VenomSpark wrote on 2023-11-12, 21:16:

hello all :) […]
Show full quote

hello all 😀

I've recently encoutered an issues on my retro build, which basically on my Windows 98SE i can't shutdown or reboot the system.

Everytime i try to shutdown or reboot, i get until the win98 sky logo which says waiting for system to shutdown screen, but nothing happens until then and im forced to press the power button until it shutdown, and is not very healthy 🙁

Mobo is an Asus A7S8X-MX with 1.7Ghz Sempron 2500+ Socket A, 768MB DDR limited to 512, with latest bios v1007 installed from 2005. Any help?

Solutions i've tried so far is to disable\enable the fast shutdown under msconfig, and change the S3 thing on bios, even the PnP option but no luck. (Bios for this mobo is VERY limited)

Also, if i can take advantage on asking, i noticed everytime the PC is shutdown, the keyboard light and mouse red under light keep staying on.. how can i solve also this? PSU is a classic 500W

Thanks!

Do you have a Live! card installed? Some Live! drivers prevent the system from shutting down/restarting. If that's the case just skip the Live! line of cards with its horrible drivers and "right revisions/model numbers to get" BS and just go for an Audigy. Had those same issues, dropped Live! cards entirely and never looked back since

andre_6 wrote on 2023-11-12, 21:57:

VenomSpark wrote on 2023-11-12, 21:16:

hello all :) […]
Show full quote

hello all 😀

I've recently encoutered an issues on my retro build, which basically on my Windows 98SE i can't shutdown or reboot the system.

Everytime i try to shutdown or reboot, i get until the win98 sky logo which says waiting for system to shutdown screen, but nothing happens until then and im forced to press the power button until it shutdown, and is not very healthy 🙁

Mobo is an Asus A7S8X-MX with 1.7Ghz Sempron 2500+ Socket A, 768MB DDR limited to 512, with latest bios v1007 installed from 2005. Any help?

Solutions i've tried so far is to disable\enable the fast shutdown under msconfig, and change the S3 thing on bios, even the PnP option but no luck. (Bios for this mobo is VERY limited)

Also, if i can take advantage on asking, i noticed everytime the PC is shutdown, the keyboard light and mouse red under light keep staying on.. how can i solve also this? PSU is a classic 500W

Thanks!

Do you have a Live! card installed? Some Live! drivers prevent the system from shutting down/restarting. If that's the case just skip the Live! line of cards with its horrible drivers and "right revisions/model numbers to get" BS and just go for an Audigy. Had those same issues, dropped Live! cards entirely and never looked back since

.........yes 😳 i do have a SB Live! 5.1 actually installed with VXD drivers provided on Phils Computer Lab site... but i can't get rid of it as is vital for audio and DOS games.. it is really this the problem?

Yeah some drivers or apps won't close when you shutdown causing that "waiting for shutdown" window to hang. You could also have a BIOS bug.
Here are some other pointers: http://web.archive.org/web/20070907204803/htt … t.com/kb/238096
I would try the Shutdown supplement for Win98SE (is only for 98SE !)
https://web.archive.org/web/20040706050750/ht … kb;EN-US;239887
http://web.archive.org/web/20040204030057/htt … atured/win98se/
here is a good website with lots MS files, you want the forth one from top: https://www.tacktech.com/display.cfm?ttid=90
Note: archive org seems to be having some issues on and off today...

VenomSpark wrote on 2023-11-12, 22:00:

andre_6 wrote on 2023-11-12, 21:57:

VenomSpark wrote on 2023-11-12, 21:16:

hello all :) […]
Show full quote

hello all 😀

I've recently encoutered an issues on my retro build, which basically on my Windows 98SE i can't shutdown or reboot the system.

Everytime i try to shutdown or reboot, i get until the win98 sky logo which says waiting for system to shutdown screen, but nothing happens until then and im forced to press the power button until it shutdown, and is not very healthy 🙁

Mobo is an Asus A7S8X-MX with 1.7Ghz Sempron 2500+ Socket A, 768MB DDR limited to 512, with latest bios v1007 installed from 2005. Any help?

Solutions i've tried so far is to disable\enable the fast shutdown under msconfig, and change the S3 thing on bios, even the PnP option but no luck. (Bios for this mobo is VERY limited)

Also, if i can take advantage on asking, i noticed everytime the PC is shutdown, the keyboard light and mouse red under light keep staying on.. how can i solve also this? PSU is a classic 500W

Thanks!

Do you have a Live! card installed? Some Live! drivers prevent the system from shutting down/restarting. If that's the case just skip the Live! line of cards with its horrible drivers and "right revisions/model numbers to get" BS and just go for an Audigy. Had those same issues, dropped Live! cards entirely and never looked back since

.........yes 😳 i do have a SB Live! 5.1 actually installed with VXD drivers provided on Phils Computer Lab site... but i can't get rid of it as is vital for audio and DOS games.. it is really this the problem?

In my experience with various Live! revisions in many different OSes and hardware, yes, it's 99,9% the cause in my opinion. Of course, you can and should also heed Horun's advice and other tips that may be given. But as for me I had to replace all Live! cards that I had in my many builds, due to 1. horrible drivers that caused multiple issues of which the ones you have were included 2. incompatibilities, signal noise issues and signal level issues with even what were considered high-end computer speakers of the same era such as Yamaha sets, etc.

Spent 8 years dealing with the various issues on all PCs without exception, installing every driver version and CD images under the sun for all the different revisions, until I decided enough was enough, and switched them all either for Audigy 1/2 cards (that will give you the same DOS compatibility with .vxd drivers, better than Live! in my opinion) or for Auzentech cards for later OSes like WinME and Win2K. Never had a single problem since.

If you are so attached to the card you can try Joseph Joestar's guide to install Audigy drivers on Live! cards, it might help. That's all I can say. Creative really dropped the ball on the Live! line, shame as they are well made hardware wise. Even the earlier 128PCI cards from the Ensoniq/Creative transition already showed a lot of the driver issues and confusion that was to come. These can be a pain to find and install the correct drivers but work absolutely fine after, Live! cards install without a problem but never perform as they should, and only bring further problems.

Wish you best of luck, but from my part, I'm absolutely done with Live! cards.

Thanks for fast replies! ^^

I agree with andre_6 about the awful quality of Live! 5.1 cards. Phils says is the best card ever for dos and win, but I beg to differ. They are good, but not this beast. I've been forced to install it as sadly, this mobo chipset looks like don't like my previous ESS 1989s Allegro card, which was working perfectly on another more modern motherboard that sadly now don't work anymore. With that card i had 1000% perfect DOS experience, even some games have FX effects, which on the Live! just don't, and above all it don't require a mandatory TSR like EMM386 to be loaded, which Live does. Could talk about it hours (also some music like in DN3D or Blood sounds pretty bad compared to real SB of original era, i get it is just an emulation but meh.

Closed Live! two cents, thanks to Horun links! Sadly, i've tried your link where you said to pick the fourth options (the 004756us9.exe file) and i installed it right few minutes ago, but looks like didn't changed nothing at all.

Could it be my Win 98SE is the italian version, so is sort of incompatible? Strange because it looks it installed correctly, but right after it required then to reboot, same screen same freeze. 🙁

do not think the language version of Win98 SE would make a difference. did you go through the list here: http://web.archive.org/web/20070907204803/htt … t.com/kb/238096
Another quick test would be to pull out the SB Live and see if it still happens, without the card the drivers should become disabled.

Horun wrote on 2023-11-13, 02:49:

do not think the language version of Win98 SE would make a difference. did you go through the list here: http://web.archive.org/web/20070907204803/htt … t.com/kb/238096
Another quick test would be to pull out the SB Live and see if it still happens, without the card the drivers should become disabled.

Had no idea just removing it would disable the drivers, cool to know, thanks. I'd just uninstall them to be 100% sure, that's how I found out the card was to blame at the time.

I'm pretty sure it's the Live! card. Trying other drivers won't work too by the way, so skip the huge pain. Like I said, either try a hail mary with the Audigy drivers using the guide, or just get an Audigy 1 or 2, whatever's cheaper. Not the Audigy LE mind. SB 128 PCI is also a cheap option, make sure to try the drivers from the Vogons' library until it installs correctly, after that it's smooth sailing.

This is most common when using Windows 9x in ACPI mode; early ACPI support was extremely buggy and didn't get better until Windows 2000 SP3/XP.

You can disable ACPI support and use APM mode with regedit but you will need to reinstall all the system drivers after a reboot, and make sure you disable PnP/ACPI in the BIOS. Doing so will make the old "It is now safe to turn off your computer" prompt at shutdown.

Is why I suggest pulling the card to see if it the Live! card, if not then start fixing the Windows install,
The Audigy 2 SB0240 or Audigy ZS SB0350 is cheap ((few sellers at $20 includes shipping in USA ), if I needed another would get one), but you need to get the Win98 drivers off the Audigy 2 cd's in the library, they do not have them at Creative website. A great tutorial here: Guide: Installing Windows 9x and DOS drivers on Audigy cards (version 3.1)

I get this on my P3 build randomly, specs in signature. I suspected it was either the network stack or just buggy ACPI. Interested to see what would help in your case, OP.

OP, what video card do you have on the system and which drivers are you using?

bobsmith wrote on 2023-11-13, 14:12:

I get this on my P3 build randomly, specs in signature. I suspected it was either the network stack or just buggy ACPI. Interested to see what would help in your case, OP.

When that happens to me randomly in my P3 build it was because I left the USB drive plugged in and something in it was keeping it from restarting/shutting down. Removing it made everything back to normal, don't know if that was the case for you, maybe not...

When the problem was consistent meaning all the time, it was always due to the Live! card's drivers for me. That's why I would go for the main suspect first, uninstall the card and check it, before branching out to other possible causes.

Garrett W wrote on 2023-11-13, 15:02:

OP, what video card do you have on the system and which drivers are you using?

i have a GeForce FX 5500 AGP with nVidia 45.23 drivers

Try uninstalling the GPU drivers, cleaning up registry entries and then installing slightly newer ones and see if that makes a difference.
Also, have you installed chipset drivers for your board's chipset?

Lastly, you mention 768MB RAM limited to 512MB. How are you achieving this? Have you used rloew's Win98 memory patch?
Win9x are temperamental OSes and all sorts of factors can play into instability or unwanted behavior. I'd look into other venues before deciding the Live! is solely responsible for your hiccups.

Garrett W wrote on 2023-11-13, 19:35:

Try uninstalling the GPU drivers, cleaning up registry entries and then installing slightly newer ones and see if that makes a d […]
Show full quote

Try uninstalling the GPU drivers, cleaning up registry entries and then installing slightly newer ones and see if that makes a difference.
Also, have you installed chipset drivers for your board's chipset?

Lastly, you mention 768MB RAM limited to 512MB. How are you achieving this? Have you used rloew's Win98 memory patch?
Win9x are temperamental OSes and all sorts of factors can play into instability or unwanted behavior. I'd look into other venues before deciding the Live! is solely responsible for your hiccups.

yes i used the R.Loew patch but it still gave me the 768MB, i limited them on the advanced tab on msconfig.exe! Also edited the system.ini classic MaxCacheFile thing for the 512MB.

Newer drivers didn't resolved, as same as remove the SB Live! card and even disable the ACPI from bios (only thing that this last thing did, was the "motherboard resources" on the system hardware yellow warning sign disappeared), still sadly i have to shutdown manually everytime 🙁

And yeah i installed the chipset, or better, on Asus site i couldn't find any chipset drivers but just for VGA, LAN, Audio and IDE, but by far looks like there wasn't the need (or any online availability at all?)

VenomSpark wrote on 2023-11-14, 03:22:

yes i used the R.Loew patch but it still gave me the 768MB, i limited them on the advanced tab on msconfig.exe! Also edited the […]
Show full quote

Garrett W wrote on 2023-11-13, 19:35:

Try uninstalling the GPU drivers, cleaning up registry entries and then installing slightly newer ones and see if that makes a d […]
Show full quote

Try uninstalling the GPU drivers, cleaning up registry entries and then installing slightly newer ones and see if that makes a difference.
Also, have you installed chipset drivers for your board's chipset?

Lastly, you mention 768MB RAM limited to 512MB. How are you achieving this? Have you used rloew's Win98 memory patch?
Win9x are temperamental OSes and all sorts of factors can play into instability or unwanted behavior. I'd look into other venues before deciding the Live! is solely responsible for your hiccups.

yes i used the R.Loew patch but it still gave me the 768MB, i limited them on the advanced tab on msconfig.exe! Also edited the system.ini classic MaxCacheFile thing for the 512MB.

Newer drivers didn't resolved, as same as remove the SB Live! card and even disable the ACPI from bios (only thing that this last thing did, was the "motherboard resources" on the system hardware yellow warning sign disappeared), still sadly i have to shutdown manually everytime 🙁

And yeah i installed the chipset, or better, on Asus site i couldn't find any chipset drivers but just for VGA, LAN, Audio and IDE, but by far looks like there wasn't the need (or any online availability at all?)

Just to be sure, did you remove the Live! card or did you also uninstall the drivers? If not give it a try actually uninstalling them fully without reinstalling anything and check the shutdown/restart at the next boot, so you can tick that for good and move on to other things

andre_6 wrote on 2023-11-14, 04:48:

VenomSpark wrote on 2023-11-14, 03:22:

yes i used the R.Loew patch but it still gave me the 768MB, i limited them on the advanced tab on msconfig.exe! Also edited the […]
Show full quote

Garrett W wrote on 2023-11-13, 19:35:

Try uninstalling the GPU drivers, cleaning up registry entries and then installing slightly newer ones and see if that makes a d […]
Show full quote

Try uninstalling the GPU drivers, cleaning up registry entries and then installing slightly newer ones and see if that makes a difference.
Also, have you installed chipset drivers for your board's chipset?

Lastly, you mention 768MB RAM limited to 512MB. How are you achieving this? Have you used rloew's Win98 memory patch?
Win9x are temperamental OSes and all sorts of factors can play into instability or unwanted behavior. I'd look into other venues before deciding the Live! is solely responsible for your hiccups.

yes i used the R.Loew patch but it still gave me the 768MB, i limited them on the advanced tab on msconfig.exe! Also edited the system.ini classic MaxCacheFile thing for the 512MB.

Newer drivers didn't resolved, as same as remove the SB Live! card and even disable the ACPI from bios (only thing that this last thing did, was the "motherboard resources" on the system hardware yellow warning sign disappeared), still sadly i have to shutdown manually everytime 🙁

And yeah i installed the chipset, or better, on Asus site i couldn't find any chipset drivers but just for VGA, LAN, Audio and IDE, but by far looks like there wasn't the need (or any online availability at all?)

Just to be sure, did you remove the Live! card or did you also uninstall the drivers? If not give it a try actually uninstalling them fully without reinstalling anything and check the shutdown/restart at the next boot, so you can tick that for good and move on to other things

will try to remove drivers as well, as they were little be tricky at beginning installing only the WDM ones and not the VXD (i picked the Audigy pack from PhilsComputerLab, that are compatible with Live! as well)

I just have two more questions, if possible ^^" one related to this issue and one totally different:

1) if SB Live is the problem, how can i actually resolve it? I mean, i REALLY need the SB Live of course, without audio this PC would be useless. So the only way to keep the SB Live (if she's the problem) is to just deal with this shutdown issue?

2) I know is not related, but if someone can help me also on this would be awesome! I have a small problem on Simon The Sorcerer, one of my fav adventures when i was a kid, and is that the game slowdowns (including framerate and music) every-single-time i move the mouse! If i don't move anything the music goes at right tempo, but as soon i move the mouse arrow around the game, it all slows down.. tried in both real dos mode and win98 🙁

VenomSpark wrote on 2023-11-14, 17:49:

will try to remove drivers as well, as they were little be tricky at beginning installing only the WDM ones and not the VXD (i p […]
Show full quote

andre_6 wrote on 2023-11-14, 04:48:

VenomSpark wrote on 2023-11-14, 03:22:

yes i used the R.Loew patch but it still gave me the 768MB, i limited them on the advanced tab on msconfig.exe! Also edited the system.ini classic MaxCacheFile thing for the 512MB.

Newer drivers didn't resolved, as same as remove the SB Live! card and even disable the ACPI from bios (only thing that this last thing did, was the "motherboard resources" on the system hardware yellow warning sign disappeared), still sadly i have to shutdown manually everytime 🙁

And yeah i installed the chipset, or better, on Asus site i couldn't find any chipset drivers but just for VGA, LAN, Audio and IDE, but by far looks like there wasn't the need (or any online availability at all?)

Just to be sure, did you remove the Live! card or did you also uninstall the drivers? If not give it a try actually uninstalling them fully without reinstalling anything and check the shutdown/restart at the next boot, so you can tick that for good and move on to other things

will try to remove drivers as well, as they were little be tricky at beginning installing only the WDM ones and not the VXD (i picked the Audigy pack from PhilsComputerLab, that are compatible with Live! as well)

I just have two more questions, if possible ^^" one related to this issue and one totally different:

1) if SB Live is the problem, how can i actually resolve it? I mean, i REALLY need the SB Live of course, without audio this PC would be useless. So the only way to keep the SB Live (if she's the problem) is to just deal with this shutdown issue?

2) I know is not related, but if someone can help me also on this would be awesome! I have a small problem on Simon The Sorcerer, one of my fav adventures when i was a kid, and is that the game slowdowns (including framerate and music) every-single-time i move the mouse! If i don't move anything the music goes at right tempo, but as soon i move the mouse arrow around the game, it all slows down.. tried in both real dos mode and win98 🙁

Like I said, relative to your issue, in order for you to definitely find out if the Live! is the culprit you need to fully uninstall the drivers and utilities that come with it, remove the card from the board, and check the restart/shutdown at the next boot. You'll then know if you can move on to other possible issues, of which you already have many good suggestions in the thread, or if you need to deal with the Live! card.

If indeed it's the Live card causing the issue, once again like I said: installing other Live! drivers won't work. A hail mary you can try if using Joseph Joestar's guide to install Audigy drivers on a Live! card, because the Live! drivers just suck unfortunately. If it solves your issue I have no idea, but it's one last option you can try. I think the guide has some specific aspects that maybe Phil's stuff may not, I'm not sure, maybe not but check it out. If the guide doesn't work, then either live with it, or get an Audigy for example.

It's pretty clear you are resisting towards keeping the Live!, and it's up to you of course in any case, I just mentioned the Audigy because if the Live! was to blame it would be a better card at a cheap price, so you would be upgrading and solving the issue all at once. Plenty of cheap options out there still nowadays, and better than a Live! in my opinion without its many issues.

But anyway it's all speculation until you try it out and rule the causes one by one

So guys after almost 10 days of life and self fixing, i just finally resolved the problem at least of course on this machine, and: it WASN'T nothing related to the SB Live! drivers or else.

The real problem was.......the USB. Yep. I don't know how, as usually when my 6th sense tells me to do something, i just figured out as i was trying to fix another annoying problem: playing some old adventure games like Monkey 1 and Simon The Sorcerer on MS Dos mode, everytime i moved the mouse the music and game drastically slows down. It was really annoying, i searched on net and i've tried three different CuteMouse drivers from 1.9 to 2.4 beta. Even a Mouse.com driver i found on an old my floppy disk. Nothing.

Then, out from nowhere, i tried to completely disable USB support from BIOS (which is already itself very limited on this board), disabling the 1.1, 2.0 and legacy support. And BAM guess what? Now Win98 correctely shutsdown everytime and reboots just fine without the need of any patch or leaving my SB Live! card and drivers untouched. Top of that, even the mouse movement lag disappeared.

I don't really know how this is possible as the SiS drivers were installed and worked just fine with all ports and usb sticks i've tried, but somehow looks like this was the real problem. The new one this, is that i use really often USB because with my 16GB FAT32 stick, i always move new games or files from main modern PC to this, so now everytime i will have to enable manually on BIOS, use it, reboot and disable it again. Annoying, but at least i can shutdown and no more lags.

I think my only explanation on this case, is that I noticed when i leaved enabled all three USB options on the BIOS, in the menu of IRQ's right before Win98 starts to boot i saw there are a lot of IRQ in the list, which some are "NA", and from Win98 device manager there are like three of them all looks alike between them, and they are using resources like IRQ 3,4,5 which are vital for SB Live for example. But even disabling them or change manually the IRQ from device manager, didn't do much at all so the only way is to disable completely under bios and this fixes the shutdown problem, despite of course i can't use any USB sticks or device now.

Thank for all help and hope this could help someone!