All right, I am trying that more or less. We'll get this right yet. As to Windows 98, I'm working on it...
Tuesday, June 30, 1998
Still playing with the layout. Looking better I hope. The following was an internal memo Eric sent that I thought ought to be up here.
From: Eric Pobirs [nbrazil@ix.netcom.com]
:
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.
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 (newwin98.html) This page is an archive, and mostly about format problems. For the real discussion, click here. Observations by readers and myself on Windows 98. The picture above is Chaos Manor Associate Eric Pobirs, who has been testing Windows 98 from earliest beta, and likes it; I make no doubt he'll have something to say on his own. I am also trying the automatic table of contents bot that comes with Front Page, and an experiment in templates. Who knows the evil... Friday Morning (26 June, which is the day the Korean War began): the organization of this makes it very difficult to see what's new. The page looks good but it's hard to figure out what to look for. Anyway, Eric has a new observation on installation. There's some important stuff in here. I have pulled all of Eric's stuff together into one section, which at the moment is at the bottom. Friday July 3: Adventures with Front Page and Dreamweaver and Lord alone knows what else. Have organized this page, for the better I hope. I doubt this page is any better than the last. That's all right, I seem to have lost all my work again. There is something VERy odd here. So another attempt was
InstallationMy ObservationsWe have had off and on problems with installations. One comparatively late beta installation was so awful that we had to reset the BIOS on one Pentium Pro system; W 98 was rewriting the BIOS cache and messed things up so badly that the machine would not even boot from a DOS disk. We had finally to remove the battery. On another we could use BIOS setup software to reset everything to defaults. Microsoft was very interested in that report, and that problem is, they say, fixed, and I believe them. Certainly I have been unable to duplicate the problem. Lately I have been seeing Explorer crash for no reason, but I blush to say that while I have what I think was the release copy of W 98, I have not installed the shrink-wrapped copy they sent. I am told that there is a unique serial number on each W 98 CD, and if you try to install the same copy of W 98 on two machines on the same internal network, one will not work. I do know know if this is true; does anyone know? I will test it later, but at the moment I don't have two networked machines with 98. Real Soon Now. Reader Reports
What are you hearing about Win 98 installs? I have had the following experience doing my own, the office and friends systems. AMD K-233 - no problems Gateway P133 - no problems Gateway 9100 solo - on reboot got invalid media type. Tried resetting bios, and fdisk /mbr (to rewrite master boot record). Tried Microsoft and Gateway tech support. Above suggestions, then fdisk, format and install from scratch. By the way, found out that if you use a diskette version of Win 95 to verify an upgrade on a clean disk (as forced here), you will have to insert about 8 of the 13 disks and wait while the install program verifies them. Use a cd-rom if possible. Gateway P166 - copied all of the programs, rebooted to hardware detect, kept getting GPFs as soon as plug and play detect started. As this is my main work computer, I uninstalled (which went very smoothly - definitely use the option to save system files) and have not retried to install. I think that the problem may have been caused by Novell's client32. I had v2.2 which, in the fine print of network.txt, is not supported. I have since upgraded this machine and the p-133 above (which went with no problems) to v2.5. Hopefully, that will fix this problem as well. Gateway Destination - no problems So my score, 3 no problems, 1 big problem (reformat) and 1 undecided. Be interested in others experiences.
I would be interested also. Thanks.
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