My 98SE laptop, with reports of all packages used

[Th3_uN1Qu3]

First of all i'd like to congratulate all modders here for their hard work, you truly breathed new life into my laptop. Then a warm welcome goes to the Romanian contributers i've seen around, i'm here to join you guys.

Now, the lappy specs:

Toshi Portege 4010

PIII Tualatin @ 933MHz

512MB SDRAM

16MB Trident Cyberblade XP video

ALi sound

30GB IBM HDD

Onboard everything, LAN, WiFi, infrared, SD card slot, blah blah blah

~5 hours runtime with 2nd battery installed

A little background. I used to run XP on this thing, but it became slow. I tried Puppy Linux, was nice and fast just that the Linux Trident video drivers hated my chipset and i found myself hitting CTRL+ALT+Backspace (restart X server) way too many times.

So i decided to revert to my long-time favorite OS, 98SE. I found this forum a while ago, and was astonished of what you achieved. I knew i had to test it, and this was the best opportunity to.

Enough blabber, now on to the reports.

I installed all the drivers and IE6 SP1 first, then DirectX 9, then 98SE SP 2.1a from here, then RP7, then KernelEx, then 98SE2ME, then Maximus-Decim's native USB drivers, then the Vista Drive Icon. Oh, and then Opera, my favorite browser.

RP7 bug reports:

The webview text doesn't always look nice, but that's a known issue.

Sometimes, a maximized window will go over part of the taskbar, even though it's set to always on top. Probably due to the bigger taskbar size of the vista theme. PS, anyone have a thin taskbar/title bar vista-ish theme?

Taskbar buttons don't flash when an application requests focus.

After installing 98SE2ME, when the shutdown dialog does the transition, instead of the effect, the screen turns white and only the shutdown dialog remains. Not affecting functionality, but not exactly pretty.

98SE2ME bug reports:

Diskeeper's MMC component will repeadetly crash in wininet.dll if i browse through the help files (not that i really needed them but had nothing to do) when defragmenting. Funny though, i hit Close and the program continues working normally.

A few mshtml.dll related crashes after playing Moorhuhn, i'll try to reproduce them and post details.

Uh, those:

I have uninstalled KernelEx and the text issues are still there, so it must be 98SE2ME at fault.

Now for a little question. When i rebooted my laptop, it said something about some updates that are going to be installed after reboot, on two occasions. Updates to WHAT??? Since when did 98 turn into XP?

Okay, enough bashing, in for the good stuff.

Your awesome work proved me that the crappy video chip in my laptop is worth something, as now

NFS Porsche runs smoothly maxed out at the screen's native 1024x768, as long as i keep it in 16 bits color (a Trident chip running properly at 32 bits? Never.), while in XP it only ran smoothly with medium settings at the same resolution.

Quake III also hums along nicely at 1024x768 16bits with medium settings, while in XP it could only do 640x480 at medium without lagging.

Pocket Tanks Deluxe runs ultra-smooth, while some weapons' explosions lagged massively in XP.

Have yet to try Worms Armageddon, but that ran perfectly anyway.

The RP7 functionality is awesome, the themes rock, and i never imagined i could have thumbnails, audio and even video previews in 'doze 98. Impressive work Tihiy !!! Can't wait for RP8 to come out!

Oh, and did i mention how fast this thing runs now? Boot times are kinda the same as XP, around a minute and a half (probably coz of the delay of the wireless card trying to get an IP while i have my internet wired at home), but once it reaches the desktop everything flies. Also, it rarely hits the pagefile, i set only 256MB as opposed to 512MB in XP, and i have yet to see it use even half of that. The huge disk cache you set has a positive impact on every program's performance, honestly i wouldn't have set such a crazy amount myself.

Also, the drivers have a few neat features i didn't see in XP. The infrared port has a handy icon in the system tray, from where i can enable/disable it, send files and disable plug and play for infrared so i can transfer files to/from my cellphone without installing any drivers. I didn't have those in XP, and the infrared would always stay enabled and searching for devices, chewing on my battery life. There is also a power saving mode for wifi, where the wireless connection is slowed down to use less power. I didn't have that in XP either.

The only thing i miss is the dynamic switching of SpeedStep under load on battery, now the applet only has "Performance" (always high) and "Battery Optimized" (always low), therefore i have to keep one extra icon in my systray to switch when needed. Oh well, that's Toshiba's fault, not yours.

Once again major kudos for those who made this possible, and see you around. Sorry for the long post, hope those reports help. If you need any more info such as crash data and more screenshots, i'll be happy to provide them in the corresponding topics.

Edited March 19, 2008 by Th3_uN1Qu3

[Marius '95]

Boot times are kinda the same as XP, around a minute and a half (probably coz of the delay of the wireless card trying to get an IP while i have my internet wired at home), but once it reaches the desktop everything flies. Also, it rarely hits the pagefile, i set only 256MB as opposed to 512MB in XP, and i have yet to see it use even half of that.

The only thing i miss is the dynamic switching of SpeedStep under load on battery, now the applet only has "Performance" (always high) and "Battery Optimized" (always low), therefore i have to keep one extra icon in my systray to switch when needed. Oh well, that's Toshiba's fault, not yours.

Boot delay is caused by DHCP. Set the IP manually and boot will be even faster.

Don't set a size for swap file. Works better without.

I think that Toshiba utility can be replaced by other programs. Search the net for overclocking tools and try them.

Add this line to AUTOEXEC.BAT:

IF EXIST C:\WINDOWS\WININIT.INI TYPE C:\WINDOWS\WININIT.INI

It will show you what "updates" are installed during reboot.

Edited March 18, 2008 by Marius '95

[Th3_uN1Qu3]

None of the known overclocking tools is compatible with my PLL chip, believe me, i've tried. I've been overclocking for a few years and i know what i am doing.

Thanks for the tip on the updates.

As for networking, DHCP is disabled (IP set manually) for my LAN, but there's no way in hell i can do it for wireless, as its job is to tap into random connections when i'm on the move.

I tried disabling the pagefile, but eventually programs will start crashing with invalid page faults, which mean they're out of memory. If you meant letting windoze manage it by itself, i don't like my pagefile getting fragmented in 2000 pieces, do you?

Edited first post, KernelEx isn't to blame for those text errors.

Edited March 19, 2008 by Th3_uN1Qu3