9x and to use bigger hard drives. 2. Needs my APIs to take advantage of bigger RAM and Multiple Cores. 3. Need to be a programmer to use those APIs or wait for me to write an App. 4. Built-In functionality becoming unusable such as Video, Audio and often Ethernet. 5. Tweaking often required. 6. Loss of legacy hardware such as Floppy, Serial Port, Parallel Port, Joystick, P/S 2 Ports, PATA support, etc. 7. Totally unusable systems for 9x are right around the corner. Some laptops are already there. If you are not a programmer, don't need extreme performance, multi-boot or virtualize, go back at least a decade and you should do just fine.

Seriously. What I sell is a tool. If you buy a wrench, you still need to do "work" to use it. Of course you are welcome to try to loosen nuts with your fingers or drop forge your own wrench. Incidentally WDMEX has over 100 Functions and I keep adding more as the need arises.

For the Video Card probably. There isn't a single one still available at my local Micro Center. The USB Sound and Ethernet Adapters and PCI Sound Cards are still available new. I'm not sure about new PCI Ethernet Cards.

I quick formatted a 4GB Giga Bank Hard Drive with one Partition from My Computer. It produced the problem so I had not tried any other combinations. I just tried using the FORMAT Command and a "removable" drive. Same problem.

In addition to the Patches already mentioned, you would probably need the following to make a useable system. 1. 9x compatible Video Card. 2. USB Sound Adapter or PCI Card. 3. USB Ethernet Adapter or PCI Card. There is a driver for modern Realtek 8111 NICs but only at 10/100 speeds.

The problem occurs, as reported previously, when quick formatting a USB Drive from My Computer. There is some activity. Then it appears to trash the first Sector of the PBR. Then it hangs. Cancelling the Format produces an error and leaves the device locked out. System will not shutdown properly afterwards. I have not determined the precise nature of the problem. Reading and Writing from anywhere in my 32GB of RAM works fine. It may have to do with one of the other SCSI commands. The only solution I know of is to replace USBPORT.SYS with the Windows 2003 Version as reported earlier. USBHUB.SYS does not seem to need replacement.

I ran some experiments to isolate the USB formatting problem. The problem is not in the Patches. It is in the USBPORT.SYS Driver. Using the HAL.DLL from SP1 did not solve the problem even though it supports >4GiB. Microsoft was correct about buggy Drivers being a problem with using 64-Bit RAM. Of course they did not mention that they wrote the buggy Drivers. As everyone knows by now, Microsoft's standard operating procedure is to limit functionality to avoid a problem rather than putting effort into fixing the cause. At least until up-sell time. The simple Patch may be overkill as it causes double buffering all the time, but it does not have much impact because Windows seems to use the 64-Bit memory first. Even with only 4GiB of total RAM (less than 1 GiB of 64-Bit RAM) the USB Driver was already being Double buffered.

USB devices do not use VEN/DEV numbers. They use VID/PID numbers. Basic USB Audio devices should work with the built-in USB Composite Drivers.

"It's about API compatibility. Some newer APIs coming from the NT family may require or return Unicode strings instead of ANSI, others may require or return different structure sizes or formats and - knowing M$ - some may even directly call code in the middle of other libraries that may not match the intended ones." I have found numerous examples of these issues while examining their code. The third one is particularly egregious and is definitely not good programming practice since they could have easily added more Exports.

Remove all of the entries with Exclamation points. Then let Windows redetect them.

If it still has an exclamation mark, I don't think it will work. I would need to know why the exclamation mark is appearing.

Your Storage Controller is NOT working. Windows bypassed it and is running in Compatibility mode. This makes your system significantly slower. It also explains why your DVD Drive is not being detected. If you can resolve the problem, you will have a faster system and won't need the Real Mode Drivers for your DVD Drive.

I'm not sure what the limit of PWS is but I wouldn't stop at 4GiB. A proper ROBOTS.TXT file might cut down on the other requests, at least from the legitimate scanners.

Is the PCI Bus Driver installed?

You probably need my SATA Patch. To verify this, go into Safe Mode and remove the Hard Disk Controller Driver. Reboot into Normal Mode. It should work once. The Driver will be reinstalled and it will not boot in normal mode again.

The Inland UED011 USB to Ethernet Adapter will work with Windows 98SE. The documentation and drivers that come with it only support XP and above. You can get the 98/2k Driver from the support page at www.davicom.com.tw. This is the only such adapter, I know of, currently available at my local Microcenter Store. The only one that lists 98 support doesn't work.

The SIIG SoundWave 5.1 PCI and possibly the SoundWave 7.1 PCI appear to be the only Windows 9x compatible PCI Sounds Cards still available at my local MicroCenter. They sell Version 3 of the Card which supposedly does not support 9x and does not come with the Drivers, but their Website has the Version 1 Drivers which do support 9x and work with the Version 3 Card. They also have a VXD Driver for Windows 95 but I have not tested it. The Version 3 Card reports the same VEN, DEV, SUBSYS and REV Numbers as the Version 1 Card but lacks the MIDI/GAME Port.

You didn't specify what 512MB Card you have. You can use the NVSIZE Test Program to see if you need the Patch. I do not have a Demo Version of the Patch.

Yes. Windows 98 will also work with the 7950 GX2 but will only use one half of it. My NVSIZE Patch handles the four issues that I have identified when using the 512MB Card. The 256MB Card may be subject to up to three of those issues in some Motherboards.

Definitely. I do it all the time. You probably will need my SATA Patch depending upon the available BIOS settings.

SATA Motherboards generally support LBA-48. The Intel bug doesn't happen with Drives normally partitioned on the same Motherboard. My SATA Patch would allow you to use the additional Ports

I don't think these Patches would help with your particular problem. The symptoms associated with the LBA-48 and geometry issues are: Failure to boot. Disk Errors. Disk Corruption. Compatibility Mode is not a symptom. Nor is there a dependence on RAM. I am assuming that you are not using SATA Drives. I have two different Patches. The BOOTMAN series of Patches upgrade or replace the BIOS Code and are implemented as a DDO. The High Capacity Disk Patch adds LBA-48 support to the Windows Driver.

These problems and the 137GB limit are unrelated issues. I have never seen this problem. If your updates reinstalled the Hard Disk Drivers, it is possible that the Driver was disabled, causing the Drive to run in compatibility mode. Attempting to set MinFileCache or MaxFileCache less than 1/24 of the total RAM will be ignored. There are some buggy Motherboards after 2002 that do not properly handle LBA-48. I developed a fix for the EPIA series BIOSes. Some Intel Motherboards in the 8xx and 9xx series cannot handle more than 32GB Hard Drives if they were setup with an unexpected geometry.

My SATA Patch can take care of any problem with the SATA Ports. I routinely use multiple HDDs and ODDs in some of my Computers.