Dave-H

Hi guys! Sorry for the delay, but I finally have an update. Installed the "new" card and everything went fine. Windows 98 started OK, even without the patchmem /a switch, as Rudolph said it would. The driver installed fine, and I can set all the resolutions I want. Went OK on Windows XP too. But (of course!) I have a few problems, one of which is on both operating systems. Sticking with Windows 98 issues here, the first problem is more puzzling than anything else. When I boot Windows 98, the first thing I see, after the desktop screen loads, is an error message saying that my network adapter isn't working properly and I might need to reinstall it. After Windows finishes loading, the network adapter is actually working perfectly, so what's that all about?! Also, when I shut down Windows 98, instead of the "Windows is shutting down" splash screen, I get a DOS text message saying "Write fault error writing device AUX". The options offered are "Abort, Retry, Ignore, and Fail". All the options expect "Abort" just bring the message back again exactly as before. "Abort" just goes to a flashing cursor which stays there until I forcibly re-set or switch off the system. Anyone any idea what that's about? What exactly is "device AUX"?! The message doesn't come up if I re-start, only if I shut down. The third problem, which is potentially a killer, is that the hardware overlay doesn't work on the new card with my video capture and editing card. It has a test facility which says that the overlay works fine, and is a RIVA128 type. Unfortunately if I use that the overlay screen produces a very high quality still frame, but that's all it will produce. If I play a video file it stays as a still frame, and only updates to another still frame if i move of resize the windows, but absolutely refuses to produce moving pictures! This is disastrous if I can't resolve it as I use this facility all the time, and it has always worked perfectly with the old graphics card. I will have to abandon the new card if I can't get this working. Anyone who knows about overlays got any ideas on this? The problem is the same on Windows XP, and I've tried different drivers and display settings on XP with absolutely no difference. The overlay seems to be working fine with Windows Media Player, just not the software that goes with the capture card. HELP!

Yes it's here. Still hasn't arrived yet!

No problem PC. The thing is, if you replace the opera.dll file from 10.60 with the one from 10.54, I don't think you've actually got Opera 10.60 anymore, as we said here. Looking at the relative file sizes between the dll and the exe, it does seem likely that most of the code is in the dll. If you want to run 10.60 properly, why not just install KernelEx? I've recently done that, and everything is fine.

Just to clarify the thread title and the original post, Opera 10.54 is the last that works on unmodified Windows 98, not 10.60. 10.60 will only work with KernelEx installed.

Well I just won an XFX GE 7950GT card on eBay (I hope I wasn't bidding against you Cyker!) £70 including shipping, which isn't at all bad. It is used, although supposedly in perfect working order. Let's hope it hasn't been used constantly for 1000s of hours by someone already! Once again I'm away for a few days next week, so it will be Thursday before I can try it out, assuming it's been delivered by then! It's only coming from elsewhere in England so it should be pretty quick.

As I said to someone over there, I'm not sure if you've really still got Opera 10.60 if you replace the dll with an earlier one! I'm not sure how much of the update is in the dll, and how much is in the exe and other files. For myself, I've just installed KernelEx 4.0 and Opera 10.60 is now running fine un-modified!

I have just run into the problem of the latest version of the Opera browser not working on Windows 98. I've never used KernelEx before, but I gather that it will fix this. I'm slightly wary of installing beta versions, but I have been told that a new version 4.5 Beta 3, is coming soon. Anyone any idea how "soon"? Should I wait for it? Also if I decide to go with the final of 4.0 rather than install a beta, does anyone know if this will this also fix my problem? Thanks, Dave.

Well, I got a reply back from the seller and you won't be surprised to hear that the card isn't actually available at all! Anyway, I'm now chasing another one.

Thanks again Queue. I have e-mailed the seller of the card with the wrong picture for clarification. I'll let you know what they say about it.

Well, yet more research done! I like the idea of getting a "proper" XFX card rather than something which is almost certainly a cheap clone. Having had one physically blow up I'm now a bit wary! The actual XFX card seems to be very hard to find. There are quite a few places advertising it, but when you actually look they're all "out of stock". I finally found one here. It is very expensive though, over $350 to ship it to England. Do we think that's worth it? The picture is absolutely nothing like the card as far as I can see either, which is slightly worrying! The card should look like this as far as I can tell. I have found another version that doesn't have a fan, but does have a gigantic heat sink instead! Can't actually find that available anywhere though. P. S. @Cyker Glad to see you're also a proud Opera user!

Thanks again Queue. Yes, the Amazon one is quite a bit more expensive, £93 as opposed to the other one at £70 via eBay. I hadn't noticed that the Amazon one didn't have two DVI connectors, well spotted! That is a bit suspicious I think as all the specs I've read for the 7950 say that it has two DVI connectors. In fact looking more closely at the eBay one, I think it's identical to the one I had before which blew up. It seems from my researches that nVidia themselves never sold an AGP version of the 7950. The AGP version was produced by a company called XFX. So, now I'm inclined to go for the one on eBay, and hope it doesn't blow up like the first one. The seller says it's brand new, which is a good sign, if it's true of course! What do you reckon?

Well my burnt-up card is going back to Amazon for a refund! I've found two more possible sources. Here and here. I am now a bit puzzled though. The cards offered look different, and different to the one I've got. It may just be the superficial branding, but more of concern is that the edge connectors don't seem to be the same. The first one has an edge connector with two notches in it, which is actually the same as the ATI card I've already got. The second one has only one notch in the edge connector, which is the same as the card which blew up! Should I be concerned about this? I'd like some reassurance before I order another card. I don't understand why two cards which are apparently the same model should be physically different in any way. I want to buy the Amazon one ideally as it's in Europe.

That would have been me! The first reply was very nice and helpful, NOT! Whether Opera will respond on this I doubt. I really don't want to have to have two different versions of Opera installed for Windows 98 and Windows XP on my dual boot machine (as I've had to do with many other applications as Windows 98 support has been dropped) so I will consider finally installing KernelEx, which will fix this I hope.

Thanks Queue, that's good to know that the psu is probably adequate, and you're obviously right, I need to review the power configuration of the machine. I've probably been lucky that it's worked OK up to now, although the way I've got things connected may well have hastened the failure of the previous power supplies. Good point. It's only a small extra fan that I added to cool part of my video capture board which suffered from a noisy composite analogue output because of a known problem with a particular chip getting too hot. I probably don't actually need it now as I don't use the coded output any more. My two main SCSI hard drives share the same power cable. They are the only things on it apart from the extra fan mentioned above. This is the cable I ran the graphics card from too, just because it was physically convenient. Another cable feeds a removable IDE drive and DVD-RAM drive, and a third feeds the floppy drive and a DVD-RW drive. I don't think there are any other spares, although there are I think unused power cables with terminate in SATA drive power connectors. I may be able to use one of those to feed the graphics card if I can get an adapter. Indeed so!

Those dark spots are not reflections, they are actually there, and you're right, the tops of those capacitors are bulging. More significantly, now I've looked more closely at that part of the board, there is a burnt-up link underneath at that point!

Your wish is my command! The first one shows the fried up power connector. The yellow wire is actually melted onto the adjacent wire! I managed to break it trying to remove the connector from the card. I think the connector had welded itself on that pin!

Thanks Rudolph. I will try uninstalling patchmem and then reinstalling it with the /M option only. When I get a replacement card I'll try it like that and see if it still works.

Rudolph, does that mean that running patchmem with the /A switch was un-necessary in my case? I do need the /M switch to solve the large registry problem. Is the /A switch likely to cause harm, and what should I look out for? The nVidia card was working fine in Windows 98 before it blew up, but I'd already installed patchmem by then so I don't know if it would have worked without it anyway. The system seems to be working fine at the moment (with the original ATI card back.) Yes, you're right of course, Cyker won't even get to Safe Mode if he's having the sort of problems I was having before I installed your patch!

Definitely not! The connectors aren't reversible anyway, (and I did check that I hadn't forced one in the wrong way round!) Thanks, that's very helpful, and confirms my thoughts. It's a server motherboard with software monitoring of the hardware. All the power rails are shown as being in the centre of their tolerances, as they were before the problem, so it looks as if the psu wasn't damaged. Don't worry, that card isn't going back in the machine! I can do some pictures if you like, but I've inspected it very closely myself, and can see no physical signs of any problem. No blackening anywhere, no sign of anything open or short circuited.

Yes, it does sound as if patchmem is perhaps not doing what it should do (I assume that you are using one of the correct versions.) The VMM BSODs you're getting now can happen in my experience if you've got too much RAM and/or a very large registry. Patchmem has cured all that for me. I'm sure you've tried this, but when it hangs on the restart, have you tried restarting in Safe Mode? I have known Windows 98 hang on reboots after installs, but Safe Mode starts OK and does the registry updates etc., and it will then boot OK in normal mode. Worth a try if you haven't tried that. The only other thing I'd now try before reinstalling Windows is to go to the system\vmm32 folder (in DOS), and restore the backups that should be there of your vcache.vxd and vmm.vxd files. These should have been made by patchmem and have a *.bak extension. Then boot into Safe Mode with the original graphics card installed and use the system configuration editor to limit the memory to 512MB. With a bit of luck the system should then boot into normal mode again and you can reinstall patchmem and take it from there.

Thanks Den. I reckon it's time to get another card. I would be really surprised if my psu is inadequate. It is a 600W model, the most powerful in its range, and I paid good money for it simply on the basis that I wanted it to be running well within its spec, even with my system. It's the third psu I've had in the system, the other two failed early I suspect (although they both survived quite a long time) because they were being stressed and were running near their limits. The one I've got now is much higher rated than either of its predecessors. I hope I can make a case that the card was actually faulty, as even if it was stressing the psu, it must have suddenly put a short circuit across the line to burn up the cable like that. Surely no card (or anything else for that matter) should ever draw enough current to melt its connecting cable! I think it ran for a while, and then developed a hardware failure, like one of the devices on the card shorted. That's the case I'll make to the seller anyway, as I don't believe that an inadequate psu could have caused those symptoms. The worst that should have happened surely is the psu overheating and tripping off, or perhaps malfunctioning caused by the supply rail voltage falling. Unfortunately, I'm sure the seller had only one of them, so they won't be able to replace it. All I can hope for is a refund, and then hope to find another somewhere else.

Thanks Den. Your picture shows exactly what I've got, and yes, it was the yellow cable that melted! I've checked with a digital multimeter, and that pin on the connector is now reading a direct short with the ground pin next to it, which is probably not a good sign. I fear that the card is indeed damaged, and I'm a bit loathe to try it in the system again in case it damages anything else. I'm terrified of the very expensive motherboard getting damaged of course, as that will leave me with no computer! Thanks Queue. This is all new to me. As I said, the installation instructions enclosed with the card don't even mention the power connector! Interesting that you say it should be connected directly to the psu and not share with any other devices, as one of the things they enclose with the card is a power splitter, as if they're encouraging you to do exactly that! This was what fried fortunately, not one of the actual psu cables thank goodness. I had it connected to the same cable that also supplies two hard drives and a fan, from what you say, probably not a good idea! My psu is a Seasonic S12-600, a 600W model and the most powerful in the range. I need that as I have a dual processor motherboard and a lot of disk drives. I hope the graphics card wasn't the "straw that broke the camel's back"! I suspect what happened was that the excessive drain from the card on one power line, shared with other things, caused the psu to shut down that line after a while, although it did survive for half an hour or so. It then took a while to reset itself which is why I couldn't get the system to work for a while afterwards. Thankfully it recovered. It didn't shut the whole psu down as some parts of the system were still powering up. Strangely there seemed to be no sign of overheating damage on any of the other cables, only the splitter that was actually feeding the card, but that may be simply because they are heavier cables. As I said to Dencorso, I am afraid that the card is now damaged and therefore shouldn't be tried again with different cabling. Do you agree with that? I don't know how I can test it without actually trying it, but the fact that it's showing a short circuit between the pin that the wire melted on and ground doesn't look good.

It was the 512 MB version. I think my power supply was too strong rather than too weak! It's much more likely that the card was actually faulty, or I connected it wrongly (I hope the former!)

Well, tried the card out today, and I have good news and bad news! The good news is that the card works in Windows 98! My main worry after I'd uninstalled the ATI drivers and substituted the card was that Windows 98 wouldn't start at all. Well, it did start OK (thanks to Rudolph's patch I suspect, although I wasn't going to uninstall it to confirm that!) and the only problem I had was getting the drivers to install. The driver setup program said that there were no nVidia graphics chips detected, and aborted the installation. I eventually had to follow Maximus-Decim's backup instructions, which involved extracting the files from the installer and directly updating the graphics card drivers from the inf file therein. That all worked fine, and I was able to set the resolution and colour depth to what I wanted. All well and good, well pleased. Unfortunately it then all went horribly wrong (before I'd modified the Windows XP side fortunately.) I went away for a while, leaving the system on, and when I came back an hour or so later, I was greeted with a blank monitor and a very worrying smell of burning! The new card has a power connector on it, which I assume is to power the on-board fan and perhaps other parts of the card. I had connected this to a power supply outlet (it's a standard disk drive type connector.) One of the cables on this connector had actually melted! Needless to say the card was now dead. I put the old card back in, and the system still produced no video, filling me with dread that I'd actually damaged something on the motherboard. Fortunately after a few attempts it came good, otherwise I wouldn't be typing this! So, it looks as if the board will have to go back. Before I contact the seller, can someone confirm that I didn't do anything wrong which might have blown it up? The instruction guide that came with it doesn't mention the power connector at all! If anyone else has one of these or a similar card could they confirm that it just connects to a standard power supply output? I'm very puzzled that the card did apparently work fine for at least half an hour. I wasn't there when it failed, so I don't know what could have happened. Anyway, the main reason for this thread, getting it to work in Windows 98, was a great success, so I hope that at least will give comfort to others that it is possible!

Not yet! I was away until yesterday, and I'm now trying to sort out another problem on the PC which I want to fix before I back everything up and try the new card. I'm away all day tomorrow too unfortunately, so it looks like it will now be Wednesday before I get to it. Just hope the weather cools down a bit (if you're in England you'll know what I'm talking about!) Can't summon up much enthusiasm for anything at the moment!