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Dell Precision M70 with Win98. Possible?


Asomodai

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very good news, the rtl8185 mini pci card works using driver version "5.1103.1210.2007" and can connect to routers using wpa2 settings with the odyssey client manager 4.56. the wireless utility is very nice and easy to use. 

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Quite annoyed starting this thread now! The M70 I ordered turned out to be a complete dud, Here I was thinking I would be the first to put Win98 on what is likely the most powerful laptop capable of supporting it and Cov3rt here has managed to pretty much crack it! 

Ah well at least someone here can claim the honour ;)

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  • 3 years later...

Just like cov3rt, I went ahead and purchased a M70 to install Windows ME on.

The setup process was a bit of a hassle. The official intel INF drivers didn't work. I installed the ICH7 drivers from lonecrusader and the proved to be a fatal mistake: attempting to even change resources would crash the system!

But, LoneCrusader's ICH6 drivers worked just fine :)

The sigmatel ac97 audio driver I used for my D600 did not work for this laptop, so I used this as a last resort...and it worked :DDDDD It also gave me a free USB driver and the communications driver too :3

I think I had an intel wireless pro, so I had no drivers for those. Went back to my RTL card (same model that cov3rt has) and drivers installed. It doesn't connect oddly, but I think my card is just broken; it would randomly time out last time I used it a few months ago.

Now, the video was a bit tricky. The thing would not work unless I used the unofficial NVIDA drivers. After installing it, I could utilize the graphics cards' full screen resolution! :) I also had to install rloew's shutdown patch because it had shutdown issues. But besides that, this was totally worth the 30 bucks off ebay <3

GOM Player IS running, faststone capture just doesn't capture the video playing in Windows 9x.

5kinEal.png
 

Edited by FantasyAcquiesce
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  • 5 months later...

Hmmm, after trying to reinstall Windows ME, I've come across and issue that is preventing me from doing so:

After installing the INF chipset drivers by lonecrusader, the OS' resources are stuck conflicting. Attempting to change the resources ends up in a "disk write error" and does not proceed with changing the settings.

Does anyone have any idea what this could be?

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On 4/21/2020 at 4:55 AM, FantasyAcquiesce said:

Just like cov3rt, I went ahead and purchased a M70 to install Windows ME on.

Interesting, very useful. I was inspired months ago by this topic to grab a M70 myself & your experience finally gave me that push to actually proceed with it.

I bought a RTL8185L based on recommendations here, sadly my BIOS cannot recognize it and after a few power-ons the system refuses to POST with that card in (possibly defective?), so I put the included Wireless 1370 back in, which maybe I'll have better luck with once I get hold of the ideal 9x driver.

With a 60GB partition placed on my spare and stupidly overkill 256 gig mSATA SSD in a mSATA to IDE converter and a gig of dual channel ram (don't think i'm ready to go higher), I've managed to get 98SE installed with ACPI, no flags or nothing, so far working flawlessly, even with DMA enabled! I fixed all the device manager hardware duplicates+conflicts as per cov3rt's instructions and now ready to install drivers.

I downloaded a copy of that 100000 driver pack you used, burned to disk and managed to use it on 3 (USB, Audio, and one other thing) of those 5 Found New Hardware screens that showed pre-login. Now, Device Manager's showing Ethernet and Network Adapter (probably wifi) with exclamation marks, however I gotta feeling I need more than just that considering I still don't even have proper video yet.

Whenever logged into W98, I hear a very faint high-pitched buzzing noise from the laptop, which makes me wonder if I'm missing some chipset-like driver (assuming I need one) that deals with power management. I'm a little confused about your mention of LoneCrusader's ICH6 driver, does this require me to modify the Windows 98 ISO and re-install the OS from scratch, assuming I still need this?

There seems to be conflicting opinions on whether to go with official 66.94 or unofficial 82.69 Nvidia drivers. A friend tells me that 81.98 is the last official driver and is recommended for a geforce 6800 in 9x; I'd like to think this is worth trying first but I'm not completely sure yet.

After I get the drivers, I'll run June 2007 Autopatcher for updates and usability patches. After this, I assume I'd be ready to go

Edited by Ray890
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On 10/10/2020 at 7:41 PM, Ray890 said:

Interesting, very useful. I was inspired months ago by this topic to grab a M70 myself & your experience finally gave me that push to actually proceed with it.

I bought a RTL8185L based on recommendations here, sadly my BIOS cannot recognize it and after a few power-ons the system refuses to POST with that card in (possibly defective?), so I put the included Wireless 1370 back in, which maybe I'll have better luck with once I get hold of the ideal 9x driver.

With a 60GB partition placed on my spare and stupidly overkill 256 gig mSATA SSD in a mSATA to IDE converter and a gig of dual channel ram (don't think i'm ready to go higher), I've managed to get 98SE installed with ACPI, no flags or nothing, so far working flawlessly, even with DMA enabled! I fixed all the device manager hardware duplicates+conflicts as per cov3rt's instructions and now ready to install drivers.

I downloaded a copy of that 100000 driver pack you used, burned to disk and managed to use it on 3 (USB, Audio, and one other thing) of those 5 Found New Hardware screens that showed pre-login. Now, Device Manager's showing Ethernet and Network Adapter (probably wifi) with exclamation marks, however I gotta feeling I need more than just that considering I still don't even have proper video yet.

Whenever logged into W98, I hear a very faint high-pitched buzzing noise from the laptop, which makes me wonder if I'm missing some chipset-like driver (assuming I need one) that deals with power management. I'm a little confused about your mention of LoneCrusader's ICH6 driver, does this require me to modify the Windows 98 ISO and re-install the OS from scratch, assuming I still need this?

There seems to be conflicting opinions on whether to go with official 66.94 or unofficial 82.69 Nvidia drivers. A friend tells me that 81.98 is the last official driver and is recommended for a geforce 6800 in 9x; I'd like to think this is worth trying first but I'm not completely sure yet.

After I get the drivers, I'll run June 2007 Autopatcher for updates and usability patches. After this, I assume I'd be ready to go

No, you simply apply the INF6 files to hard disks in device manager.

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