5u3 wrote:

Anyone got an idea how to stop this behaviour?

Well people will debate this, but I still believe that corpeal punishment works and is a good deterent to bad behavior.

Seriously, have you tried contacting the manufacturer? I know that they don't support Win98 anymore, but if it is BIOS then it is probably a problem outside of the operating system.

On the Device Manager tab, select System Devices.

Select Plug and Play BIOS, and then click to clear the Disable NVRAM / ESCD updates on the Settingstab.

Click OK, click OK, and then restart your computer.

Dunno if it helps

Hazekel wrote:

Well people will debate this, but I still believe that corpeal punishment works and is a good deterent to bad behavior.

Nope, I'm not going to kick my mainboard because it's forgetting it's settings 😉

Hazekel wrote:

Seriously, have you tried contacting the manufacturer? I know that they don't support Win98 anymore, but if it is BIOS then it is probably a problem outside of the operating system.

Hmmm, contacting Asus might not be a bad idea. Although chances for getting an answer are low, because the board was manufactured more than ten years ago, the latest BIOS update is from 1998...

h-a-l-9000 wrote:

Select Plug and Play BIOS, and then click to clear the Disable NVRAM / ESCD updates on the Settingstab.

Thanks for the tip, but alas it doesn't help. Actually I disabled this some time ago, because it prevents Win98SE from hanging at shutdown.

I was not aware that ASUS technical support was very good at all.

Have you tried disabling some of the seemingly-superfluous items in the Windows device manager? Disabling "Advanced Power Management" (I think it's under the System item) is generally harmless.

maybe the socket on the motherboard for the CMOS battery is faulty.

Thanks again for the hints, but nothing seems to get this board cooperating with Win98SE.

It is definitly not a defective board, because I tested three of them, they all have the same issue (on a v1.2 board it remembers at least some of the settings, but alas not the important ones, on v1.8 boards all of them get wiped after Win98SE has been executed). I even traced the voltage from the battery to the chips with a multimeter, all OK.

In the device manager I tried every option available in the depths of the system device drivers - nothing. It gave me the impression that the chipset/BIOS are not really fit for a PnP OS (too many bugs and cheesy workarounds).

In theory the board would work well with Win98SE if I checked all the BIOS settings at every bootup. But forget one of them and Win98 starts rearranging resources, reinstalling drivers and leaves me to fix everything manually (which is really tedious with four soundcards and lots of other stuff installed).

Finally I gave up and installed Windows 3.11 😉

I've forgotten how awful the GUI is, and it needs a plethora of addons just for basic net connectivity, but it works fast and without problems. And it'll come in handy for those Win3.x games...