Hi................bin thinkin..............

If you have a P1, it does not support MMX, which may be a problem with anything that requires that level of multimedia support. I have actually only come across this with a pair of 56.6 modems, and my P1/133 happily runs a SiS 305 32Mb graphics card, 60 & 12 Gb HDDs, 52x CD Rom, 56.6 modem etc……………..so I do not think that there is a performance issue here.

You say that you got 20 ex-corporate boxes. This is good, as they will probably be pretty much consistent in their specs? I guess that all we have to do is get one going and the rest will follow without problem

The downside is that they are Gateways………………Gateway seem to have dropped out of the PC market, and the support is pretty minimal. My Gateway is a 386 Cyrix with 16 Mb & 98se.……….things take a while to happen ………Tedob1 knows about this .

Being ex-corporates, I don’t think that they will have anything that unusual or exotic on board so I guess your problems must be with the software.

I have had a lot of problems with older boxes loading 98/98se and Me, particularly in its finding drivers. And I am very positive about this one……………..

I suggest you get hold of two of them, and follow exactly the same steps on each. My reason for this is to eliminate any confusion that might arise from a defective box. You should load the 3.5 floppy and run the standard set up from CD, including format disk. We now have two options:

1. Let the install run through, and when it re-boots and starts looking for the drivers, try to find them.
2. Let the install run through and take the “skip file” option when it looks for missing drivers. This will load a basic WIN98. You can then re-start and look for the drivers later, when it re-detects the hardware.

You mention you were getting the BSOD (blue screen) so #2 might be the best option?

My observations of Win98 are that it loads drivers then can’t find them? When you get the pop-up that says it cannot find the file and check the details, you see that it is looking for .CABS or suchlike, and trying to put stuff into the Windows system files. If you back out and search for the files, you often find that they are already loaded!!!

Don’t ask me why……real nice of Mr. Gates to provide a free intelligence test with his OSes ?

The typical paths to search are:

C:\windows\
C:\windows\system32\
D:\win98\

The last one is on your CD (so use whatever drive letter for “D”)………..this is where the drivers really are…NOT in the folder called “drivers”

Once you have got this far you can start using the normal Windows driver update mechanism to get the best and latest for your peripherals etc.

Cheers