I'll continue the offtopic stuff here before we mess up the original thread


liekloo:




SK1:



You're not going to believe this, but Windows 98 SE, when I tried it a few months ago, was instable right from the start. What also annoyed me was that, however hard I tried, I could not install the VIA chipset drivers properly, which severely degrades system performance.

Windows 98 first edition has usually been fairly stable on my system. Sometimes upon re-installing I had a nice stable system that lasted for months, sometimes it started to become instable after some time. This very installation I've got here is the first one to give me serious stability problems (right from the start).

I'm 99% sure my hardware is intact, although I'll soon do some thorough checks. (The last time I used Memtest86 it didn't report anything unusual, so my RAM is surely OK.)

[BTW: This is just a wild guess, but I think Win98 first edition being more stable on my system than SE could have something to do with my Celeron processor. A friend of mine had a Celeron laptop, and Win98 SE wouldn't run properly on that machine either. Of course, that may be just coincidence and I could be totally wrong.]




You won't believe this either, but Win2000 can't be installed on my system (otherwise I'd sure as hell be using it). I tried it about 5 times over the past 1.5 years, and the installer will hang up at one and the same point every time (when Windows Installer is launched the first time). I've tried removing LAN card, sound card, modem etc., but to no avail. (Again, I'm quite certain my hardware is OK.)

Go figure...

Wow damn :\... I do believe all this .. Very strange and frustrating...
Well i'm...don't know what to suggest further... I hope you'll be able to install Win2k, if anyone here knows what can possibly be wrong do tell. This sounds really frustrating i must say.
By the way, nice idea continuing this in another topic .

If you can't install Win2k you should snoop about in the BIOS to see if you have any antivirus which is integrated in the BIOS, disabling it may do the trick. You could also post a question, or search for the answer on the Computing.net Win2k forum http://www.computing.net/windows2000/wwwbo...d/wwwboard.html

For Win98 installations I'd recommend reading how to properly partition and format using the instructions available from http://www.bootdisk.com/. More info on properly partitioning and formatting can be read at http://www.computing.net/howto/advanced/partition/

I've seen it mentioned time and time again with countless people saying don't just format but FDISK the Master Boot Record (MBR) "fdisk /mbr" I've seen this mentioned so many times I'm going to actually use it when I redo my Win98 installation in a few weeks.

Also I've seen it mentioned that the Windows setup files should be copied from the CD to the hard disk, and then the Windows setup should be executed from the hard disk -- many people have claimed that doing that alone allows them to get a cough, cough, "stable Win98 install."

Theres also the VXD Bug Fix for Windows 98 http://freepctech.com/pc/002/files007.shtml#VXD which has more or less cured all my stability problems with Win98.

Another thing is to remove all the excess plugins in the Winamp\Plugins folder and slowly add them one by one until you find which one is causing all the crashing, there are after all alot of buggy plugins that cause Winamp to crash.

FWIW, whenever this has happened to me, I've *always* eventually traced it to a dodgy stick of RAM...

I run Win98 SE on my Celeron 800 system, and it's very stable, so it's probably something else.

ff123

Well... as I said, I've tested multiple times with Memtest86, and no errors were reported.

When my RAM once gave up, the installation would crash randomly, not at some fixed point as is the case here.


Andavari: I hadn't noticed your post, sorry! Thanks a lot for your suggestions, I'll try them the next time I do a re-format (which will be pretty soon). Especially the VXD fix sounds interesting.

BTW: I have been installing from hard disk for ages, and I agree it works great (very fast, and you never need the Windows CD at hand). Not so sure whether that has any impact on system stability though, I doubt it.


I think I have at least tracked down the random Winamp crashes. I've lived without SuperEQ for today, and Winamp has hummed along nicely. I was suspecting the EQ might be the reason for those crashes (especially those on song change), because in conjunction with SQRSoft Advanced Crossfading it makes the system unusable for about 2 seconds when chaningg songs because the processor load is so incredibly high. Add to that Winamp's buggy API, and it seems quite possible that this is indeed the reason for the instabilities.

Blame Windows 98 for the rest. But perhaps that VXD fix will even take care of that. Thanks again.

CU

Dominic

Guys, it's laughly for me.
1. I have one machine with Win95 (no osr2) that works without any reinstallation of OS from 1996.
2. I have machine at my home where sits Win98se about 2 years without reinstall.
3. I wrote earlier that I am an PC assembler and have assembled a lot of different PCs and tested large number of OSes and a kind of other soft.
What I see here? A lot of PC-user's myths. Yes.
"WinXX sukz". We say: there are no wry OSes, there are wry hands. (Besides, what word better use in this case - "wry" or "crooked"?)
"[some CPU] isn't applicable for [some OS]" Yes, any Windows cannot run on Cray. But there is so called "x86 architecture", and when CPU has been announced for it, there is no reason to misworking any x86 OS on it. If any reason will, the CPU creator (producer) can go broke.
"installation from harddisk will be more stable than from CD". Think about any reason why? Think... think... ... ... Well, I say some reasons. When you have bad CD-drive that able time to time read different data from one track :-) A chance that when it reads all the installation at once it doesn't make an error. (Or not CD-drive but cable, or controller, or the Moon phases :-)
... what also?... enough?...

Of cource, there was very good advices here. But... theese are particular... Which advice arrives your "Bingo"?

My current install of Win98SE has been up (not constantly, I mean no need for a reinstall) since 06 September, 2001 and is running just fine... no instability problems. Of course, certain poorly written programs can mess things up -- that's a given with any Win9x OS. But a reboot always fixes things.

Do I do "serious work" with it? You bet... it's just fine with well-written programs that aren't too buggy, even programs that make massively heavy use of the CPU, HD and etc. (like Adobe Premiere, for example). And I use my PC daily, for a good number of hours (at least 12 hrs/day).

We also can't forget that some of the stability issues with Win98, or any Windows OS itself come's from the system registry. After installing and uninstalling programs, etc., the mess does take its toll on system performance. I've seen my system go completely haywire because of reduntant registry keys, that's why I clean it everyday using the free for personal usage program jv16 PowerTools http://www.jv16.org/ and Microsoft RegClean.

About once a week I also compact ("rebuild, defrag") the registry in DOS using the command Scanreg /Fix

Ray Geide the author of the commercial Windows Rescue utility WinRescue98 http://www.superwin.com/frescue8.htm has info within WinRescue98 which states that compacting the registry makes it smaller, and it does. Not only that it also repairs erroneous errors at the same time

I know after using Scanreg /Fix that my system always runs better, and I know when it needs to be run again because the mobo starts acting really funky even after a disk defrag.

*smacks head*

I had completely forgotten about scanreg /fix! I used to use it regularly, as well as RegCleaner, the predecessor of jv16 Powertools. (RegCleaner though, in my experience, doesn't really have any impact on system speed/stability, but let's see what happens now that I haven't used it for months...)

Yeah, I'll do that now. Let's see by how many MBs my regsitry will be reduced. B)

Good news:
I tested and ran fdisk /mbr before I formatted and reinstalled Win98 on 01/03/2002 and all went well. In more testing the coolest thing I discovered is that it doesn't even destroy files already on a system, and Win98 can be started immediately after running it by pressing CTRL+ALT+DEL.

I have seen it mentioned that if a virus attacks the MBR that fdisk /mbr should be ran to make sure the virus is gone and that the MBR is clean. I'm thinking since my system is running its best in over 3 years that I may have had some unknown, not found virus on my system that did something to the MBR some time ago.

Anyways, just sharing my results.

Good to hear.

FYI, I tried installing Win98 SE this time. Apart from some really weird happenings that occured after installing all the drivers (Windows would put all drives MS DOS compatibility mode on random bootups, and crash with blue screens - it was gone after once starting in safe mode), all is running stable now. I have had one single crash during normal operation which I consider quite good for Win98.

As expected, the VIA drivers wouldn't install properly, but oh well...



(Not that I'm really a fan of "if it ain't broke, don't fix it", but I decided to wait with VXD fix, shutdown supplement etc. until I really see a reason to install them.)