Give me back my Win 98

somano

HAd lots of problems with my win 98se and couldnt fix with my disk - My sister borrowed without telling me and I think it is damaged. Friend gave me Windows 2000 professional but on installing I found that most of my hardware won't work eg dvd player, scanner, Creative SB Live and I cant seem to find the right drivers to make it work. I was thinking of going back to WIN 98. Am I right in saying that there is not an issue in borrowing someone else win 98 disk ? There are no unique key codes or anything is there ? If I reinstalled from a disk other than mine, everything should work ok ?

Is it possible to get a replacement WIN 98 disk from Microsoft if I show them the damaged one ?

Tivoli

what speed is your pc??


if 2k doesnt recognise all the devices then 98 definately won't (unless you have the hardwares drivers for 98) if you over 500mhz try xp it will recognise anything

also
just copy a mates 98 cd. if you have a liscence (stuck to win98manual) it doesnt matter how you got the files needed, if you dont have a liscence then you never were legal, but dont worry i doupt anyone has 100% legal software, and am sure a lot of people have 100% illegal software

somano

550mhz. Win 98 and all drivers and software used to work fine until a mate used my pc. Yeah i have manual with code attached alright. So I'll just someone elses cd to get me up running again. Thanks

sceptre

Creative drivers should be available from the creative site. If they're not, I have the SBLive disc for win2000 and will send you the drivers or upload them somewhere.

If it's a HP scanner, you'll need to download them from their website. Or order a CD - they sent me mine for nowt. Any other brand it's probably the same thing except for a few scanners that will never have NT/2000 drivers (feckers).

DVD player - the one you got with your machine probably won't work with win2k. Buy, beg or (cough) borrow one from someone. I'd recommend PowerDVD 5 because I like it.

Or you could just go back to win98. Boo hiss.

somano

Thanks Sceptre for the offer of driver for SB Live, I'll come back to you if I do stick with win 2000. I see PowerDVD5 needs 40gb of hard drive so maybe I'm wasting my time going down that route. My pc spec is below and is probably creaking 4 years later- just dont wanta go spending a load of cash to get me back to original state. The DVD player did work fine. I'll try and get a copy of win 98 over the weekend and see if everything works. i think my original problem was that a vital file got deleted becuase of spyware problems and becuase my cd didnt work I couldnt get the fix back.


Profile Date:
Operating System System Model
Windows 2000 Professional (build 2195) Gateway
Processor a Main Circuit Board b
550 megahertz Intel Pentium III
32 kilobyte primary memory cache
512 kilobyte secondary memory cache Board: Intel Corporation WS440BX
Bus Clock: 100 megahertz
BIOS: Intel Corp. 4W4SB0X0.15A.0017.P12 12/21/1999
Drives Memory Modules c,d
20.51 Gigabytes Usable Hard Drive Capacity
11.57 Gigabytes Hard Drive Free Space

IDE-CD R/RW 4x4x24 [CD-ROM drive]
TOSHIBA DVD-ROM SD-M1402 [CD-ROM drive]
3.5" format removeable media [Floppy drive]

WDC WD205BA [Hard drive] (20.53 GB) -- drive 0, s/n WD-WM9490107549, rev 16.13M16, SMART Status: Healthy 256 Megabytes Installed Memory

Slot 'J6J1' has 256 MB

c: (on drive 0) 20.51 GB 11.57 GB free
Standard floppy disk controller
Intel(r) 82371AB/EB PCI Bus Master IDE Controller
Primary IDE Channel [Controller]
Secondary IDE Channel [Controller] 3dfx Interactive, Inc. Voodoo3 [Display adapter]

Bus Adapters Multimedia
Intel 82371AB/EB PCI to USB Universal Host Controller
Creative SB Live! Basic (WDM)
Game Port for Creative SB Live!
Communications Other Devices
HCF 56K PCI Mod

Blub2k4

Your pc is about on the edge of acceptable 2000/XP performance, personally I would not install XP under 700Mhz, but the option being 98 (pfffuuuii) almost makes me want to tell you to stick with 2000. By now you will have drivers for everything that you would need under 2000 if you just search for them.

If you try here
www.driverguide.com

username: temp
passsword: 512

You should be able to find any drivers you need there no problem.
password may have changed but it is free to register anyway

Stephen

They actually changed it?!

Its been drivers/all for years

jabberwock

AFAIK the problem with 2k professional is that it doesn't comes with less drivers as the workstation does.
guess M$ must think that the pro version would be used with companies with alot of net access.

Cake Fiend

This post doesn't make a whole lot of sense. If you reinstall Win98 from scratch, you're going to have to have all your drivers and stuff ready anyway. Or, you could just download the drivers for Win2K instead, and enjoy a superior operating system. Pretty much any hardware you had running under Win98 should have a Win2K driver available, it's only a matter of STFW. There are definitely Win2K drivers for the sound card, I used to use it myself.

And PowerDVD certainly doesn't need 40GB free HD space :eek: 40MB maybe, and that's only for swap space.

Tenshot

TBH, Windows XP Pro is a lot closer to the Windows 98 "experience" than Win2K so you should think about going that road. A LOT more stable than Win98, and any modern games coming out are designed to be XP compatible. (Yes, I know Win2K and XP are pretty closely related under the surface.)

With at least 256 MB of RAM you'll be fine - my sister is running XP on a P550 with 256 MB and no complaints.

Cabaal

Originally posted by Stephen
They actually changed it?!

Its been drivers/all for years

Nope that still works too

zilog_jones

Win2k is soo much better than 98. The only reason why it won't recognise a lot of your hardware is because you need drivers designed for win2k - the drivers made for win98 that probably came with your PC won't work.

I'd also recommend Windows XP over both of these too if you can get a copy of it, but whatever you do, don't bother with 98!

Also, PowerDVD 5 works (just about!) fine on my P3 500.

Red Alert

VideoLAN is also a good DVD player, although it does have some quirky stability issues an odd time www.videolan.org