Dave-H

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!

Yes, although there's no picture of it, it does sound like exactly the same thing! They claim it's got Windows 98 drivers too I see! I paid £85 for mine from amazon.co.uk BTW, including postage. I do think your problem is very likely not having the latest version of Rudolph's patch installed properly. I'll let you know how I get on when I try installing it on Monday with the latest version of the patch. If it works for me, it should for you!

Well, my card has arrived! I'm going away for a few days, so I won't be trying to install it until the beginning of next week. One slightly puzzling thing. It is an actual nVidia card, not badged by someone else, and the box says "Drivers included for Windows 2000, XP, XP (64bit), Vista", which is what I expected. However, in the box is a CD which says on it "nVidia VGA Card Driver version:7.0" which claims to include a Windows 9x driver! There is also in the box an installation instruction leaflet which has instructions for Windows 9x installation! It does look very much like a generic leaflet and disk though, and when I unpacked the Windows 9x installation file on the CD (which is version 56.64) there was actually no mention of the 7950 in the inf file! So, why are they including software with the card which won't actually work with it, at least not under Windows 98?! At least that explains why the seller stated that it included Windows 98 drivers. It does, they just won't work with that card! Anyway, I will open the machine up on Monday and see how it goes! Wish me luck.....

That's slightly worrying! I'll be getting my card delivered soon, so I hope I have better luck. Which driver(s) have you tried? This is the one I'm intending to use - http://www.mdgx.com/files/NV8269.EXE Have you tried that? I'm puzzled by your problem with Rudolph's patch, it has always worked perfectly for me. Why are you using it, is it just to enable Windows 98 to work with a large amount of RAM? Presumably it does that if that's the case. Did it not extract the files from your VMM32.VXD and patch them? It should have patched VMM.VXD and VCACHE.VXD, as well as VMM32.VXD. Which version of the patch are you using? The /a switch for the AGP fix is only recognised by versions 6.1 and 7.0 as far as I'm aware.

Thanks Den. I've checked my e-mail archive, and I was informed about version 7 by Rudolph, but the e-mail said that the only change from 6.1 was that it now supports Windows 95. In fact the message said that those with Windows 98, 98SE, and ME did not need to update as the patches are the same in 6.1 and 7 for those operating systems. I have e-mailed Rudolph again to clarify that, and I'm sure he will send me version 7 if he thinks I need it.

@dencorso I have version 6.0 of Rudolph's patch installed, which does not support the Patchmem /A switch, so I will have to upgrade to version 6.1, which I have but have never installed. I have ordered the card, so let's hope it works! @rainyd I will certainly let you all know how it goes!

Thank as always Den! You made me feel very lazy not to have found all that for myself! It seems as if the 512MB memory on the card may still be an insurmountable problem here, although the debate about it seems to be from last year so things may have changed. I have Rudolph Loew's RAM Limitation Patch installed, as you know, but it seems unclear whether that helps in this situation. I have e-mailed Rudolph about it, so hopefully he can tell me what the current situation is. Thanks again, Dave.

Thanks for the link to that thread! That looks very interesting. It appears that the unofficial driver does support the 7950 GT under Windows 98SE. It seems to support other higher cards too, but am I right in saying that the 7950 GT is actually the last with an AGP version?

Thanks. I already use the Catalyst 6.2 driver for Windows 98 with my Radeon 9200 based card. The nVidia cards which supposedly have Windows 98 drivers seem to be more up to date than the ATI/AMD equivalents. What I don't know yet is whether to go ahead with an nVidia card which supposedly has drivers for Windows 98. I don't want to buy it only to find that it actually hasn't got Windows 98 drivers! Can someone confirm or deny that drivers exist for the nVidia 7xxx series of cards? I'd obviously like to use the 7 series if possible as it's the most recent, but the 6xxx series would probably do.

Thanks. I found the 7950 GT available here - http://www.epartsandmore.com/product_info.php?products_id=542&cPath=97&m1track=custom&source=google1&osCsid=rka3mjp6muojq4pr5ff7t5i8e0 The seller says that it's compatible with Windows 98. Is that not so?

Well I'm now looking at nVidia cards. I quite like the look of the GeForce 7950 GT. Seems pretty powerful, is an 8x AGP card, and claims to have Windows 98 drivers available! Anyone any thoughts or experience with this? Thanks, Dave.

Just a quick note. That download link doesn't work. It should be http://japheth.de/Download/VWin32.zip It appears to be case sensitive, vwin32.zip won't work!

I'm not an expert on processor types, but I assume the Xeon is an x86 processor. Windows 98 (and DOS) runs on one fine, but only sees one of my two physical processors of course. XP Pro sees them both as four processors using hyperthreading, which was the predecessor to multi-core technology I believe. The reason I run it like I do is just a legacy one. I originally had just Windows 98SE (and 98FE and 95 before it) on my previous motherboard, then in 2000 I added Windows 2000 in a dual boot setup. The whole lot was ported to my present motherboard, (which despite never being tested with Windows 98 seemed to work fine with it) in 2003. Earlier this year the Windows 2000 installation was updated to XP Pro.

Thanks everyone, and sorry for not responding sooner, but I've been very busy the last few days! That's certainly given me a lot of food for thought. I'm not going to be changing my motherboard any time soon, as it is a dual processor server board with 3.2GHz Xeons and 4GB of a hard to get type of RAM, all which cost a lot of money! It's more than powerful enough for everything I want to do with it, it's just the graphics card (which is five years older, and was transplanted from my previous motherboard) which is now letting the system down. I will certainly investigate all the suggestions and get back. I do run my present card at 8xAGP BTW. Thanks all.

I'm hoping the Windows 98 experts here can give me some advice. As you can see from my signature, I have a dual boot system with XP and 98SE. My ATI Radeon 9200 based graphics card is getting pretty old now (bought in 1998) and I really need to replace it with a better one as it's having problems with recent games. XP is no problem of course, but I need the replacement to still work at least at a fairly basic level on Windows 98SE! I need it ideally to work at least with 32bit colour at 1024x768 resolution. I've looked at later ATI cards like the Radeon HD series, but it seems to be impossible to find any drivers for them which will work at all on Windows 98. I'd like to stick with ATI/AMD if possible, but it's not essential. It has to be an AGP card though, as my 2003 motherboard has no PCI-E slot, and not even any free normal PCI slots! Anyone any suggestions as to what I could use? Thanks, Dave.

I was aware that there are later versions of PC-cillin that support Windows 98, I assume PC-cillin 2005 is the last one that does. I haven't tried any later versions simply because I don't have licences for them! <snip> Thanks. Which Spyware Pattern do you use? I don't know what CPR, DCT and OPR mean. CPR means Controlled Pattern Release. OPR means Official Pattern Release. Not sure about DCT! CPRs are released in between OPRs for those who always want the very latest all the time. I only ever bother with the OPRs.

I was aware that there are later versions of PC-cillin that support Windows 98, I assume PC-cillin 2005 is the last one that does. I haven't tried any later versions simply because I don't have licences for them! I'm pretty sure that upgrades from 2002 to later versions were not free. Whether you can actually buy a licence now for any version I would doubt. 2002 seems to still work fine and I don't know what later versions might provide that would make attempting an upgrade worthwhile.