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General discussion

win98 and nvidia driver problem

Nov 25, 2003 7:57PM PST

Hi, I'm new to this forum and hope someone here can help. I recently installed win98 to a new partition on my hard drive. Win98 boots up fine until I try to install any drivers for my Geforcefx 5200 graphics card.

When I try to reboot with the nvidia driver installed I get a windows protection error message during the boot sequence. I then have to reload in safe mode and remove the nvidia drivers.

I have tried a range of drivers right up to the most recent nvidia detonator release (45.23) and the same problem.

I also tried installing onto an older hard drive and had excactly the same problem so I know it can't be the installation that's the problem.

My system specs are:

Syntax SV266A Mobo
Athlon 1900+
Geforcefx 5200
Sonicfury
I Gb RAM
120 Gb HDD

So I'm thinking that there's some kind of compatability problem but have tried everything I know how todeal with this but to no avail.


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Discussion is locked

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Re:win98 and nvidia driver problem. I see issues.
Nov 25, 2003 8:20PM PST

"I Gb RAM
120 Gb HDD

So I'm thinking that there's some kind of compatability problem but have tried everything I know how todeal with this but to no avail."

Let's start you didn't reveal what "everything" you tried. So what people suggest may be duplicative. In spite of that you should check.

1. Windows 9x/ME does NOT support this much memory.
The article at http://support.microsoft.com/support/kb/articles/Q253/9/12.asp has NOT been updated to include all possible error messages, but will show you how to tell Windows to limit its use of memory to just 512M

You could just install 512M if you don't want to use this setting.

2. Driver development for 9x/ME has ceased. You'll have to try all the versions of drivers for motherboard and video to find which works best for you. You'll read passages like:
"**Note: Win95/98/98SE are now relatively old operating systems, and drivers are no longer optimized for those operating systems. Many users of VIA chipsets who run Win95/98/98SE report that using an older version, such as VIA 4in1 version 4.35, they experience a more responsive system."
http://www.viaarena.com/?PageID=300

What they also don't add is the wonderful error message you may receive with the newest drivers.

Armed with these items I expect you'll make some progress.

Bob

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Re:Re:win98 and nvidia driver problem. I see issues.
Nov 27, 2003 5:19PM PST

Bob, thanks very much for your detailed reply. I'd become so convinced that this was a problem with the nvidia drives I'd completely forgotten about the 512 mb memory limit on win 98.

By adding the following lines to the system.ini I was able to force win 98 to accept the 1 gb of ram.

[386]
ConservativeSwapfileUsage=1

[vcache]
MinFileCache=65536
MaxFileCache=65536
ChunkSize=512

Problem solved, so thanks again.

David

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Re:win98 and nvidia driver problem
Nov 28, 2003 1:01AM PST

Hi,
I have a similar problem with the my MSI MX 400 card. After updating the drivers to 4523 I can't run Direct 3D in the DxDiag utility, now games like Ghost Recon won't run either.

There are newer drivers for these GeForce cards version number 52169x you can download from the MSI site or nVidia site. It's claimed they are for all win9 cards but as I got trouble with the 4523 drivers I don't know if I should risk it.

Hope this helps anyway