Jump to content

Realistically, how much longer can Win98 be kept viable?


E-66

Recommended Posts


Epox EP-8KRAIPRO

IMO, the Asus A7V880 appears to be one of the best socket A motherboards. The Epox EP-8KRAIPRO, I dunno. :}

Epox, unlike Asus, has had a history of using caps that are believed to be bad quality. Thus the motherboard may not be stable for long.

Edited by RJARRRPCGP
Link to comment
Share on other sites

Perhaps boards like the Abit NF7-S Revision 2 might be the speedier, but that's hard to find at any reasonable price now.

I got a lot of use out of the Asus A7V880, but it does suffer from some funky defects in the memory voltage area. I don't mean specifically my board, but the whole lot of them. We must set the memory timings manually, and raise the AGP voltage to 1.75, as well as dumb down to AGP 4X for stability.

The bios blinks out, and that did happen on mine. It just loses the bios and nothing but a replacement chip fixes it. Mine was RMA'd just to have that done. No telling when it'll forget again and go blank.

Mine also locks up with high processor usage such as video encoding. Nice Antec Tru-Blue 480 power supply, so it gets plenty of stable power and good air flow.

My Epox board shows none of these negative attributes, although the bios in it won't let you lower the AGP speed if you wanted to. It's locked at 8X or 4X depending on the card. I think I recall reading that they put better capacitors on the 8KRAIPRO than the original version of (8VTAI?) the board that was renamed.

I recently purchased a second 8KRAIPRO to replace the A7V880 in my other case. The only thing that I might miss there is that SoundMAX audio. I thought it sounded great and had all the cool Sensaura stuff I purchased seperately to upgrade it. But I haven't used it in a while anyway as I put an Audigy 2 ZS in there. And now that I find I can get SoundBlaster 16 emulation in Dos with the Audigy 2 ZS and the Epox board I'm sold! The Asus A7V880 wouldn't let that work. Don't use it alot, but the old games look and sound better than what I get with Dosbox.

Maybe I'll try out that 48Bit LBA ESDI patch on my 250GB ATA drive on the new board with 98SE! Oohh, fun without destroying this system. Sounds like a plan.

Asus has the good rep, but that particular board has known problems. Hence it's being discontinued early.

The KT880 chip is nice for it's maximizing Socket A speeds, dual-channel memory support, working USB 2.0 and Sata support. It just seems that it took too long to work out the bugs, and only now that Socket A is dead there are a few boards out that combined stability with that speed.

98SE runs the Epox board fine. Both boards show IRQ steering errors on 98SE but the hardware works anyway. Using setup /p i installs as a standard pc and then the error only shows up within the properties tab of the PCI Bus heading (IRQ Steering disabled due to errors in the steering table) and not in System Information. Maybe I'll try a normal install again and see what happens. It looks just cosmetic.

I'll just mention here an important trick in getting AGP transfer's working in 98SE. I install the latest Via Hyperion Pro's without the AGP driver selected. Before rebooting, I extract the AGP folder from the 4443v 4-in-1's to the root directory and run the OEM reg file in there. Then I use device manager to manually update the Microsoft PCI to PCI controller to the Via CPU to AGP Controller in that folder (not the one with 2.0, 3.0 support). Then I reboot. Now when I install either ATI or NVidia drivers, they provide the AGP transfer's. Newer 4-in-1's turn that off and only let drivers provide PCI transfer's. Lot's of complaining in forums about that and no solutions besides telling folks to reinstall the Via AGP drivers, which won't help.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

AGP 4X ??

What the heck?

Thats ridiculous, I set mine manual for faster times.

I found that my kt6v-lsr was the most stable and tough enough not to freeze when bogged down, but I sold it when I got my asus.

It works but I dont see no drastic improvements.

On XP the nforce chipset sucked real bad when moving files, on 98se its ok.

I'm not sure what happened but socket a got ditched and people were left hanging if you ask me.

Edited by kartel
Link to comment
Share on other sites

Well, no sensation happened. Another one of VIA's attempt's to create a chipset outperforming NVIDIA nForce2 didn't succeed. Due to NVIDIA's intellectual DASP unit, nForce2 Ultra 400 remains the fastest Socket A chipset today.

http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/chipsets/...a-kt880_10.html

Actually, with the Via KT880, with some benchmarks, it loses and with some, it wins or at least roughly the same! It may lose in 3D Mark 2001 SE, but heard that it's fine with real world performance.

It's not like the Via KT400, where unfortunately seemed to always be behind, even with the DDR SDRAM latencies at 2.0-2-2-6.

I doubt that it performs majorly worse than the nForce2, unless there isn't a high enough PCI and AGP divider.

Also, I heard that the FSB is limited to 227 mhz with the Asus A7V880. (this appears to be Asus' fault)

Heard that the Asus A7V880 stock BIOS won't let you select any higher than 227 mhz for the FSB.

Heard that a BIOS mod can solve that problem.

Also, the nForce2 likely is going to be slower than the Via KT880 under Windows 98 and Windows ME.

It seems that you're required to use a NT-based Windows with nForce2s for performance advantages.

Edited by RJARRRPCGP
Link to comment
Share on other sites

Windows 9x has three possible features that could keep it going.

  • Embedded or Rescue System
  • "Dusty Decks" = old hardware
  • Global Warming

The first has serious competition from BartPE, which relies on code that is updated. Unlike say, IBM with OS/2, Microsoft has not really made Win9x or WinNT really embeddable, and this greatly shortens the usefulness of these OS's after the mainstream usage is over.

The second, "Dusty Decks", refers to old hardware and software.

The third is rather interesting idea. One might suppose that as global warming starts to leak into our minds more, things like operating systems would tend to look for power-efficient operations, rather than consuming more power. This in turn will mean that interfaces might revert back to something less power-consuming, eg 16-colour or something.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • 4 weeks later...

Most things subject to Copyright laws; books, plays, etc., are subject to time limits, after which they become Public Domain, unless, of course, they affect National Security. It seems to me that Microsoft's stunning - in terms of speed - production of "New" Operating Systems - and their versions, plus the fact they have now ceased support for 98, is an indication of "corporate release by declaration" - my term. If a product is deemed to be obsolete by its manufacturers, indicated by no further support, then they should be required, under modified software copyright laws, to hand it over to those who wish to use it. Any bolshy WIN98 enthusiast lawyers out there want to have a go?

Course, they could defend their hoarding using the National Security approach, and they may have a point. You wouldn't want the defence of your country in the hands of WIN98, would you. Mind you, if the world's hawks were allowed to use/modify it to control their missile systems we'd all be a lot safer. "War's cancelled, got to reinstall WIN98PE in all the silos, keeps booting into DOS, sorry."

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Windows 9x has three possible features that could keep it going.
  • Embedded or Rescue System
  • "Dusty Decks" = old hardware
  • Global Warming

The first has serious competition from BartPE, which relies on code that is updated. Unlike say, IBM with OS/2, Microsoft has not really made Win9x or WinNT really embeddable, and this greatly shortens the usefulness of these OS's after the mainstream usage is over.

The second, "Dusty Decks", refers to old hardware and software.

The third is rather interesting idea. One might suppose that as global warming starts to leak into our minds more, things like operating systems would tend to look for power-efficient operations, rather than consuming more power. This in turn will mean that interfaces might revert back to something less power-consuming, eg 16-colour or something.

Just noticed this post, regarding point 1 I think win9x is an awesome embedded/rescue os, I have built countless embedded systems with a footprint a fraction of BartsPE. In fact I have a rescue system I carry around based on the 98 os which fits onto 2 floppies, 3 with network support for retrieving customers files from problem pc`s. I have been messing around to try to get it to fit onto 1 floppy disc but so far I have been beaten(work in progress).

Have a look at litepcs EOS web pages, with an edited bios, win9x os they create tiny embedded kiosks etc plus 98 has a huge software back catalogue which can be ran on these devices.

Completely agree with regards to your point 3

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Create an account or sign in to comment

You need to be a member in order to leave a comment

Create an account

Sign up for a new account in our community. It's easy!

Register a new account

Sign in

Already have an account? Sign in here.

Sign In Now
  • Recently Browsing   0 members

    • No registered users viewing this page.
×
×
  • Create New...