Jlo555

I used to have that problem with 98 trying to find an IP address. It became a real pain because using 98se on a wireless network took FOREVER to find an IP. I'm talking like 3.5 minute boot time! Then I discovered static IP addresses, and my problems were solved! But LAN cards, for some reason, seem to slow down all 9x OS's during bootup no matter what.

My guess is that the LAN card must've done "something" to your motherboard. Perhaps static electricity? You might try resetting your CMOS, that could work.

Every heard of GAIM? That's what I've been using for the past few weeks and I must say it works pretty well. It replaces AIM, MSN, Yahoo, IRC and a few more things I can't remember. I think it runs better on 98 because instead of having multiple IM programs running in the background consuming resources, there's only 1 program running that doesn't consume that many resoureces. Just a thought... it's kind of like the Mozilla (replacement for IE) of instant messeging programs.

I'm pretty sure the answer to #1 is no, you might have to buy HL2 for that. But, then again, I'm not a that much of a CS gamer, so I'm not "too" sure. That ad problem seems rather odd. If you havent already, turn on popup blocker in firefox.

That's definately not a windows problem. Sounds like a bios problem to me, most likely WinMe was still intacked. I'd say that your LAN card and your motherboard are incompatible with one another, but I don't know for sure. I've heard of ME doing some crazy things, but I highly doubt it's at fault here.

I know for a fact that you can just use the admin account in win2000pro, so use that instead of xp (I'm getting so flamed for this)...

The Microsoft end user license agreement is the most ridiculous thing I've ever seen. I'll press the "agree" button or "f8" when I install windows, but that doesn't mean that I'm going to follow it. It's kind of sad (disturbing?) to see a multi-billion dollar company drop support on a widely used product so they can become a multi-trillion dollar company. I always thought that MS's worst enemies were pirates, then I read in the paper that it was their own older products. Just think, when Vista comes out, microsoft will HATE XP's guts. I do think that someone should try to write a program or something that will trick games written for only XP to run on 98. If people managed to do that on Linux (made an awesome app called WineX, now it's called Cedega), I think people would be able to do it on windows 98.

Well, from what it sounds like, they're purposly making newer games not playable on 98se. That's they're fault. They "could" just say the games are untested on anything but 2000/XP, but let the game run on older OS's anyway, and leave it to the consumer to attempt to make it run properly on their system.

Score 1 point for windows 98!!

Uggh, I hate the gaming companies in general now for this very reason. When I was discussing something like this incident with GTA: San Andreas, I actually did email rockstar games tech support and I believe my exact words were: "I am very disappointed about your lack of support for windows 98 in Grand Theft Auto San Andreas. There are still a lot of win98 users out there who have the hardware capability to play the game, but can’t because the game runs like crap on 98. I strongly urge Rockstar to release a patch for san andreas for people who still run that operating system. The game runs fine on my hardware under 2000/XP, but on 98SE, the game works fine for a brief moment, then is extremely laggy, and sometimes crashes. I’ve already updated my video driver and all the other drivers for my computer and am still plagued with this problem. My video card is an ATI Radeon 9800 Pro with the latest catalyst. I’ve tried every configuration in the san andreas settings with no results. Releasing San Andreas with the lack of support for both windows 98 and Windows Me was a horrible idea on your part, and you probably lost many customers because of that." They responded with: "It says on the box that only Windows 2000/XP are supported." In other words, they don't really care. But luckily, in the case of san andreas, I was able to get past the lagginess/crappiness of the game performance by turning down audio acceleration. We should lead a revolt against the game developers for not supported older OS's, it's really starting to p*** me off!!

I still remember going through Dell tech support. It was the most inconvenient thing ever. They have at least 3 different 1-800 numbers, one of which was the desktop phonenumber, and the other was the laptop phonenumber. I called the wrong number a couple of times, and waited 5 minutes on hold until they informed me that I need to call a different 1-800 number. I called the "right" number, and was on hold for at least 20 minutes, then I hear a distant, barely audible voice saying "please tell me your service tag number and express code." Now when you're talking to someone thats all the way across the goddamn globe, it's hard for them to hear you. I had to tell them at least 3 times a bunch of stupid meaningless numbers until I could start talking about my computer issues. But for the most part, they were able to help me somewhat. Luckily, once, I was able to talk a tech support person in the Central United States. That makes a WORLD of difference. So, Dell Support is highly inconvenient, but sometimes, it is helpful. I can't really speak about other computer manufacturers that much, but I can tell you that Rockstar Games support REALLY sucks. Newegg.com tech support is perfect. ADS tech support is efficient, but not helpful and Microsoft is tedious and annoying with reactivating windows xp pro for my laptop.

Yeah, that's what I like to call the tedious part of building a computer. I was putting my old PII in a new case about 2 years ago (don't ask why), and everything work ok, except for the floppy disk drive. It's always the FDD!! It kept showing errors in the BIOS, like "floppy disk failure". So, I changed around the FDD cables about 10-20 times, until I got it running. About a year later, I put that FDD in a newer computer, and it shorted out when I turned the computer on. Smoke was chuggin' out the front disk slot of the drive, so I ripped out the drive and literally tossed it in the garbage can, out of rage. Thanks for the suggestions on the motherboards; I think I'll stick with the Abit one. I did check out the motherboards with the SiS chipest. The highest priced one I found was $45. Somehow, I just don't trust something that cost that low to run my system, although the Foxconn one's I read about did get pretty good reviews. I'm trying to avoid the VIA chipset for now, because that's what my Gigabyte motherboard had. I prefer to try something new every once in a while.

Yeah, the Abit NF7-S V2 is what I've been looking at now. I think that one may be a winner after reading some of the 98se compatibility reviews on newegg. I just hope it doesn't arrive DOA; that seems to be a recurring problem when I build computers.

Does anyone have any sugestions on relatively good motherboards with socket A for AMD Athlon XP, DDR400, SATA150 and driver support on Windows 98SE fully? I've found several motherboards with these features, but a lot of them lack good support for 98se. I had a Gigabyte one but it's proved to be unstable on a lot of OS's, especially windows 98.

I researched that motherboard. Everything looks pretty good except for the driver support for, guess what? On Abit's site, they only have chipset drivers for 2000/XP. I guess that's a symbol of how 98se is doing these days. More companies are abandoning it day by day.

I prefer to build my own PC's, but I'd say HP. Dell sucks.

Wait, no, I'm thinking about buying the Asus motherboard; the one I have right now is a Gigabyte one that's proved unstable with every OS I throw at it (especially windows 2000, bsod'd upon first boot). Back to the topic: I don't think windows 98 will ever be dead, there's always going to be someone using it, somewhere. As for game and application support, that's dissapearing as fast as VHS. Leaving us, the one's who remain loyal to the OS to maintain it and attempt to make the software work on their system. Obviously it's a severe pain to get stuff that was never meant to run on old OS's to run on the OS's. I can now speak from experience, as I finally got GTA: San Andreas to run properly when I re-discovered the horrors of audio acceleration in the Control Panel. Software companies like Adobe, and especially Windows 98's creator, Microsoft have been rapidly dropping support for Windows 98 and Me. This is nothing new either, Office 2003, which was released 2 years ago doesn't even work (or isn't "supposed" to work) on 98. Along with Adobe Reader 7, but who needs either of those software titles. Office XP/2000 both work perfectly and as for Adobe, well, their's always an alternative. For compatibility, just learn from Linux. They've had an app out called WineX for years that has allowed Windows Apps and even highend 3D games to run on Linux. Possibly, someone might try the same thing for windows 98 or even 95. MS has dropped compatibility for most of their office applications, eventually IE, and apparently MSN Messenger, and you know what I have to say... GOOD RIDANCE!! Their's Mozilla Firefox (replaces IE), Office 2000/XP/OpenOffice.org, and their's GAIM, which has can replace MSN Messenger, AIM, ICQ, Yahoo Messenger... Point Being: There's always an alternative

I have a friend who is completely computer illiterate and needed help trying to repair his XP computer. He told me he hated XP and I told him that he could just reformat and change to a different operating system. He responded in a state of oblivian with "You can do that!!!???" It's kind of sad, there's a lot of people who hate XP, but don't realize that they can (somewhat) easily switch to a different OS. I've had some success in making windows 98 more stable on my hardware. But I have recently taken apart completely my new windows 98 computer because I've decided to rebuild it. I've have many stability issues with my computer, and putting windows 98 on it did not make anything better. So, for a couple weeks, I'm off 98SE, but once I can get my computer up and running again, hopefully 98 will run fine. (This is just a request but if anyone can tell me how the ASUS A7N8X-E Deluxe motherboard runs on 98SE, like stability issues, driver support etc. that'd be great.)

Just stick with good old AMD. Who needs Intel?

Woah, 20%? On a lot of site stats I've seen windows 98 has been down to 8% or less, and 2000 was second highest. I've noticed on some stats that the amount of 2000 and 98 users is slowly decreasing year by year, while XP increases. It would be awesome to see win98 users increase again, now THAT would p*** off microsoft.

Wow, 10 years. I still remember my family unpacking the old Micron Pentium I with windows 95 Gold pre-installed on it. It had 133MHz/16MB EDO and a Creative SB ISA card that was a foot long, (I'm not kidding). I made use out of that computer until 2002. Man, I wish I still had that computer. Ahh, memories. I also remember using Windows 3.1/DOS 6.22 back in the early '90s. That computer had an 80386DX25 processor and would lag up if you typed too fast in Word 2.0!

Huh, I didn't know anyone else thought the way I did about updating stuff.

Wait, what? Who are you referring too? No one's complaining. Frankly, I think Gape has done an outstanding job on the service pack and I don't see why anyone would complain about it. Of course, people have told him about possible bugs or issues with the service pack, but the contributers just want to help make the service pack better. Now, as for people that keep on saying, XP ownz, 98 is DEAD AND BURIED, those are the people that p*** me off constantly.

This bug that you speak of, IMO is (yet another) Microsoft bug. I am using the service pack, but I have the original Win98se explorer.exe and found the exact same thing DCipher was talking about. Wait, just a second... oh well, I guess that bug was fixed on newer os's (I just tried it on my w2k computer.) Again, that's only my opinion that it's an MS bug, but I'm pretty sure of it.

As a matter of fact, I believe so. Or at least I have the installation disks. I have just about all windows os's from 3.0 up to XP, so I could technically use icons from any of those. BTW, I'm not being sarcastic. For God's sake, I was only asking how to keep the original 98 icons, that's it. If I want the ones from other OS's, believe me, I'll find a way to get them.