You learn something every day, I’m told. Apparently today’s lesson is that parts of Windows 98 fall apart when running on a CPU clocked at over 2.1GHz.
Why I’m still running Windows 98 is a long story involving a Robotics class at work and some very old Lego Mindstorms software. At any rate, apparently the NDIS driver in Windows 98 produces a divide-by-zero error if the processor is running faster than 2.1GHz. The symptom is a crash on startup, with a cryptic message about a “Windows Protection Error” when loading the NDIS driver. The error message states that the computer must be restarted — but that won’t help. The machine will boot into Safe Mode, but only because the network drivers aren’t loaded, that way.
Microsoft no longer supports Windows 98, so it took a bit of digging to find the fix. The Windows 98 Q312108 hotfix should patch the NDIS drivers so the divide-by-zero doesn’t occur.
Enjoy!
Interesting, working on a 98se system, myself. can’t get a virtualised copy to work. I’ve got a 3.2Ghz P4, with 2 gigs of ram. the biggest problem so far has been the ram, apparently windows doesn’t like more than 512, so I came accross adding MaxFileCache = 524288 to the win.ini. what kind of system are you putting together?
I’m just running some old games…
This was a while ago. I think that was a laptop with a Celeron or something like that; either 512M or 1G memory — I’m not sure.