Dave-H

Ah thanks, understood! He was giving out information that was out of date anyway, unless you've got an earlier version of Windows 10.

Thanks Jerry, your post seems to have been removed, but I still got the e-mail notification! Did you remove it because you realised it was out of date information (there is no longer a "Cortana" section in settings for instance)? If so, thanks anyway, but there is a strange thing that if I looks at the "Locations" settings you mention, which are still there, Cortana is not listed there at all. Surely it should be? My Microsoft Weather app is also now malfunctioning, after an update as usual, in that the live tile is now showing the wrong location, and not the location of the main app as it always has before. I have set the location there manually as my PC has no geolocation facility. The live tile is now showing the weather for somewhere several miles away! If I change the weather app location to somewhere completely different, the live tile still doesn't match it, showing a different place! Just how hard can it be for Microsoft to get this system working properly?!

Yes, that really annoys me too, but it's sometimes the only option now to get hold of old drivers! I don't trust those driver downloaders either, I always imagine that they're full of spyware at very least. That file is almost certainly big because it includes control panel software, not just the driver. If you can unpack the exe file you may well be able to install just the driver using an INF file in Device Manager.

This driver looks like a possibility. Supports that device ID and is supposedly Windows XP compatible. No guarantees, but worth a try!

Well if there was nothing at all by way of sound from the hardware when you booted up, not even a faint click or pop, I would still be worried that the hardware isn't physically working, but I would be delighted to be proved wrong! Do keep us up to date on your driver searches.

No it doesn't, even with that setting enabled. I'm not going to worry about it as I have dual graphics cards and I can always use the other one if I need WebGL support on a site in XP. Frankly as I have a multi-boot machine, it would be easier just to go into Windows 10 which has to use the newer card anyway!

OK, I will investigate all that, and thanks, but this is really off-topic in this thread!

My ATI Catalyst driver version is 10.2, which is probably the issue. Apparently 10.6 is the minimum required for WebGL. 10.2 is the last for my card that works on XP.

There is no full 2008 edition, the December 2008 patch was just an update for the December 2007 full edition. You have to have the December 2007 full version installed before you can use the update. The 2008 Update file I've got is 45.3MB (47,558,413 bytes to be precise). If yours is different it may well not be OK. I would personally now use the 3.65 version of the Service Pack if I was wanting to update a new Windows 98SE installation from scratch, as it must surely be more up to date than any of the existing Auto-Patcher versions.

You still haven't said whether there's any sound at all from the speakers when the machine is starting up!

Thanks, problem solved! It's my ancient ATI graphics card that doesn't support WebGL in Firefox. If I switch to the Nvidia card it's fine! I do wonder why that Cloudflare test site is still using WebGL if it's obsolete. I'll go away again now......

I hope "$763.45" shipping was a joke! I agree, there shouldn't be any problem skipping BIOS versions.

Strange, the webpage says it doesn't! This is off-topic of course, but perhaps it does on some sites but not others, although I don't see why that would be.

The jack which feeds a simple pair of stereo speakers is normally coloured green. If you connect to that and hear nothing, I am very afraid that the hardware could be dead. I thought the audio hardware being on the PCI bus was quite normal, but I'm not an expert on the architecture of motherboards.

Thanks!

FWIW it works fine with Firefox 52.9 ESR on XP, except for the map, which it says it can't display because there is no WebGL support in the browser.

I'm pretty sure that the codecs are listed anyway, even if there is actually no functional audio hardware to take advantage of them. Do try the speaker test, as if there is no sound at all from them, even a faint click or pop, when the machine starts up I think it's very likely that the audio hardware is non-functional.

My experience with motherboards with Intel chipsets and Realtek onboard audio is that the the analogue audio hardware appears in Device Manager as a Realtek device. Did you try the "speaker test"?

Ah yes, I've just seen that now! Very strange. So what's the point in publishing it if you're not going to let anyone download and use it?

VEN_8086 indicates an Intel device. It doesn't look as if there are any Realtek devices there. It is still possible that the on-board audio hardware is physically disabled, or faulty. Try connecting some speakers to the audio output, and turn the volume up on their amplifier. With your ear right up to one of the speakers, boot up the machine. If the hardware is working, it would be very surprising not to hear at least one click or pop from the speakers, however faint, when the hardware starts. If there is complete silence, I think you have to assume that the hardware might be dead, or physically disabled, by a jumper perhaps rather than just in the BIOS. If you have the manual for the motherboard, it should detail the functions of any physical jumpers on the board.

The link's still serving 3.65, not 3.66.

BTW, the Service Pack download link still seems to serve version 3.65, not version 3.66.

I must say FWIW that I never had any problems with the 2008 update to Auto-Patcher, but of course it's now 12 years old, and the Service Pack must be far more up to date now!

Ah yes, I do remember that now! I seem to remember thinking that it wasn't actually worth the trouble as 261 only needed one file substituted with an earlier version, but going up one more version needed much more work. Since then, and I hadn't made the connection, I've actually been using the Azul Zulu version of Java 8 Update 262 on Windows 98SE, to run a Burp proxy server!