PC Advice - Putting it Together

[odin]

@jaxanim:

*Does* your PC boot from CD-ROM? If yes, then you won't need a W98 Emergency Disk to reinstall. If no, well..you guessed ;-).

And do you know what brand/type/part number the mobo is? Normally there should be some sort of marking on the mobo. Unless it's a very dodgy noname mobo ofcourse ;-). Usually mobo makers will have some software- and ROM- aka BIOS-updates available.

-edit-
Er...just like mikeymike said on the previous page ;-).

[Floid]

To put it bluntly, I don't know what the hell is going on here any more, but two things that may be helpful:

Since nobody else had the sense to mail 3DLabs' support with the part number, I did, and a "Thomas Dorfler" was nice enough to reply with the following:

Dear Sir,

Thank you for your email.

Ok I think I have found out what card you have there.
If this is the partnumber, then you have the VX1-AGP card there.

You will find the latest drivers here:

http://www.3dlabs.com/support/drivers/oxygen_vx1_and_vx116_drivers.htm

Thanks, Thomas. ;-)

(Remember, kids, in the PC scene, companies often still exist, and usually have enough corporate memory to help with anything made after 1995 or so.)

...

Since you say it's a Pentium II, chances are 98SE already includes reasonable support for the motherboard chipset (and thus AGP, etc, etc).  The additional drivers mostly come into play with Via chipsets... which, to put it bluntly, you probably don't have.  (One motivation for the launch of 98SE was to put out a version that wouldn't instantly crash on the hardware that MS/Via failed to hash out support for in the first run of '98... I can't remember how successful they were at that.)

[JaXanim]

Hokee Dokee, maybe this will terminate this particular thread and we can all go back to doing what we enjoy most.

Anyway, I reformatted the C: drive which appeared to be full at the very moment I installed the Permedia drivers for the 3D Labs card so kindly included in by PeeCee makins kit by Spirantho. Still with me...?  OK...

There was apparently a few bad sectors on the drive, which Fdisk (I think it was) fixed very nicely.

I then reinstalled Windows98 to the clean disk. This was a most salutary experience in efficiency. I must say I was very impressed for every minute of the 45 minutes or so it took. The running commentary was not only informative, it maintained my confidence that things were OK. There were no points at which I wondered whether I'd messed up or the thing was going to hang on me. Both familiar to Amigans no doubt.

Now when the Amiga OS..X gets installed with such panash, The World may Really Know! Let's hope it gets there.

Anyway, I'm still non-plussed over the graphics drivers, but will persist till I'm satisfied I've got the best I can get from Spirantho's generosity. More than that I cannot ask and will trouble you no more on this issue.

Cheers,

JaX