[SOLVED] 98se prebuilt

[fastcompany2]

Hi trying to find options here and I've done lots of searching and reading already. I need to put together a PC for a friend to run his Laser etching machine. It uses a pci card to work with the machine. I do not know the specifics as he took his PC to a computer repair shop 2 months ago. What he can tell me is that the newest os that will work is 98 and that the proprietary card is pci. I would like to find an old PC that I could basically just buy and replace some parts. I'm looking for one that would have a standard atx power supply so I could just go ahead and replace it now. Have a sata slot so again I can just put a new hdd in and obviously have some type of 98 support like drivers I can find. I can still buy ddr and ddr2 memory for a good price new so that's not an issue. The oldest pc I have right now is some junky hp with a core 2 duo in it. I put 1 stick of ddr2 1gb memory in and a 500gb hdd. To my surprise 98se installed easy and uses the one gb of ram and sees the whole 500gb hdd. I have pci driver issues and I wasn't trying to fix them as this was just an experiment. I'm only 31 and this is a first time install of 98 for me. Any suggestions? The end result of this would be to get a pc up and running and then build another one exactly the same so he could have a spare.

 

[NightHawkRMX]

Sata and really old? Not happening.

 

[fastcompany2]

Ya well sata is pretty old too. Because I just loaded it on a sata II system leads me to think there is a better system I can do this on vs some random hp that no one bought and has very little online support. I'm a Dell guy but I didn't find what I wanted in the old optiplexs. I found some new ide drives for like 200 bucks. That's just stupid.

 

[Randi Poling]

Ya well sata is pretty old too. Because I just loaded it on a sata II system leads me to think there is a better system I can do this on vs some random hp that no one bought and has very little online support. I'm a Dell guy but I didn't find what I wanted in the old optiplexs. I found some new ide drives for like 200 bucks. That's just stupid.

Hopefully im not rezzzing a dead post? Maybe look into IDE to SD card adapters? Or IDE to SATA adapters?

 

[TerryLaze]

Hopefully im not rezzzing a dead post? Maybe look into IDE to SD card adapters? Or IDE to SATA adapters?

Or just an PCI sata controller card.
https://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?_from=R40&_trksid=m570.l1313&_nkw=PCI+To+SATA+Controller&_sacat=0

fastcompany, core2 is pretty much the newest that will still run win 98 without a lot of problems.
You can get any core2 system you can find,the problem with the PCI you had with yours is going to be pretty much the same with any system,you just have to use the right bios settings,mainly leaving the irq for the PCI port empty so that the card's driver can use this port without conflicts.

I found some new ide drives for like 200 bucks. That's just stupid.

Yeah old new stock is always very expensive.
Used ide drives on the other hand are a dime a dozen.

 

[NightHawkRMX]

View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eDqDIY5NrIA


You can buy a cheap 13 year old prebuilt with something like a Celeron 450 (my first pc had one) or C2D, 1gb or 2gb ram (98 plays nicer with 1gb or less), and any old LGA775 motherboard to have a decent Windows 98 compatable system compatable with a PCI card. This is the best route because LGA775 is still readily available and can be used for a windows XP or 9X build.


The link above is detailing a 775 PC for windows 98 gaming, but as long as the onboard GMA graphics has win98 gfx drivers you can omit the GPU and use it for your purposes.

 

[fastcompany2]

I know it's been a little while since I posted about this but I did build a 98se system for my friend to run his equipment. Used a Dell dimension 4500 P4. Replaced the ide cables,power supply, running 1gb ram,ati32mb GPU and I bought a SSD ide kit from owc. I partitioned a 120gb drive to 80 leaving the rest unallocated . I also got a brand new ide lg DVD burner. Made everything work. USB 2.0 got hid keyboard and mouse drivers and USB mass storage. It all works really fast ,at a decent resolution and he can use flash drives to load image files which is a huge bonus since he was trying to do it with floppy before. This was definitely a project. I have every file I used to do this on one of my machines so I'm going to make a couple backup disc with a long drawn out readme file so someone else or me again in 4 years can fix this thing if it fails.

 

[onespeedbiker]

One thing that was lightly glossed over is Win98 pretty much maxes out with 1 GB RAM. If you try to install more your PC will likely not boot; at least that has been my experience.

 

[fastcompany2]

Ya I read that. I did try anyways though lol. All I have are 1gb sticks of ddr . 1 works 2 doesn't. On that note after a full install of 98 all the software and drivers I wasn't using more than 750mb of the hard drive which is just flat out funny. So technically even over an ide cable I should be able to read every file on the entire system in a few seconds with the SSD. I will say that I'm glad I got a new drive working in this and an SSD at that but there is actually no performance gain I noticed using a SSD over a hdd with 98. Boot times and software load times seem identical. Saying that boot times were pretty damn fast on the 40gb ide hdd that I had. If there was a way to boot it with 2gb of memory and you could make a 1gb ram disk you could actually load whatever the hell you have to it at startup. So totally unnecessary but it would be fun.