Jerry-

Did you know that the table on the Win98 Discussion page was centered? Perhaps that's the problem you mentioned? In Word, click on the table, right click, choose Table Properties... and you'll find a checkbox and some other justification opens. Perhaps that will solve things. If you're talking about an actual line, I don't see it.

OS Installation Stories:

I re-installed OSR2 once, after reformatting my drive, and it messed things up, plug 'n' play wise. I tried deleting drivers and re-installing and things were a mess. The solution was to boot to "safe mode," delete drivers, and then everything installed correctly.

I upgraded to Win98, and everything went fine there, too, until I started messing around with my sound card, an SC128-3D. This device insists on installing three devices: a PCI Audio device, a Gameport device, and a "Legacy Relocator for PCI Audio Device." Each one of these takes an IRQ, and with all three of them active, I've no room for my tape back up, which conflicts with the "Legacy Relocator." Since I don't play any games that need that thing, I thought to delete the thing. WRONG! When I reboot, Win98 tries to re-install, and I get lots of errors and a "cannot write to drive c:" error. Here's how I fixed it:

MORAL OF THIS STORY: Win98 messed with my previous hardware profile such that "disabled" devices conflicted. The fault is with the Aztech driver installation for never asking me if I wanted the Legacy driver installed. Grr! All in all, though Win98 works.

And the title bars are pretty! And you can stick icons anywhere on the desktop with Active Desktop. Other than this, and other than learning a lot about how I need to install OS's on this particular machine (and I'm a home user veteran of OS/2 on my ole 486).

Question: What the heck is "IRQ Holder for PCI Steering" which "conflicts/shares" with my sound card, net card, and "USB to Universal Host Controller?" Does everyone have this?

Question: I have only one IDE drive, but two controllers (for a possible total of four drives, two master/slave pairs). Can I disable the second one safely so as to free up an IRQ? Is this a BIOS setting? Motherboard jumper? Software setting?

Interesting: Our experience has been that OSR2 and W98 solve a lot of plug and play problems that earlier W 95 versions couldn't handle. Eric has been a W98 enthusiast, and since I have W98, I'll certainly install it on the new Socket 7 system I'm building. As to the IRQ Holder, I don't know: our machines have all the IRQ's used up, one reason we very much look forward to USB and Firewire. You can disable the secondary IDE, but whether that will free the IRQ is not clear. How you do it is specific to the motherboard and BIOS you have, and there's no general answer I know. Sometimes it works, sometimes it's a mess.

Two experiences:

Tried to open the photo of Eric in a new window, so I could blow it up big enough to see. Error: HTTP:www.princess.com not found. Apparently, NS 4.05 saw your - I guess - internal network link to a server and tried to execute it as a web link.

Clicked on mail in the w98 section, got an error: "Netscape is unable to find the file or directory named C:/InetPub/wwwroot/chaosmanor/mail.html Check the name and try again".

regards

RE: Windows 98

I've used a couple of beta versions, and most recently installed the one that Microsoft sent me (it arrived on Byte's last day of existence), which is a full version. I installed that one on a virgin disk, an IBM 14-GB deskstar, and everything went well.

I've had one problem only, using SciTech's Display Doctor universal video drivers, and that wasn't really SciTech's fault, it was caused by their following Microsoft's directions about uninstalls. Turns out that you can delete the driver from the disk and current settings, but Win98 doesn't update the registry and so it starts looking for a video driver that no longer exists. Makes it impossible to reboot, so after several attempts I tried reinstalling Win98. Even that hung twice, but finally succeeded after I manually deleted the old registry files. SciTech has fixed the problem in their latest release, but it was a real headscratcher for a while. (SciTech says I could have booted into safe mode and changed the video driver there and it would have worked.)

Anyway, that aside, I've had no other problems with Win98 that I didn't have with 95, and it seems like it crashes or hangs less often. My system is a Pentium-233MMX, 64MB RAM, Number Nine Revolution 3D graphics card with 8MB, and it's got all kinds of stuff hanging off it (every bracket slot is filled!): 4 serial ports, 2 USB ports; 2 parallel ports supporting a Lexmark 7200 printer, Storm TotalScan flat-bed scanner, and ZipPlus; a SCSI Jaz external drive, AWE64 sound card, USR 33.6 modem, CD-ROm and CD-R drives, the aforementioned 14-GB drive and from time to time another hard drive (as I try to consolidate things from past computers-that 14GB is great, just copy everything onto it and it doesn't burp).

I'm using a FAT-32 (or is it FAT-32X?) file system, and some apps don't seem to know how big the disk really is; they seem to think it's only 8 GB, but it only affects their space-remaining display.

So far, I'm happy.

ERIC'S EXPERIENCES

Tuesday, June 30, 1998

With the release of Windows 98 the USB revolution is upon us. Kind of. Keyboards, mice, adapters for legacy parallel and RS232 devices are available but that is only half the story. What use is migrating our devices if the system insists on continuing to reserve resources for those old ports? It should be possible to disable these items but on most systems they simply won’t go away no how much one messes with the BIOS and/or Device Manager.

Until this problem is overcome there will be little advantage to USB. We will still have to carefully weigh the value of every internal addition to our systems. I really enjoy my Creative Labs Encore DVD drive and decoder but it will have to go if I’m going to install a SCSI host to handle the drives I want to add. Reviewing any IRQ using product means temporarily removing something else.

What about the folks out there in the real world? Have any of you been successful in creating a USB oriented system with lots of IRQ freedom? Eliminating the keyboard, mouse, parallel, and two serials of a typical system should free up four IRQs assuming the fifth is used by the USB host. Move the PCI sound cards down to IRQ 5 to simplify legacy support without additional resource and a wealth of expansion space is freed up.

What I really want for purity’s sake is an otherwise top of the line motherboard that lacks legacy ports and has a BIOS that defaults to USB input devices. Any candidates?

Eric

 

 

 

 

Eric points up a real problem. USB and Firewire are supposed to save us from IRQ depletion, but unless the mother board people allow us to disable some of the devices we no longer need and thus free up the IRQ, it hardly matters.

 

Thursday, July 2, 1998

Another report from Eric:

 

From: Eric Pobirs [nbrazil@ix.netcom.com]

Sent: Thursday, July 02, 1998 6:13 AM

To: Jerry Pournelle

Subject: About installing Win98

 

Here are a few things I’ve learned along the way:

1. I’ll do a full review soon (depending on how this diverticulitus progresses) but to put it shortly, get Power Quest’s Drive Image! The 2.0 release is a major improvement. Take advantage of the incredibly cheap cost per gigabyte we now enjoy and grant yourself the power to screw up without consequence.

2. Don’t panic if you get a crash during installation. If you reboot there is a good chance the install will pick up where it left off. Other times you need to start install again but in this instance there is a good chance that it will succeed the second time around. Who knows, perhaps it’s something akin to a reverse immune response. Numerous items that have been on the market only a few months will try to install obsolete DLLs as part of their drivers. My recommendation is to keep the newer versions since Win98 seems to need them more than the drivers. This seems to be a major cause of crashes that don’t reoccur after restarting.

3. You may have to remove devices to simplify the system. Get rid of the most extraneous items first i.e. DVD decoder boards. (For the record, the Creative Labs Encore DVD package works fine under Win98) The two items that must be in place to get started are the drive you’re installing to (It would be a real short show otherwise, wouldn’t it?) and the video board. Most video cards now require an IRQ and will not permit the system to boot in other than safe mode if that need is not met. Since you cannot manually assign IRQs in safe mode it’s a much easier route to remove a few nonessentials to get initial installation done and then make a backup with the aforementioned Drive Image. If the remaining device need special coddling it will be much simpler to work out the details if it only takes ten minutes to start over Vs. doing the whole install again.

4. If at possible start clean. If the system you’re installing on has been running any version of Win95 for long, chances are it’s a mess. You can use the various commercial uninstall and cleanup utilities, you can run RegClean until every byte has been scrutinized more than the Zapruder film but nothing beats a clean drive for, well, cleanliness. This would also be an excellent time to make sure you have the latest version of every driver that might be requested. Evil old drivers can bring everything to a screeching halt so it’s best if the new OS never sees them to begin with.

Thanks. This will probably get moved up to the Install section reasonably soon. My first priority is to get rid of Front Page 98 before it drives me to total insanity. Actually my first priority is to print BURNING CITY and get it off to my agent.

Then I'll build up the Chaos Manor W 98 machine.

Friday, July 3, 1998

 

From: Eric Pobirs [nbrazil@ix.netcom.com]

Sent: Friday, July 03, 1998 1:40 AM

To: Discontinuity Group

Subject: More Win98 grist for the mill

http://www.news.com/News/Item/0,4,23837,00.html?st.ne.fd.gif.d

 

It appears that prospective upgraders should really follow my suggestion about scoping out new drivers before starting the job.

This also seems in keeping with the advantage of a clean install since that eliminates the chance of outdated drivers causing havoc.

I'm still trying to keep up with the rest of the world, so I haven't had a chance to get at the new W 98 machine, but it looks like I'll profit from other's experiences. The thing about a monthly is that you never know when I got something done. I can with a burst of speed catch up and incorporate all the other inputs into a column, trim it for excessive words, and look like a genius. This way you see the process. Bismark said that the public should not see how legislation or sausages were made lest they become disgusted.  Hmm.

Friday 13 November 1998

I have built the system; reports are in VIEW as they happen and in columns, but I should link to here, and I'll try in future.