Jlo555

This is something pretty tedious, but for some reason, it has plagued every windows 98 installation that I've ever done. Everytime I bootup my computer with 98SE, the windows boot sound when it loads to the desktop is incredibly laggy. The file being played is "The Microsoft Sound.wav." I've gone into msconfig and disable as many startup processes as I possibly can, with no results. For a Win98SE computer, my computer is REALLY high end, so I'm sure it's not lagging up because my computer's too slow. On another note, I have an old Dell XPS T-500, built back in 1999, that plays the boot sound flawlessly. I know this is kind of a tedious problem, but to be honest, it's annoying as hell! If this helps, these are my computer specs: AMD Athlon XP 3000+ 1GB DDR400 Abit NF7-S v2 Motherboard ATI Radeon 9800 Pro Creative Sound Blaster Audigy 2 ZS Maxtor ATA-133 60GB / Maxtor ATA-133 120GB HDD's Sony DVD-ROM / LG DVD-RW Optical Drives Windows 98SE, unofficial service pack 2.02, all updates

My vote goes to XP Home. I used it for 1 1/2 years, and I HATED IT!! Of course, that was when I was for the most part, computer illiterate, but still it was terrible. This was when my family didn't have cable internet, so I was stuck with 26.4k, BlackIce Firewall, and NAV 2002. Those three things lead to a frickin hoard of viruses and adware. My friend hacked me 4 times over the course of a year. I finally got windows 2000 pro in the fall of 2003 and it ran like crap on my laptop, but it was much better than xp home. After a while, I sold that laptop and built a desktop with the sole intention of putting windows 98SE on it. This was in 2004, so it was getting hard to find hardware with 98se compatible drivers. Windows 98SE has run perfectly on my system. It boots in seconds, it doesn't crash that much, and I've never gotten a virus on it. In fact, I never got a virus on windows 3.0/3.1/95/98 or Me. I have gotten several viruses on XP Home, 2000 Pro and XP Pro. Though I tend to have a lineage of bad luck on NT based OS's. XP Home NEVER, 98SE FOREVER!! (XP Pro is still ok.)

This may seem odd, but I think windows me was the one Windows OS that I have never seen a BSOD on. Though, I've only used it a few times on my old Dell. I did run an experiment with the sole purpose of crashing the computer on vmWare. I decided to bring down the system resources as far as I could to see if I could crash it. I got the resourecs down to less than 1%, and nothing happened. Hmm, maybe I'll try that OS out on this computer. All I've heard about windows me is that it is the worst OS to ever come out of Microsoft, but after some "minor" experience with the OS, I'm going back to my opinion that XP Home is the worst OS made by MS (based 2 years of personal experience.) IMHO, Windows Me is not that bad at all. ****, how much did that thing cost!!??

Windows 98 support sounds like it has already ended the way companies are already rapidly dropping support for it. And most games still being compatible with 98SE is actually inaccurate. Go to any store near you that sells computer games and pick out 10 high end, new release games and I can guarentee you that at least half of them will say "Compatible with 2000/XP" or "Compatible with XP." We don't have to wait till 2006 to see 98 support die.

Never mind, I fixed it. I just needed to update my motherboard drivers. All is well right now.

I just got a new motherboard and new dvd drives. The problem is that when I insert a cd or dvd into either of the dvd drives and attempt to install something from there or copy something from there, the whole computer gets INCREDIBLY laggy. Even the mouse lags up! The only other time I've seen this problem is on my old laptop. Anyone know how to fix this? I'm certain it's not my computer specs because I have a an Athlon XP 3000+ with 1 GB of DDR400.

I solved the problem; but in a way that I didn't really like. I had to go to ctrl. panel>system>hardware>device manager and tell the little question mark for my "audio device" where the driver was located on the cd, instead of using the installation program. It worked, so I'm satisfied, but I don't think I'm getting all the 7.1 surround sound because I didn't go through the setthings in the creative installer. Oh, well, it worked anyway.

That's most likely a BIOS password. You can try to reset the CMOS either by taking out the battery in the motherboard for a few seconds and putting it back in or move the jumper on the motherboard. I'm guessing you have no documentation for the motherboard, so I suggest you find the model number of the board and google it for a manual, or instructions on how to reset the CMOS. But resetting the CMOS does reset all the BIOS settings to default, that includes removing the password. So, you will have to manually set all of the settings on the BIOS manually after you reset it. Of course, that is, if this password is for the BIOS, which it most likely is.

I don't understand this at all. I installed windows 2000 pro sp4 on my desktop yesterday. I installed all of the drivers, until I got to the audio driver. I put in the cd for my creative sound blaster audigy 2 zs, it auto played, and I started the driver installation. While it was loading the setup wizard, my whole computer immediately restarts with no warning. Then when it gets to the login screen, it says that it can't find some weird system file. Am I doing something wrong? This has happened multiple times on different **clean** installs.

It wasn't a BSOD, it was an error right past the Windows boot screen. The software I'm using was windows media player 7.1 and Office 2000. I'm pretty sure that's all I had installed. I highly doubt that it could overheat because I just booted my computer right now (it was off for about 10 hours), and I got the same error. It is true what Andromeda said about newer software being unstable or buggy on 98SE. WMP9 runs somewhat OK on 98 and it horribly lags up on 2000pro. Office XP has worked fine for me in the past and I haven't tried office 2003 because the only real difference I see in that version of office is a newer GUI, which I don't really need nor want.

I don't understand this. I just rebuilt my computer, and everything has been running perfectly for the past 2 days. I installed MS Office XP a few hours ago, and everything went to hell! I rebooted, and just past the boot splash screen, I get a message that says "Windows Protection Error. Please Restart Your Computer." I restarted, same error. I went into safe mode and uninstalled office, and attempted to disable all services in msconfig that I deemed suspicious. I rebooted again, same error. It hadn't been very long since I had installed windows, so I decided to just reformat and reinstall 98SE. I did that, and this time I installed all the drivers, IE 5.5 (unstead of 6, which is what I had on the last installation), and WMP 7.1 (I had 9 on the last installation), and Office 2000 instead of XP. Everything worked perfectly. I went to windows update, rebooted, and saw the same error as before. I have no idea what is going on, as far as I am concerned, everything should be working properly.

GTA: San Andreas is a relatively high-end game that is only "meant" for 2000/XP, yet with some tweaking/patches, it runs perfectly in 98SE. And I have heard of some people modifying Doom 3 to run perfectly fine on 98SE. I haven't tried Battlefield 2 really but I did see the OS requirements were simply "XP". My brother had a copy of the game so I put in the install cd and it said "This game has only been tested on Windows XP Service Pack 1." It is hard to distinguish which software is programmed to not run on anything lower than 2000/XP and what software simply hasn't been tested on old OS's. So, I'd say the best way to go is just to test out software that says it won't run on anything but newer OS's. (And, I say newer because XP is not in any way new, it's nearly 4 years old!! And 98SE, god forbid, is 5 1/2 years old!! And people have said 98SE is old and obselete!

I hate it when companies attempt to force you to upgrade against your will just because they want to squeeze more money out of people. This is the price we pay for being interesting in technology... literally. I wish we could just pick a format for everything (like audio/video/software) and just keep it like that for a while. Seems like everytime I turn a corner, something new comes out that I will inevitably be forced to buy one way or another. But, I'm sticking with Win98SE for the time being when it comes to software. Eventually, I'll go back to 2000, then that will become obsolete and fade away and then... possibly Linux. This may sound harsh but I believe that all the OS's that came out of MS after win2000 are bloated pieces of crap. This is especially frustrating when your a gamer. I hate being forced to upgrade my OS and my hardware just to play the latest and greatest Grand Theft Auto.

You gotta be kidding me. What possible trouble could you get in for changing the GUI. I don't really see any real problem there. I do see how you might end up with technical problems though...

Thanks a bunch! I've been wondering how to do this for quite some time. Frankly, I think it's pretty stupid of Microsoft to "require" IE 6 just to us an instant messenger.

I agree it is a big mistake. Most of the time the problem is that the game simply hasn't been tested under that OS. I find it very strange that the game even works on ME. Most new games say only 2000/XP or just XP. You may be in luck because if it works on winME, I'd say there's a 75% chance of it running perfectly fine on 98SE (and I emphasize the SE, because there's a lot of software that is too new for 98 Gold.) But 98SE "should" run just about anything you install on it, it is not too old, and millions of people DO still use it. You want to blame someone for this, blame Microsoft. They're doing everything in their power to move people to XP and to Vista now, and one of the ways they do this is by pressuring software companies to stop supporting old OS's. But if it works on ME, it should work on 98SE, so go ahead and buy the game.

29 megs, wow I'm impressed. I think I should try out nLite, when I was using 2000pro, memory usage was at least 90mb at startup.

Is there any way that I can install MSN Instant Messenger 7.0 without having to have internet explorer 6 installed. MS has never had this as a prerequisite in the past, but I tried to login to MSN IM 6.2 one day, and it told me I needed to upgrade to 7.0. I downloaded 7.0 and it said I needed IE 6. How do I get around this?

Well, I finally got the Abit NF7-S v2 and put my computer back together. I reformatted and installed 98SE and all the drivers. Anyway, there is one major annoying issue. Random crashes every so often. I'm pretty sure it's the nForce 2 chipset drivers that are causing it because I've heard other people talk about how they were a bit "flaky." The motherboard seems pretty good though. I am debating on whether or not I'll just stick win2000pro on this computer and just leave 98SE on my other desktop. :Sigh: Oh well, 98SE runs better on my other computer anyway. With the service pack I can keep the computer going for days without a reboot, although I don't actually use it that much.

Older operating systems have their advantages over newer ones, that's evident. I just bought an Abit motherboard with SATA and the silicon image controller, but I don't have a SATA hard drive. Thanks for telling about the (lack of) driver installation for SATA under 98se, that was a huge thing I was wondering about when I bought my motherboard.

Sorry, I guess I didn't really know what I was talking about. By DRM in WMP 7.0 do you mean the ability to protect the .wma's produced by wmp 7.0? I forgot about that until now... Oh well, I use winamp for audio files anyway.

I actually feel glad that WMP 10 doesn't work on anything but XP. wmp 10 is the first integration of DRM support, and I want absolutely nothing to do with digital rights management (drm) on my computer. I still use wmp 7.1 primarily, because it works perfectly (except for variable bit rate mp3s). If it ain't broke, don't fix it. Although, in this case, I guess wmp is broken. I've become so quick at reformatting and reinstalling windows that I basically do it everytime I have a problem that I deem bad enough. My computer is up and running again within 2 hours. And when you have damaged windows applications that are practically integrated into the OS that start to show errors and don't work correctly, that can be a huge problem. (I know from experience that IE is one of "those" applications.) My best advice is reformat and reinstall windows if all else fails.

I wouldn't trust windows update for drivers at all. I've steared clear of drivers from ms update after I had XP Pro on my laptop and I found out there was a driver update available for my USB 802.11b network adapter. I installed the driver, and ended up with an incredibly reduced link status to my network and it would disconnect every 5 minutes. Search for the updated driver elsewhere. One site you might want to try for modem drivers is: www.modem-drivers.com, they got tons of modem drivers. And, as you may've noticed, when something interrupts windows update while it's installing updates/applications/drivers etc, your windows installation can absolutely go straight to hell! Believe me, I know from experience and other people's experience.

Oh. Gotcha Well, I guess I'm not really into multimedia webcams and all that crap, so gAIM works perfectly for me; much better than AIM anyway. Although I haven't tried file transfers though. Most file transfers over AIM seem to fail for me anyway, so I don't really care about file sharing on AIM all that much.

Well, gAIM may not be the best thing in the world for all the special features of the instant messeging programs, but, meh, it works for me anyway.