Winrar Win98

[Otilia Mojarro]

Windows98 accepts 512mb of ram, but there are patches for that to use it with more memory

- There are no intel graphics drivers, then i would have to buy a geforce 6200 pci-e card to make it work on win98

- The machine has sata hard drive and sata cdrom drive, i wonder if that would even work on windows98

- There are no audio drivers either for win98, and the case is low profile to make things even worse.

- There are no chipset drivers because they are for win2000

- Memory: Your HP looks like it can handle a maximum of 2GB of RAM. Windows 98 (without modification) can handle up to 1.5GB of memory minus the amount of Video RAM. If you limit your upgrade to 1GB of RAM, you won't need to patch anything and you'll give Windows 98 all it will need.

- Graphics: You can use the integrated graphics if you download and install Bearwindow's VBE VESA mode drivers. The VBE drivers don't provide any 2D or 3D acceleration, but they can handle high resolutions and color modes. If you want to game on this computer, you would need a dedicated graphics card (either a GeForce 6-series or Radeon x-series (x800, x600, x300 etc).

- HDD and CDROM: If your BIOS can configure the SATA ports as "IDE Compatible" or "Legacy IDE", then Windows 98 can use the built-in IDE drivers. If the BIOS has no option, then you could try Rloew's SATA driver. If the BIOS gives you the option to configure the ports in "AHCI" mode, then you could try Rloew's AHCI driver. If all else fails, Windows 98 will access the hard drive in INT13 mode without drivers (not good for performance). You could also use a DOS GCDROM.SYS driver or something similar to access CDs using real-mode within Windows (again, not ideal).

- Audio: I doubt you'll find HD Audio drivers for the built-in audio. You might be able to find a low-profile PCI audio card with Windows 98 drivers, but I don't know any off the top of my head. You could use a USB stereo adapter with Windows 98 drivers instead, but you'll take a bit of a performance hit.

EDIT: Dell used a low-profile Creative Labs card in some of their computers. You could do a search for "Dell 3196W" or "CT5807" to find one (about $10 US). It's a Sound Blaster PCI (a variant of the Ensoniq ES1373). Creative Labs developed Windows 98 drivers for the Sound Blaster PCI. Not the greatest or most feature-rich card, but Sound Blaster PCI cards work pretty well.

- Chipset: Windows 98 should detect and ID most of your system devices with the built-in drivers (the PCI bus being the most important). You could try to install the latest Intel chipset drivers as well. Windows 98 could use them to identify most of the other system devices. Windows 98 would likely work even if you don't have every last device on the motherboard ID'd. If Windows 98 does not install the drivers for the PCI bus during set up, you'll need to run the "Add Hardware" wizard in the Control Panel to add the PCI bus as a system device (Windows 98 will then begin finding the PCI devices).

Is it normal for drivers from Gigabyte to install 7z? I got a notice while installing drivers from the Gigabyte site that 7z installation may have failed. I was installing the audio drivers and network drivers from their site. I found this suspicious but admit I am not a normal windows user and have been on Linux since windows 98. Something about this screamed malware.

typically the download is a zip file.

if you dont already have winzip, winrar or 7zip. download and install one of em to handle your archives.

and no ive never had a gigabyte download try to install secondary software like 7zip before allowing a driver download. (gigabyte user for over 8 years)

well ive looked at the website, the download link html the downloaded zip.

its not redirecting to download anything else. (the code for the button is transparent and goes straight to the file download, no extra code to do anything else.)

so im guessing your issue is somewhere else.

Drivers from AMD and Realtek seemed to work fine without the weirdness I got from the Gigabyte site. Except windows updates gripping that I need to install Realtek and AMD drivers. However windows also says I have the newest drivers for the same requirements. LOL this is some funny shit.

Anyhow It is what it is and all seems to work now including 5.1 audio and power profiles.

3a8082e126