From my experience WIndows 98 is not a very stable system, but it helps a lot if you have a Intel platform, I mean a motherboard with Intel chipset and Intel CPU, especially BX440 and PII or PIII seems to work much better than other platforms. Worst (again, from my experience) seems to be PIII on VIA chipsets, tested on a lot of motherboards, I would always get blue screens, freezes, etc and after a while the entire system would become unusable. Socket 7 is decent, especially on Intel + Pentium/MMX. Socket A (KT133 + Athlon) is also decent, but not 100% stable. Slot A - usable, but quite unstable. Both Slot A and socket A works almost flawless on XP, so I wouldn't blame the hardware.

Bottom line: if you want to make a Windows 98 system try to get a good motherboard (Asus, Abit, etc) with BX440 chipset and a PII or a PIII CPU (100 Mhz bus). Also avoid SB Live. Max 512 MB, can be used with 1 GB with a patch, but I don't recommend. Video - it doesn't matter too much, but I would get V3 or TNT2, try to avoid Rage 128/Pro, the drivers for those cards seems bo be buggy and can cause problems.

I think it's inherently unstable. It's just not designed with stability as a big priority. It's too easy for programs and drivers to crash it. It's a crazy hybrid of DOS and 32-bit features with the emphasis on backward compatibility and low resource usage.

Rock steady, as I keep it powered off 99.9975% of the time. Even when it's on, I don't do anything crazy with it, and I think a Linksys PCI ethernet NIC is going to have pretty stable drivers (normally the cause of many Win9X BSODs)

It was mostly games that made Windows 98 unstable.
If I didn't play a game, I didn't have to reboot.
If I played a game I'd have to reboot afterwards to avoid problems.
Windows 2000 did a better job of protecting itself from weird game code, as did XP and later.

Windows 95 wasn't bad either -- except for its memory leak.
I used to have a screensaver on Windows 95 and it would go slower and slower and slower...

RaverX wrote:

Also avoid SB Live.

Should I just replace my SB Live with an SB Audigy 2 now? 😦

RaverX wrote:

Worst (again, from my experience) seems to be PIII on VIA chipsets, tested on a lot of motherboards, I would always get blue screens, freezes, etc and after a while the entire system would become unusable. .

Hmmm, I didn't really have any issues with this as long as I wasn't trying to use AGP 4x. Was perfectly stable, but a bit slow as my VIA PIII motherboard didn't properly support coppermine.

KCompRoom2000 wrote:

RaverX wrote:

Also avoid SB Live.

Should I just replace my SB Live with an SB Audigy 2 now? 😦

Nah, I never had any real problems with the SB-Live either on windows 98.

Don't mix SB Live and VIA 686A/B chips though, seems to be a bad combo.

Changing hardware and drivers a lot can really upset a windows 98 installation.. so can bad drivers.. otherwise I have found it to be really stable

I believe the VIA problems affect IDE and RAID controllers too. The SBLive combined with the chipset quirks cause all hell to break loose. This is what the VIA PCI Latency patch can sometimes fix or at least make less terrible. Win9x doesn't handle any instabilities gracefully.

Win9x also has a nasty concept called "system resources" that is a 16-bit hangover and causes all sorts of weirdness. This might be where most of those refreshing reboots come in. Memory leaks causing problems here.

KCompRoom2000 wrote:

Should I just replace my SB Live with an SB Audigy 2 now? 😦

I don't know, I never used Audigy 2 under Windows 98, I was already on Windows 2000 when I bought Audigy 2. Anyway, there are a lot of versions and revisions of SB Live, some of them I think that don't work at all under Windows 98, some works, but they have problems, some *might* be ok, you can try and see, but I'd avoid it if I could.

skitters wrote:

It was mostly games that made Windows 98 unstable.
If I didn't play a game, I didn't have to reboot.
If I played a game I'd have to reboot afterwards to avoid problems.

You might have a point, but "mostly" is the key word, I think that almost any application made Windows 98 to have memory leaks and to become unstable. Also, if anyone is using Windows 98 now, why do you think it's using it? Hmmm, I wonder 😀

dr_st wrote:

My Win98 SE system is about 18 years old. I now turn it on about 5 times a year. It crashes about 7 times a year.

It crashes two more times than the number of times you turn it on? Definitely not good... 🤣

appiah4 wrote:

My K6-2 Win9x system is rock solid but my P3-700 Win Me system can behave strangely (on occasion locks up on desktop right after boot etc) that I think is more motherboard related than OS related

Oh yeah, my motherboard is definitely going south. It's been crashing in DOS every now and then too. I did some voodoo with the Voodoo and memory stick shuffling in slots, and it may have gotten a bit better, but with how rarely I use it will take me another 18 years to get a decent sample size for any meaningful statistics.

It can be stable but I never had the feeling that it was rock-solid. Install the wrong drivers once and it may be botched and primed for a fresh install.

collector wrote:

Ask old hardware and OS questions in Marvin. This forum is for old Windows games on *modern* systems. Marvin, the Paranoid Android

Stiletto wrote:

Moved.

Apologies, and thanks for moving it, new here so wasn't sure the best place to post 😊

Had a look at the motherboard, and I can see a few capacitors ever so slightly bulging, making me think it could be them making things extra unstable. And I'm totally cack handed at soldering so wondering what my options were to get it repaired (without spending a fortune).

I also worried if I cocked up my CPU, as the original CPU fan had gotten annoyingly loud, so managed to find a brand new Akasa AK-786 cooler, which despite having a supposed easy latch mechanism, turned out to be a beast to push down (cant use a screwdriver like the stock one) and put in place, which I finally managed, but have heard stories about third party coolers on these cracking the CPU. PC still turns on and runs things fine (when it isn't crashing) so I'm hoping no damage done there.

Think id rather get an Intel P3/P4 system anyway (around the 1GHz range) with an intel board, although trying to find one online through things like eBay/Gumtree they seem to be quite expensive.

Again, on Windows XP my current PC seems to run fine, so its possible the last drivers they released for my board were a bit ..... naff. nForce was a pretty good chipset ..... wasn't it?

BoozerDawg wrote:

[...]

Had a look at the motherboard, and I can see a few capacitors ever so slightly bulging, making me think it could be them making things extra unstable.

If any caps are visibly bad, get every cap of the same type on the board replaced. Don't use it again until you've gotten that sorted. Usually caps die in a graceful way, but the leaking mess can be corrosive and sometimes while failing they cause other components to overload, which can result in spectacular fireworks and significant quantities of magic smoke being released.

And I'm totally cack handed at soldering so wondering what my options were to get it repaired (without spending a fortune).

Depends entirely on where you are located. Some places with big homebrew scenes have repair cafes and similar, and there are always people/companies offering services online - but shipping can get excessive and some only service certain countries.

I also worried if I cocked up my CPU, as the original CPU fan had gotten annoyingly loud, so managed to find a brand new Akasa AK-786 cooler, which despite having a supposed easy latch mechanism, turned out to be a beast to push down (cant use a screwdriver like the stock one) and put in place, which I finally managed, but have heard stories about third party coolers on these cracking the CPU. PC still turns on and runs things fine (when it isn't crashing) so I'm hoping no damage done there.

CPU is pretty simple: if you crunched the core, it's completely dead. No POST, no boot, nothing. If not, not.

Think id rather get an Intel P3/P4 system anyway (around the 1GHz range) with an intel board, although trying to find one online through things like eBay/Gumtree they seem to be quite expensive.

Check Amibay.

It's worth clarifying if by "Intel board" you mean a board manufactured by Intel themselves, a board with an Intel chipset, or a board with any chipset so long as it can run an Intel CPU...

P3 and P4 are also quite different beasts as are the platforms they run on. If you want things like ISA or PC/PCI ("SBLink"), it's possible with a P4, but hard to find and pricey.

Again, on Windows XP my current PC seems to run fine, so its possible the last drivers they released for my board were a bit ..... naff. nForce was a pretty good chipset ..... wasn't it?

The nForce2-400 was the fastest chipset for the SoA platform and generally very stable. But if you have a clear hardware issue with your board, get that sorted before even looking into software.

It's actually much more stable than I remember it being. My 80GB hard drive is almost full of DOS and Windows games, but it almost never crashes. Of course, this time I'm running it on carefully selected components and drivers, which probably helps a lot. It's a Celeron-1400 on 440BX w/ 512MB of RAM, a V3-3500 video card and Vortex 2 audio card.

Back when Win98SE was actually relevant, I ran it on a much slower machine (P2-266 w/ 64MB). Plus, it was upgraded from Win95 and retained all of the Compaq bloatware. It crashed almost daily.

My system is PRETTY stable after tweaking around with drivers, memory managers and assigning DMA and IRQ manually in the BIOS.

Out of the box, Windows 98SE is a heap of crap, though. On my system, I needed to keep a lot of things in mind to get it running.

- I needed to get the correct VIA drivers (4.43) for my Abit VH6T and manually force-install the CPU to AGP bridge driver and the IDE controller. Otherwise it would randomly crash, lock-up or eject my USB drives mid-transfer.
- I also needed to install HimemX and a Vcache fix to get it running reliably with 1.5GB of memory.
Otherwise, it would either freeze at boot, reset my NVidia driver back to VGA 16 colors or just quit out of programs randomly.
- The order in which I installed the device drivers and software mattered a lot.
If I tried to install the drivers for my Opti Mad16 Pro sound card AFTER all of my USB devices, it would just end up in a bluescreen every time. Doing it the other way around results in a perfectly working system.

Windows 98SE is a major pain in the ass. But it's part of the fun to figure out how to make it work regardless of that. Having a system for all of my favorite childhood games on original hardware is a dream I was finally able to make true.

And yes, it's very easy to destroy a good installation of Windows 98. It wasn't built with security and stability in mind - a random crash can render it unbootable because your partition is broken, programs have write access to everything on the system and if you have shitty drivers (looking at you, FM801) it might seem worse than it actually is.

One time I installed a scanner driver that replaced system files with Windows 95 versions. Oh, the good old days...

Last week I made the switch from an old, massive, hot and loud harddisk to an SD->IDE adapter and I love it. Making a backup of my system before testing out new programs will save me a lot of pain and the lack of noise is amazing. Wish I had that back in the day. 😀

Win9x doesn't have the full memory protection that NT does, only certain regions can trigger a protection fault. It also expects certain registers (ebx,ebp,esi,edi) to be preserved by user procedures. So it is less resilient in the face of buggy programs.

I have the problem that my Vectra VEi8 is plagued recently by regular bluescreens of the same variety.
Tomorrow I shall make some screenshots, is there there any chance to investigate further using the protection fault numbers spat out on blue screens?

My setup (see sig) is ok as long as I don't try to get the V2's going in a dos game like Descent 2 and the like. Otherwise it freezes at the desktop every 4-5th boot. Still trying to figure out that "riddle" to this day.