Gmlb256 wrote on 2022-12-23, 21:29:

Ozzuneoj wrote on 2022-12-23, 21:02:

Though looking at how mediocre the performance is in relation to board complexity reminds me of why 3dfx didn't survive very long.

True, this was noticeable with the Voodoo5 and the VSA-100 architecture. A product that wasn't competitive with simpler GeForce and Radeon cards in terms of performance, power consumption, features and price. Another reason for the downfall of 3dfx was the acquisition of STB which alienated third-party manufacturers.

To be realistic here everything 3Dfx did launch after the great Voodoo II was NOT as strong as ppl think it was... nVIDIA was smart and did learn from their mistakes.. So it did not all started with the UNDERhelming Voodoo IV and V.. It all started after Voodoo II, as Voodoo III was somehow faster, ONLY die to the fact 3Dfx was the big name out there, so many did use Glide, so that is the only reason Voodoo III cards was a bit faster then the competition (mostly nVIDIA), not to mention also the Voodoo was still in 16 bit color 🤣, while everything else like MatroX, ATi, nVIDIA had cards with 32 bit color wut a joke really... And the ones that have 80% of the responsibility for 3Dfx downfall is themselves, the rest 20% goes to nVIDIA and M$.. 3Dfx did try to be the Intel of the video cards industry, so they made some retarded/ greedy decisions, that sealed their fate. Also i heard that instead of going full on the Rampage project, 3Dfx did pull shitty cards such as the Banshee or like Voodoo Velocity...

Gmlb256 wrote on 2022-12-28, 02:24:

Agreed, 3dfx singlehandedly killed nearly all of the old companies that used to make video chips. Only ATi managed to make it th […]
Show full quote

hyoenmadan wrote on 2022-12-28, 01:25:

To be fair with 3DFX... You can't really compete with a company who acquired almost all the talent from SGI and Cray to work with them. Even ATi couldn't in long time, let alone S3 and Matrox.

Agreed, 3dfx singlehandedly killed nearly all of the old companies that used to make video chips. Only ATi managed to make it through the end thanks to OEM deals and even then, they were later acquired by AMD.

People says nVidia destroyed SGI... But actually I would say nVidia IS SGI/Cray! minus the IBM-like corporate mindset and bureaucreacy which plagued almost every 80's corporations. And SGI was and now as Nvidia is... Well... They were and are the gods of matrix math processing ASICs. You really can't compete with them... Not at least in "clean" terms (directly targeting their engineering assets for example).

Prior becoming the market leader they currently are, nVidia had a rough beginning with the NV1 chip. Said chip used quadratic texture mapping for 3D rendering which was slower and complicated to work with. Success for nVidia began when they launched the RIVA 128 which used polygonal texture mapping and led to the more competitive RIVA TNT.

Rendition was a company that was promising, their Verrite V1000 was on part with the Voodoo 1, but sadly they did bankrupt a bit later with Verrite V2200, guess they did not had brand popularity, and not good channels for sale.. 3Dfx may got big talents, but they did dumb decisions that killed themselves. The way i see it, 3Dfx lost the GPU/ videocard war after Voodoo II for obvious reasons, if they did AT least started to research some new architecture, they could have saved themselves from bankruptcy in 2001, but hey shit happens.
These days nVIDIA is just disgusting company, when u take in account, how much did GTX 980TI cost, then they raised the prices on next gen with GTX 1080/TI, and after that point the things got nasty to the bone... These days they sell flagships such as the RTX 4090 that cost retarded 1600$, and ppl still continue to buy is moronic.. But i believe if 3Dfx was not as greedy and dumb as they were, they was going to survive the GEforce 256 and release even stronger card prob.. Problem was going to be for the consumer, as i think 3Dfx was going to start charging alot more money for their cards since well they are the Voodoo brand, and Glide was everywhere, so they was going to sell expensive from that point on.. Someone said that when AMD did purchase ATi, ATi was struggling against nVIDIA in financial way, so they was on the path to bankruptcy it seems, no wonder they did sell the company...

I really like the colors of SGI machines, they are for sure different and interesting, and nice to look at...

Tried to restore a windows ME laptop which ended up going full windows ME on me:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IwJTheElDqE&a … nel=LJRRetroPCs

Radical Vision wrote on 2022-12-28, 08:28:

3Dfx did pull shitty cards such as the Banshee or like Voodoo Velocity...

The Voodoo Banshee wasn't a dumbed down Voodoo2 like most people think. Although having one TMU, it came with a 128-bit memory interface and lay the groundwork for the Voodoo3. Still, that doesn't change the fact that 3dfx lost vision at this point.

Rendition was a company that was promising, their Verrite V1000 was on part with the Voodoo 1, but sadly they did bankrupt a bit later with Verrite V2200, guess they did not had brand popularity, and not good channels for sale.

Rendition did major mistakes. Their chip designs were completely outsourced without any QA being done and the V1000 didn't have hardware support for z-buffers.

I consider the Banshee to be a good chip for its time if you take into consideration that it was an inexpensive Glide implementation that was competitive as an upgrade to the Voodoo 1, 2, and Rush, with a combined 2D and 3D chip.

I think the major issue at the time that caused many companies to misstep is that they tried to aggressively push lower specced products to milk the low-end market while still protecting the lucrative high-end. The problem that most of these companies encountered was how aggressive their competitors pushed the quality and performance of their products. This created a lot of bad press and poor impressions for products like the Rush and the Banshee by comparing them to markets where they were never designed to compete.

I think the Voodoo Banshee was always a good pairing with a slower CPU that wouldn't be able to take advantage of a faster alternative anyways. Anything prior to the Pentium 2 would probably be good.

Another great example is all of the hatred towards the GeForce FX 5200. In a slower system, this card is actually excellent, with full DirectX 9 shader support. If the CPU is a limiting factor, there is no difference between an FX 5200 and an FX 5950; I have found this to be the case personally. This is the same agreement I'm making with the Banshee.

This past week I had some time to test several parts that had been stacking up. An AT case with some no name Socket 370 board included, closest match was a Jetway, and what I thought might be a Celeron. I also had an NEC 6xi SCSI CDROM, an AHA-1542ch SCSI controller. Lastly the main part I wanted to test was a rare Videologic Apocalypse 5D, not the sonic mind you but pretty rare nonetheless.

This build went off almost without a hitch, plugged everything in, had to reserve an IRQ for the SCSI controller, was able to boot from a Windows 98 CD and everything installed no problem. It was quite a bit slower than I thought it should be and I removed the cooler from the CPU to find a VIA Cyrix 3. No big deal new CPU for the collection and one I’ve not had experience with, score! The Apocalypse 5D was working without issue as well, all good news!

Here’s the real kicker, this machine was running quite well for what it was. Was thinking about leaving it as is. Then later that day or the following day I tried opening “My Computer” and the whole system froze. Tried rebooting and Windows through a protection error. Discovered the SCSI controller was no longer showing up during boot. I tried for hours to get this machine back to where it was and I was completely defeated. The eventual discovery is that the SCSI controller will simply no longer work as long as the Apocalypse 5D is inserted.

How in the hell it ever worked I’ll never know, I tried adjusting IRQ, DMA, and BIOS address on the controller, reserving them in the bios, moving cards around. A few times I would get the SCSI bios to load but it would usually hang. Now I can’t get it even once. How the hell does that work? Confirmed the SCSI controller and Apocalypse work independently. It was one of those scenarios where I didn’t really need those parts to work together but I just had them working, and I was determined to get it working, in the end I had to throw in the towel.

Standard Def Steve wrote on 2022-12-28, 03:01:

I just started a 1080p h264 to 1080p, 20mb/s WMV-HD transcode on a PIII Katmai 550, the slowest CPU I have with SSE. I have absolutely no good reason for doing such a thing; morbid curiosity is the best excuse I can come up with at the moment. I have no idea if this thing will actually complete the transcode, though I did ditch Win98 and install XP to give it at least a fighting chance.

It's currently encoding at a plodding .16 fps. Estimated time left for this roughly 2 hour movie is ~12 days! And to think, once/if it finishes encoding, this machine won't even be fast enough to play the file it created! But first, let's see how far this poor computer doesn't get.

Sounds like you are a masochist 😀 Fun to see just what pain we can put our retro systems through!

I ran into a really weird situation yesterday.

I was testing a bunch of old video cards in my Windows 98SE test system (440BX, PIII 850, storage is a 16GB mSATA SSD converted to IDE), and when I tried to boot with a Diamond Stealth64 Video (Trio64V+ with MPEG audio out jack) the system blue screened. After rebooting I was getting errors about some specific system files being missing, but was still able to use the command prompt. I rebooted again and it froze at the POST screen. This was odd, so I took the card out and saw that it had one tiny bent leg on the main graphics chip and it was contacting the one next to it. So, I used a needle and straightened that out. It passed POST just fine now but I still had the missing file errors at startup.

This wasn't good, but it also wasn't a big deal. The way I run my 98SE test bench is that I have the system boot to command prompt only, and I have about a dozen different Windows folders, all renamed to whatever hardware they are set up for... like win_v3 for Voodoo 3 cards, win_riva for Riva 128 etc. Each Windows folder has a batch file that runs at start up to tell me which one is loaded, so, just as an example... if I had previously tested a Voodoo Banshee but I now needed to test some sort of common VGA card with built in win9x drivers and no 3D acceleration, I would do this:

ren windows win_ban
ren win_vga windows
win

And that's it... Windows will load and often times it doesn't even act like any hardware has changed because the current card uses the same driver as whatever that installation was previously set up for. The renaming also happens instantly because no copying\moving is involved. This is a wonderful setup and has made testing cards so much more reliable since I don't have to worry about conflicting drivers and software.

Sooo... long story short, my win_vga folder seemed to be toast. After renaming a different Windows folder and rebooting the missing file errors were gone. I could now boot with the Stealth64 with no issues, so the card was fine after fixing that leg... but what caused those file errors? I dug into the old windows folder (now renamed win_BAD) and I started scrolling through the Windows folder and sure enough, there it was. "DBLBFB.sys"???? Wow... yeah that's a problem. Also noticed some other files and executables with misspelled filenames and with generic icons rather than the ones they should have had. Holy cow, that one blue screen caused Windows to corrupt and rename important files from the Windows folder??? Why was it even writing those files in the first place???

Again, this isn't a huge issue because I can just copy a few things I need out of that folder, delete it and make a new one from "win_orig" or "win_bak" (very handy to have these). But I find it baffling that a shorted leg on a VGA card could allow the card to actually pass POST and get to the DOS prompt, and yet was capable of crashing Windows 98 in a way that made it rename some random system files. I'm so so SO glad that modern versions of Windows aren't this fragile\suicidal.

EDIT: After thinking about it a little more, is it possible that the pins that were touching were something related to addressing or other system resources and this caused the video card to be sharing\interfering with the resources used by the storage controller? I can't think of any other explanation.

EDIT2: Wow, it's crazy how easy it is to find this information online.
http://www.bitsavers.org/components/s3/DB018- … rator_Jul95.pdf

According to the pinout for the Trio64V+ chip, sure enough, the pins that were shorted were AD29 and AD28, which are labeled as "Multiplexed Address/Data Bus". I bet that was the issue then. I can't believe this is the first time I've had this happen. I have tested hundreds of cards over the past 5-6 years alone, and I've repaired damage on many of them and never run into anything like this before.

Added some more memory to my Epson Equity III+ (now @ 6 MB) and tried running Doom.

Sure it's a complete slide-show running on this weird 12 MHz 286/386 hybrid. But it runs! 😁

kohellus@gmail.com wrote on 2022-12-24, 11:28:

My new retro network build network. It serves something else too but 4 vlans, one for retro and other for various iot's and the rest for my home network. Nothing fansy but working. Pfsense and 4 gigabit ethernet ports. Works with everything for my retro nas serving drivers and os's, games 😀

What's the model of this HP PC?

Pulled out the Optiplex GX260, plugged it in, heard a pop, PSU blew out smoke, now the room smells like Caramel (oddly pleasant smell, makes me wonder what chemicals I'm inhaling currently).

Now the new low profile GeForce 6200 AGP has no home 😒

Not sure if this is just my collection aging (it didn't explode the last time I had it powered on, 3 years ago) or if the unclimate controlled shed I store my stuff in is actually becoming a major problem.

EDIT: Motherboard survived after testing with another PSU. Will probably tear open the dell PSU and see if the failure is easily fixed. If not, I guess I'll have to spend $20 on a new PSU from eBay since I don't have any Dell SFF PSUs of this type lying around or in any other system.

Out of curiosity, did you let it warm up from your shed before turning it on?

Since it's dead, you can also open it up and poke around. The caps may have all gone bad, most likely.

Kahenraz wrote on 2022-12-28, 19:39:

Out of curiosity, did you let it warm up from your shed before turning it on?

Since it's dead, you can also open it up and poke around. The caps may have all gone bad, most likely.

I thought it had warmed up enough, but its possible that is indeed the problem. Not seeing any condensation though.

The motherboard DOES have a few obviously leaky caps though. I suspect the PSU has the same problem and something gave up the ghost. Its probable something went open and the current blew out the next part in line.

I needed to place an order at digikey anyways..... 🤣

EDIT: So apparently whatever blew was not important. I plugged Sir Smokes-a-lot back in.... and the PSU is working fine? IDK, its a Dell Optiplex. I'm just going to roll with it because lets be real this PC isn't worth the $20 a new PSU costs.

Gmlb256 wrote on 2022-12-28, 13:15:

The Voodoo Banshee wasn't a dumbed down Voodoo2 like most people think. Although having one TMU, it came with a 128-bit memory i […]
Show full quote

Radical Vision wrote on 2022-12-28, 08:28:

3Dfx did pull shitty cards such as the Banshee or like Voodoo Velocity...

The Voodoo Banshee wasn't a dumbed down Voodoo2 like most people think. Although having one TMU, it came with a 128-bit memory interface and lay the groundwork for the Voodoo3. Still, that doesn't change the fact that 3dfx lost vision at this point.

Rendition was a company that was promising, their Verrite V1000 was on part with the Voodoo 1, but sadly they did bankrupt a bit later with Verrite V2200, guess they did not had brand popularity, and not good channels for sale.

Rendition did major mistakes. Their chip designs were completely outsourced without any QA being done and the V1000 didn't have hardware support for z-buffers.

Well to be fair the Banshee is not a bad product.. What i meant to say is, that 3Dfx did the stupidity, to focus NOT on the main thing that being the Rampage design, but instead of some low end products as the other guy mentioned to milk the low spectrum of the customers as well, how well did that played for them hah...

Well is sad for Rendition, as they were not as greedy, arrogant and nasty as 3Dfx did fast become, and they did not deserve that fate, while 3Dfx did seal their own fate with their own mistakes and greed...

Kahenraz wrote on 2022-12-28, 13:27:

I consider the Banshee to be a good chip for its time if you take into consideration that it was an inexpensive Glide implementa […]
Show full quote

I consider the Banshee to be a good chip for its time if you take into consideration that it was an inexpensive Glide implementation that was competitive as an upgrade to the Voodoo 1, 2, and Rush, with a combined 2D and 3D chip.

I think the major issue at the time that caused many companies to misstep is that they tried to aggressively push lower specced products to milk the low-end market while still protecting the lucrative high-end. The problem that most of these companies encountered was how aggressive their competitors pushed the quality and performance of their products. This created a lot of bad press and poor impressions for products like the Rush and the Banshee by comparing them to markets where they were never designed to compete.

I think the Voodoo Banshee was always a good pairing with a slower CPU that wouldn't be able to take advantage of a faster alternative anyways. Anything prior to the Pentium 2 would probably be good.

Another great example is all of the hatred towards the GeForce FX 5200. In a slower system, this card is actually excellent, with full DirectX 9 shader support. If the CPU is a limiting factor, there is no difference between an FX 5200 and an FX 5950; I have found this to be the case personally. This is the same agreement I'm making with the Banshee.

Interesting point of view... Did never think of the low end products this way, is nice concept u got there.. But on other hand i still believe that the life is too short, the storage too small, in order to waste time on average stuff, but only instead only in the top 90%... I anyway have also lower class parts, as i use them to test new old parts, or the customer shitty parts, so i still use them as well it seems..
Also if there was many high end parts such as FX5950 compared to small amount of FX5200, the 5200 was going to be what everyone here is aiming to get their hands on.. So guess the flood market with shitty parts is a good thing, specially when the one finds some exotic part (for example Voodoo V 5500, or DFI LanParty Expert, or GUS) for pocket change in the local flea market, thrift shop or local ad site...

Radical Vision wrote on 2022-12-28, 19:56:

Well to be fair the Banshee is not a bad product.. What i meant to say is, that 3Dfx did the stupidity, to focus NOT on the main […]
Show full quote

Gmlb256 wrote on 2022-12-28, 13:15:

The Voodoo Banshee wasn't a dumbed down Voodoo2 like most people think. Although having one TMU, it came with a 128-bit memory i […]
Show full quote

Radical Vision wrote on 2022-12-28, 08:28:

3Dfx did pull shitty cards such as the Banshee or like Voodoo Velocity...

The Voodoo Banshee wasn't a dumbed down Voodoo2 like most people think. Although having one TMU, it came with a 128-bit memory interface and lay the groundwork for the Voodoo3. Still, that doesn't change the fact that 3dfx lost vision at this point.

Rendition was a company that was promising, their Verrite V1000 was on part with the Voodoo 1, but sadly they did bankrupt a bit later with Verrite V2200, guess they did not had brand popularity, and not good channels for sale.

Rendition did major mistakes. Their chip designs were completely outsourced without any QA being done and the V1000 didn't have hardware support for z-buffers.

Well to be fair the Banshee is not a bad product.. What i meant to say is, that 3Dfx did the stupidity, to focus NOT on the main thing that being the Rampage design, but instead of some low end products as the other guy mentioned to milk the low spectrum of the customers as well, how well did that played for them hah...

Well is sad for Rendition, as they were not as greedy, arrogant and nasty as 3Dfx did fast become, and they did not deserve that fate, while 3Dfx did seal their own fate with their own mistakes and greed...

Kahenraz wrote on 2022-12-28, 13:27:

I consider the Banshee to be a good chip for its time if you take into consideration that it was an inexpensive Glide implementa […]
Show full quote

I consider the Banshee to be a good chip for its time if you take into consideration that it was an inexpensive Glide implementation that was competitive as an upgrade to the Voodoo 1, 2, and Rush, with a combined 2D and 3D chip.

I think the major issue at the time that caused many companies to misstep is that they tried to aggressively push lower specced products to milk the low-end market while still protecting the lucrative high-end. The problem that most of these companies encountered was how aggressive their competitors pushed the quality and performance of their products. This created a lot of bad press and poor impressions for products like the Rush and the Banshee by comparing them to markets where they were never designed to compete.

I think the Voodoo Banshee was always a good pairing with a slower CPU that wouldn't be able to take advantage of a faster alternative anyways. Anything prior to the Pentium 2 would probably be good.

Another great example is all of the hatred towards the GeForce FX 5200. In a slower system, this card is actually excellent, with full DirectX 9 shader support. If the CPU is a limiting factor, there is no difference between an FX 5200 and an FX 5950; I have found this to be the case personally. This is the same agreement I'm making with the Banshee.

Interesting point of view... Did never think of the low end products this way, is nice concept u got there.. But on other hand i still believe that the life is too short, the storage too small, in order to waste time on average stuff, but only instead only in the top 90%... I anyway have also lower class parts, as i use them to test new old parts, or the customer shitty parts, so i still use them as well it seems..
Also if there was many high end parts such as FX5950 compared to small amount of FX5200, the 5200 was going to be what everyone here is aiming to get their hands on.. So guess the flood market with shitty parts is a good thing, specially when the one finds some exotic part (for example Voodoo V 5500, or DFI LanParty Expert, or GUS) for pocket change in the local flea market, thrift shop or local ad site...

The Banshee seemed fine for what it was to me. An expensive 2D/3D card with GLIDE capability. Hell, I've ran games from 2000 fine on it at 800x600 at various settings.

I think the low end of gaming products at that time was probably targeting peeps who just wanted to play whatever 98/99 titles they were already playing fine. They weren't intended to be future proof, nor did the buyers of them expect them to be. The buyer of these cards weren't putting them in then-bleeding-edge 1GHZ Coppermine machines. They were upgrading the single 4MB voodoo or "off brand" graphics in their old Pentium II machine.

The FX series as a whole is meme'd to hell and back because compared to the contemporary ATI offerings they were straight up dogshit. A Radeon 9600 Pro runs Oblivion and other high end titles of the time better than a GeForce FX5950. That being said, the FX5200 is still faster than a GeForce 256 DDR and MUCH cheaper now-a-days. So why NOT throw it into your Windows 98 machine?

I can build two windows 98 machines, one for next to nothing, and one that costs several hundred dollars, that produce nearly identical benchmarking results. The difference would be the prestige attached to the parts inside. I have plunty of high end components now-a-days, but I really wish people just getting into the hobby would stop chasing whatever garbage LinusTechTips (as much as I like the dude) is showing off in his latest retro video and realize they can get the exact same experience for much less. Like I'm LITERALLY one of the foremost experts on GPUs here, I own like 150 of them. If you put me infront of two W98 beige boxes and ask me to tell you which one has a GeForce256 and which has a GF2MX 400 AGP based off gameplay, I'm not going to be able to tell you which is which.

Optiplex Update Edit: Power supply is now 100 percent dead after it released the reserve magic smoke.

debs3759 wrote on 2022-12-28, 14:25:

Standard Def Steve wrote on 2022-12-28, 03:01:

I just started a 1080p h264 to 1080p, 20mb/s WMV-HD transcode on a PIII Katmai 550, the slowest CPU I have with SSE. I have absolutely no good reason for doing such a thing; morbid curiosity is the best excuse I can come up with at the moment. I have no idea if this thing will actually complete the transcode, though I did ditch Win98 and install XP to give it at least a fighting chance.

It's currently encoding at a plodding .16 fps. Estimated time left for this roughly 2 hour movie is ~12 days! And to think, once/if it finishes encoding, this machine won't even be fast enough to play the file it created! But first, let's see how far this poor computer doesn't get.

Sounds like you are a masochist 😀 Fun to see just what pain we can put our retro systems through!

haha, guess I am! And it certainly helps that I'm running this torture test on a shite PC Chips motherboard I couldn't care less about. If the VRM goes up in smoke, so be it.
I'm more than a little surprised that it's still chugging along, nearly a full day later, wow!

Spent hours today arguing with a toshiba satellite 1800.
Windows ME was crapped out.
Windows 2000.. Cannot find a working VGA driver
Windows 98se.. VGA Drivers say they work but dont.
Now its the turn of XP.. But I hold little hope.

Dont want to go crawling back to ME

LewisRaz wrote on 2022-12-29, 01:09:

Spent hours today arguing with a toshiba satellite 1800. Windows ME was crapped out. Windows 2000.. Cannot find a working VGA dr […]
Show full quote

Spent hours today arguing with a toshiba satellite 1800.
Windows ME was crapped out.
Windows 2000.. Cannot find a working VGA driver
Windows 98se.. VGA Drivers say they work but dont.
Now its the turn of XP.. But I hold little hope.

Dont want to go crawling back to ME

Why does everyone hate ME so much?

Every time I've tried it, my experience has been positive. Has so many quality of life features that W98 doesn't have, with the added benefit of being 9x based. For a true WINDOWS 9x machine (not a combo DOS/Win9x setup) its great.

TheAbandonwareGuy wrote on 2022-12-29, 01:23:

LewisRaz wrote on 2022-12-29, 01:09:

Spent hours today arguing with a toshiba satellite 1800. Windows ME was crapped out. Windows 2000.. Cannot find a working VGA dr […]
Show full quote

Spent hours today arguing with a toshiba satellite 1800.
Windows ME was crapped out.
Windows 2000.. Cannot find a working VGA driver
Windows 98se.. VGA Drivers say they work but dont.
Now its the turn of XP.. But I hold little hope.

Dont want to go crawling back to ME

Why does everyone hate ME so much?

Every time I've tried it, my experience has been positive. Has so many quality of life features that W98 doesn't have, with the added benefit of being 9x based. For a true WINDOWS 9x machine (not a combo DOS/Win9x setup) its great.

I actually like it.. But this laptop had been through some stuff... And the install was not great.

I dont want to go back to ME because I probably could have saved time just trying to clean the original installer up more! Stubborn 😀

LewisRaz wrote on 2022-12-29, 01:35:

TheAbandonwareGuy wrote on 2022-12-29, 01:23:

LewisRaz wrote on 2022-12-29, 01:09:

Spent hours today arguing with a toshiba satellite 1800. Windows ME was crapped out. Windows 2000.. Cannot find a working VGA dr […]
Show full quote

Spent hours today arguing with a toshiba satellite 1800.
Windows ME was crapped out.
Windows 2000.. Cannot find a working VGA driver
Windows 98se.. VGA Drivers say they work but dont.
Now its the turn of XP.. But I hold little hope.

Dont want to go crawling back to ME

Why does everyone hate ME so much?

Every time I've tried it, my experience has been positive. Has so many quality of life features that W98 doesn't have, with the added benefit of being 9x based. For a true WINDOWS 9x machine (not a combo DOS/Win9x setup) its great.

I actually like it.. But this laptop had been through some stuff... And the install was not great.

I dont want to go back to ME because I probably could have saved time just trying to clean the original installer up more! Stubborn 😀

Sunken cost fallacy

TheAbandonwareGuy wrote on 2022-12-29, 01:23:

LewisRaz wrote on 2022-12-29, 01:09:

Spent hours today arguing with a toshiba satellite 1800. Windows ME was crapped out. Windows 2000.. Cannot find a working VGA dr […]
Show full quote

Spent hours today arguing with a toshiba satellite 1800.
Windows ME was crapped out.
Windows 2000.. Cannot find a working VGA driver
Windows 98se.. VGA Drivers say they work but dont.
Now its the turn of XP.. But I hold little hope.

Dont want to go crawling back to ME

Why does everyone hate ME so much?

Every time I've tried it, my experience has been positive. Has so many quality of life features that W98 doesn't have, with the added benefit of being 9x based. For a true WINDOWS 9x machine (not a combo DOS/Win9x setup) its great.

I haven't run ME in years, but I remember when I worked at a PC repair shop in the early 2000s we used to secretly really appreciate working on it, despite all the hate. The reason was that it had drivers for almost everything built right in, so unless you needed something more full-featured from a driver package you could just install the OS and almost everything just worked. Along with that clean installation came a very smooth a well running system... something that a lot of people never saw, because of what OEMs did to the poor machines. Much like Vista, I think the problem was that it was often put on terrible hardware and combined with too much 3rd party software.

When I think of a "Windows ME Computer", I think of those blobby little Compaq systems with colored plastic panels, insufficient RAM, slow CPUs, dirt-slow Quantum Bigfoot hard drives (among others) and tons of pre-installed bloatware, which was starting to become a thing at this point in time. Prior to this you usually got a big book of CDs of full-version software with your PC and most of it was installed but didn't have to run at startup... but it seems like ME came about right as things were shifting to "lets just install irritating trial versions of *everything* on this already barely adequate PC" . To top it all off, way more people were trying to do things online in the early 2000s and broadband was starting to be a thing, which meant that it was very likely that you were running ME if you were also a clueless new PC user that clicked on everything and downloaded viruses and adware.

So, I agree. ME was not a bad OS, it was just a victim of the times in which it was released.