buckeye wrote:

This has happened twice on my P3 Win98 pc (see sig for details). During a period of inactivity the BSOD comes on with a message and when I hit a key then comes a blinking gray screen with weird line artifacts - see pics for clarity. My guess is the screensaver for some reason brings it on but it's just one of the standard windows screensavers set to come on after 15min. Hopefully someone can decipher the BSOD message, hope it's not too serious. I can do a "hard boot" then it goes into scandisk after which all is fine.

Motherboard make and model? System specs? VGA card make and model? VGA driver version? Looks like a driver or ram issue.

System specs - Intel SE440BX P3 450 384mb 40GB Hercules 3D Prophet II Ultra 64MB SB Live! 5.1 350W. I think part of the problem could be tied to having DX9 installed but in the Nvidia "control panel" it shows DX7. Probably need to "knock it in the head" and reinstall the OS.

Graphics driver crash. Try reinstalling the driver, and possibly changing driver version. Do you know what screensaver you have running? I recall the OpenGL flying text wreaking havoc on my nearly identical system.

Another idea is to uninstall DX9, as you seriously don't need it, and install DX8 (It's a DX8 card, no need to use DX9 if it causes issues).

I've had BSOD issues with a multitude of hardware, in a multitude of windows versions, with the windows screensaver, I think it's just crappy programming. Probably something to do with the GDI.exe stack overflowing. You'll boot and be good for half a day maybe, but after several hours, several screensaver activations, it's russian roulette.

Also, don't install any nvidia video driver newer than the 45.23 version under 98, the newer ones are crap for stuff older than the FX series of card

Try matching DirectX and driver versions as well as GPUs. Usually I stick with DX 8.1 for win98, since most of my win9x builds use video cards that don't support Direct3D 9. I only use DX9 with my x800xt. For my GF4 Ti rig I use DX 8.1, and for older cards DX 6.1.

You can find a list of DX versions and month/year they were released in here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DirectX

Ampera wrote:

Graphics driver crash. Try reinstalling the driver, and possibly changing driver version. Do you know what screensaver you have running? I recall the OpenGL flying text wreaking havoc on my nearly identical system.

Another idea is to uninstall DX9, as you seriously don't need it, and install DX8 (It's a DX8 card, no need to use DX9 if it causes issues).

The 3D pipes screensaver. How do I go about uninstalling DX9 and install DX8? Do I need to do this before or after reinstalling the graphics driver?

kanecvr wrote:

Try matching DirectX and driver versions as well as GPUs. Usually I stick with DX 8.1 for win98, since most of my win9x builds use video cards that don't support Direct3D 9. I only use DX9 with my x800xt. For my GF4 Ti rig I use DX 8.1, and for older cards DX 6.1.

You can find a list of DX versions and month/year they were released in here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DirectX

So for the Hercules 3D Prophet II Ultra (GF2) what DX version would you recommend? DX7 perhaps?

I had a blue screen when I was checking for new hardware in Windows 98SE saying it was unable to write to the C Drive, then Fatal Exception 0E errors until I restarted the computer, checked the drive for errors, and it's now running without issues.

It was all because of the PS/2 and Serial mouse that was causing the issues, that and re-enabling the ACPI driver since I thought it was causing my GeForce 6200 to not work. I'm going to repair the Riva TNT2 M64 card and get another AGP card since some of my games require more horsepower than the VooDoo3 3000 PCI I have, and some games don't work with the GeForce 6200 (Jimmy Neutron Boy Genius) in Hardware mode, only software mode (slow and takes the CPU usage to the sky).

buckeye wrote:

kanecvr wrote:

Try matching DirectX and driver versions as well as GPUs. Usually I stick with DX 8.1 for win98, since most of my win9x builds use video cards that don't support Direct3D 9. I only use DX9 with my x800xt. For my GF4 Ti rig I use DX 8.1, and for older cards DX 6.1.

You can find a list of DX versions and month/year they were released in here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DirectX

So for the Hercules 3D Prophet II Ultra (GF2) what DX version would you recommend? DX7 perhaps?

The GeForce2 MX is a DirectX 8 card.

In order to fully remove DirectX 9, you need to fully uninstall Windows and reinstall from scratch. It sucks, but that's the price you pay for using Microsoft products. Trust me, I know the feeling.