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Dell Precision M70 with Win98. Possible?


Asomodai

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Hello all. 

I am a proud owner of a D600 I managed to get running with the help of people from here and Vogons. 

I was looking through what other laptops I could pick up cheaply and get 98 SE running on it. 

I see alot of posts about D610's and D810's. Though very few on the Precision M70, has anyone tried to get 98 running on it?

http://www.dell.com/downloads/global/products/precn/en/spec_precn_m70_en.pdf

In theory it is possible. 915PM Chipset, IDE Drive, Sigmatel STAC 975X AC97. However I am not sure about the Nvidia Go1400 Graphics card. (Based on a Go6800). I can find drivers for 98 with the desktop 6800, but not anything specifically for the mobile versions. The alternative is to softmod the 1400 to a 6800, I think there are drivers for 6800? Also it is an MXM 3 based connection which is PCIE Will this be a problem?

Is there anything else I should watch out for before taking the plunge? Is the 915PM Chipset drivers or workaround stable?

Cheers!

Edited by Asomodai
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I don't see anything outstanding that should be a problem from the spec sheet you gave. However with laptops and 9x it's very much a game of Russian roulette. I certainly was disappointed when my HP ZD8000 plans fell through. Everything seems to have working drivers (although I didn't get to test them all) except the Radeon Mobility X600 video. Nothing works correctly with it, not even VBE9X. I hope Mobile NVidia chips are more cooperative.

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On 1/23/2017 at 4:39 AM, Asomodai said:

Hello all. 

I am a proud owner of a D600 I managed to get running with the help of people from here and Vogons. 

I was looking through what other laptops I could pick up cheaply and get 98 SE running on it. 

I see alot of posts about D610's and D810's. Though very few on the Precision M70, has anyone tried to get 98 running on it?

http://www.dell.com/downloads/global/products/precn/en/spec_precn_m70_en.pdf

In theory it is possible. 915PM Chipset, IDE Drive, Sigmatel STAC 975X AC97. However I am not sure about the Nvidia Go1400 Graphics card. (Based on a Go6800). I can find drivers for 98 with the desktop 6800, but not anything specifically for the mobile versions. The alternative is to softmod the 1400 to a 6800, I think there are drivers for 6800? Also it is an MXM 3 based connection which is PCIE Will this be a problem?

Is there anything else I should watch out for before taking the plunge? Is the 915PM Chipset drivers or workaround stable?

Cheers!

the m70 seems to be even faster than the nw8240 i just worked with, making it the fastest 98SE compatible laptop i've seen, though, that is if you can the gpu part to work, at least through a external monitor which had to be done on the nw8240 as i couldn't get display on the laptop screen after installing a modified catalyst 4.11 installation ( inf editing ). i would assume the unofficial forceware 82.69 may work for the fx go 1400 that is based on the go 6800, as the 6 series were the last officially supported and the package allows up to 7 series nvidia and up to 256 MB video memory based systems to work fine without needing extra work or patches to be done, many 7 series nvidia cards have been known to work fine if they don't use more than 256 MB of video memory, however i'm not sure. 

the 915pm indeed is one of the picky chipsets for 98SE but IS supported officially by intel, it just may be harder to get running properly or stable on 98SE. you may have to install with acpi disabled "setup /p i" or some other installation process, i had to use "setup /ip" ( bypass unsupported plug and play devices ) for the nw8240 because "setup /p i" wouldn't allow finishing of setup and would constantly freeze and reboot on the plug and play installation / configuration part.

the official site lists the dell wireless 1370 as supported on the m70 and so you should have better luck possibly with this laptop than the nw8240 that doesn't officially accept my dell wireless 1370 mini pci card for the wifi part as there is a driver for 98SE for the 1370 card with an appropriate wifi utility to connect up to wpa2 based connections using wpa-aes, wpa-psk, etc. i'm not sure why i didn't test the m70 instead of the nw8240, i guess i couldn't find any ones for sale in decent shape or price for me or perhaps some other compatibility issue. i guess another issue may arrive from the video memory being high, i think some people mentioned having problems with gpu's with large video memory sizes ( more than 128 MB ) on laptops. 

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3 hours ago, cov3rt said:

the m70 seems to be even faster than the nw8240 i just worked with, making it the fastest 98SE compatible laptop i've seen, though, that is if you can the gpu part to work, at least through a external monitor which had to be done on the nw8240 as i couldn't get display on the laptop screen after installing a modified catalyst 4.11 installation ( inf editing ). i would assume the unofficial forceware 82.69 may work for the fx go 1400 that is based on the go 6800, as the 6 series were the last officially supported and the package allows up to 7 series nvidia and up to 256 MB video memory based systems to work fine without needing extra work or patches to be done, many 7 series nvidia cards have been known to work fine if they don't use more than 256 MB of video memory, however i'm not sure. 

the 915pm indeed is one of the picky chipsets for 98SE but IS supported officially by intel, it just may be harder to get running properly or stable on 98SE. you may have to install with acpi disabled "setup /p i" or some other installation process, i had to use "setup /ip" ( bypass unsupported plug and play devices ) for the nw8240 because "setup /p i" wouldn't allow finishing of setup and would constantly freeze and reboot on the plug and play installation / configuration part.

the official site lists the dell wireless 1370 as supported on the m70 and so you should have better luck possibly with this laptop than the nw8240 that doesn't officially accept my dell wireless 1370 mini pci card for the wifi part as there is a driver for 98SE for the 1370 card with an appropriate wifi utility to connect up to wpa2 based connections using wpa-aes, wpa-psk, etc. i'm not sure why i didn't test the m70 instead of the nw8240, i guess i couldn't find any ones for sale in decent shape or price for me or perhaps some other compatibility issue. i guess another issue may arrive from the video memory being high, i think some people mentioned having problems with gpu's with large video memory sizes ( more than 128 MB ) on laptops. 

Hiya. 

Hopefully iI'll have less troubles with force ware then you did with catalyst. I set out to find the highest spec laptop possible that had a chance of working. Guess I may have found it!

With the VRAM issues. Is this not just linked to the Ram limit of Win98? I do have RLOEW paid ram patch which may solve the issue. 

I haven't used switches like that. Are those used when installing the video driver? Hopefully I will aquire the laptop next week.

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3 hours ago, Asomodai said:

Hiya. 

Hopefully iI'll have less troubles with force ware then you did with catalyst. I set out to find the highest spec laptop possible that had a chance of working. Guess I may have found it!

With the VRAM issues. Is this not just linked to the Ram limit of Win98? I do have RLOEW paid ram patch which may solve the issue. 

I haven't used switches like that. Are those used when installing the video driver? Hopefully I will aquire the laptop next week.

those switches are used when running setup to install the operating system, so if you normally just type setup in dos prompt, you may have to run one of those switches i mentioned, though it may or may not be needed depending on the laptop. for the dell latitude d810, i was able to get it working properly with either ACPI enabled or disabled, however, my last experimenting with the d810 only yielded successful operation with ACPI disabled which you would run at the dos mode after formatting the drive and then you would type "setup /p i". the route i install with 98SE is the ms dos install without floppy way with a cd, i use the same method with windows 95 osr 2.5. i am not aware of the video ram limit in relation to 98's ram limit. rloew has several patches that apply to many different things, it's possible the rloew ram patch you have may help with the video ram issues or there may be a more specific patch that he offers that is supposed to fix it. 

other than that, there may be some things you need to manually do like setting resources, unchecking a device in device manager and finding a free resource or changing configuration type or editing some inf files to properly detect devices during driver installation. my only experience with the unofficial forceware 82.69 driver was that i used it for a geforce 7300 gs or gt with 256 MB of video memory and it installed the driver and it worked fine, although from what i remember, it was a pain in the a** to get it to work due to resource problems or configuring, however the person i gave it to later on also mentioned that the gpu driver wasn't working with several resource problems, i believed the reason to this could've been explained from a worn out cmos battery but also from the nature of 98SE that can run erratically or sketchy sometimes. i would assume resource problems would be less of a problem or with the previous generation gpu's like the fx go 1400 or 6 series nvidia mobile versions but i really don't know. 

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  • 3 weeks later...

I just got done installing Win98SE on a Dimension 2400 -- 845 chipset. Dell supported that chipset for Win 98 but Dell did not so the same sorts of issues came up. Most of it was straightforward; the integrated graphics was the one exception. Doing a straight Win SETUP I had memory conflicts between the graphic adapter and ACPI; there's no access to the ACPI allocations and although SOME of the graphic allocations can be changed, there's one that can't. The solution was (as above) to use SETUP /p i -- must be a space between p & i because the 'i' is a param passed to whatever the 'p' invokes. This eliminates the ACPI and the graphics adapter then works fine.

A search for 'win98 setup switches' will find an explanation of what they all do. There's a BUNCH of them.

The reason I installed Win98 on this machine again was that I discovered that solid state HDDs are now frequently under $10 for devices that are plenty big enough for a '98 system -- 2Gb is ample. If you're going to have Win 98 run on a 2.4 gHz machine (for the Dim 2400), might as well have a SSD too. The ones I've seen are all SATA devices but a PATA to SATA adapter that will fit a 3.5 in. drive bay is just another $10. There are no tricks to this: Windows doesn't seem to know that it's not on a hard drive.

Edited by waltah
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On 2/15/2017 at 5:33 PM, waltah said:

I just got done installing Win98SE on a Dimension 2400 -- 845 chipset. Dell supported that chipset for Win 98 but Dell did not so the same sorts of issues came up. Most of it was straightforward; the integrated graphics was the one exception. Doing a straight Win SETUP I had memory conflicts between the graphic adapter and ACPI; there's no access to the ACPI allocations and although SOME of the graphic allocations can be changed, there's one that can't. The solution was (as above) to use SETUP /p i -- must be a space between p & i because the 'i' is a param passed to whatever the 'p' invokes. This eliminates the ACPI and the graphics adapter then works fine.

A search for 'win98 setup switches' will find an explanation of what they all do. There's a BUNCH of them.

The reason I installed Win98 on this machine again was that I discovered that solid state HDDs are now frequently under $10 for devices that are plenty big enough for a '98 system -- 2Gb is ample. If you're going to have Win 98 run on a 2.4 gHz machine (for the Dim 2400), might as well have a SSD too. The ones I've seen are all SATA devices but a PATA to SATA adapter that will fit a 3.5 in. drive bay is just another $10. There are no tricks to this: Windows doesn't seem to know that it's not on a hard drive.

it may have been better to post this in a separate thread / other thread, however i can answer some questions from your post, 98SE seems to do best and fine up till ich5 or 865 chipsets, ich6 is officially supported but tends to be harder to setup, both stability wise and driver wise, the dell dimension 2400 is actually fairly easy to get working with 98SE, i think i remember actually trying to get it fully working on windows 95 osr 2.5 but never got the gpu driver to properly work despite many sites mentioning win95 as a drop list in the driver section specifically towards the 845 graphics, it could perhaps have to do with the ACPI part which you mentioned was the solution to the gpu part, i remembered a problem where i eventually got the driver to install, however dxdiag showed it using something like 9 MB of video memory or some very low number, i don't remember if it was the dell dimension 2400 but it was either a laptop or desktop with 845 chipset and graphics. i didn't bother with using the 845 graphics on 98SE anyways up to this point because of not only the unsuccessful attempts in getting it to work properly but also the poor performance of the integrated gpu itself. i've been only focusing on the fast gpu's like the mobility x600, geforce lineup with official drivers, etc.

for the solid state drive part, you don't necessarily have to get an adapter, you can actually get one of those pata dom drives ( disk on module drives ) which are essentially 40 pin pata solid state drives that plug into a typical desktop motherboard and come with a power source which is a molex power connection, i recommend the 32 GB one, although a bit expensive, the reason why i recommend specifically a 32 GB one or up to 32 GB is because of some weird bug that shows up ( in my experience ) when you have a primary storage partition of larger than 32 GB and more than 384 MB of system ram on 98SE that causes virtual memory to become disabled and the main drive runs in compatibility mode, making usability almost useless ( you can't open and work with most programs ), however if the partition size is limited to just under 32 GB, you can then have up to about 1 GB of system ram and won't have the bug either. i haven't seen anyone else mention this specific problem, however i thought of mentioning again anyways. 

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  • 1 month later...

i went ahead and got the dell precision m70 myself. so far, configuring and setting up the laptop has went pretty smoothly and quickly. it has been one of the easier 915PM chipset laptops i got working on 98SE. i did install with ACPI disabled, "setup /p i". other things were setting usb emulation to off in bios, setting video to onboard video. i was initially gonna try out the unofficial 82.69 driver for the fx go 1400 gpu, but i went another route to which i believed would work better possibly, which was to use the official forceware 66.94 driver and manually select the geforce 6800 since i read somewhere that a similar approach was done, just for different reasons on a different os, and it worked! selecting "NVIDIA GeForce 6800" in the devices shown in device manager installation steps through the have disk way worked after restarting the system, a new monitor was detected and resolution and functionality has been fine so far, showing 240 MB of video memory in dxdiag, resolution can be set up to 1280x800 with 32 bit color mode which i currently have it at and offers a good resolution, not too small where it's hard to see things on the screen but not too big where you have to scroll a little more around the screen to get to something, etc. 

i am still updating the system, basically all drivers are working, the dell truemobile 1370 ( bcm4318 ) mini pci card is accepted, i just haven't installed the driver or ran the odyssey client 4.56 ( would be first time using this wireless client ). so far, this is the fastest laptop that i've been able to successfully get pretty much full support for it in 98SE, it's also nice because it doesn't run too loud either, the cpu/gpu fans run at a steady acceptable noise level. i suppose it would've been better if i got it to work with ACPI enabled so that the battery status can show, but that's left for some other experiment.

Edited by cov3rt
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i ran into an unfortunate problem, the bcm4318 mini pci wifi card seems to prevent the system from booting into windows after driver installation. everything else was fine, except for the wifi part. could it perhaps be a faulty driver or resource conflict? i noticed when trying to install the driver again, it installed it all the way but freezed the system so i had to manually turn it off but still would take hours to try to get to boot into windows where i had to just turn off the laptop or go into safe mode and remove the driver references which then allowed booting back to normal windows mode. i believe i used problemchyld's driver, im not sure if i spelled the person's name right but i obtained it from him i think from a different forum, it may have been a modified version? i was thinking of using a different driver version. interestingly, i had gotten this same driver working though on a different laptop, so i'm not sure why im getting the problems im getting on this laptop. 

any thoughts or solutions on this? also just now i just tested the ethernet which worked fine with firefox 3.5.19, however when going on youtube and trying to load a video, it wouldn't and just stayed black. i have kernelex 4.5.2 installed with the latest update i believe with adobe flash player 11.1.102.63 non IE, this flash version was the newest one i got to work in the past with kernelex 4.5.2 so i always used it, however it doesn't work anymore today. 

Edited by cov3rt
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good update, i have gotten youtube videos to play now on firefox 3.5.19 with flash 11.1.102.63 non IE by following a solution provided in another thread. basically, you just need to type ""&nohtml5=1" without the quotes at the end of each youtube video, press enter, and upon the new page, it should automatically load videos or have the option to play them. i was thinking this same method would also work on windows 95 with the flash 7 spoof plug in or nt 4.0 with flash 8 ( requires other modification too ), as youtube did stop working with the flash 7 spoof on windows 95 a while ago too, i didn't test nt 4.0 for a while but i would assume the solution may work on both OS, unfortunately, the wifi problem is still there when installing the driver for the bcm4318 mini pci card ( dell truemobile 1370 ), it prevents the system from booting and will just sit at the splash screen for hours, although eventually it goes to the other screen where it mentions Wbem in the c: drive, but still sitting for long periods where i had to shut down the system or restart. i was gonna test another card, some toshiba mini pci card, but that card's antenna ports were too far from the laptop's antennas, even though the card was accepted, and the card is one of those cards that requires an extra cardbus driver but installing that causes a resource conflict where you can't use it unless the original cardbus controller of the laptop is disabled and doesn't have the driver installed. 

i can't think of any other cards that would support wpa2, i don't remember if the intel pro 2100 supports wsc gaurd 4.0, and i never tried it with oddyssey client 4.56, because i was thinking of trying the intel pro 2100 as i usually used this card often in my laptops, there is the cardbus route, but i don't like the practicality of cardbus because of it sticking out from the laptop, being less secure physically, and taking up a slot when someone can use it for something else while having wifi in the mini pci slot. there is some other cards that i could test, although some of them are in the same family and i feel like it would less likely to work if i tried a different card in the same family such as the dell truemobile 1390, driver version "3.90.38.0" was said to work with wsc gaurd 4.0 i believe from one source. one random card that isn't in the same family as those broadcom is the "TNETW1130" model, which uses the hardware id "PCI\VEN_104C&DEV_9066"

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On 4/2/2017 at 0:28 PM, cov3rt said:

 unfortunately, the wifi problem is still there when installing the driver for the bcm4318 mini pci card ( dell truemobile 1370 ), it prevents the system from booting and will just sit at the splash screen for hours, although eventually it goes to the other screen where it mentions Wbem in the c: drive, but still sitting for long periods where i had to shut down the system or restart.

I know of one solution, but it requires rloew's ram limitation patch..."run the command line option with "/M" with the patch as the Network card takes up the first 16mb of ram which causes boot failures."
This card isn't the best for use on 9x due to being meant for W2K and later, but its probably the only option for WPA2 (If you use odyssey client)

Make sure to enable ACPI once everything is setup if you want Win98 to display a battery meter :)

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18 hours ago, ~♥Aiko♥Chan♥~ said:

I know of one solution, but it requires rloew's ram limitation patch..."run the command line option with "/M" with the patch as the Network card takes up the first 16mb of ram which causes boot failures."
This card isn't the best for use on 9x due to being meant for W2K and later, but its probably the only option for WPA2 (If you use odyssey client)

Make sure to enable ACPI once everything is setup if you want Win98 to display a battery meter :)

thanks for the information, i do not have the rloew patch and don't have any plans on using it yet, however if i do, i will use take this info into consideration. there was actually another card i just purchased that is on the way to test on the m70, it is a mini pci card based on the rtl8185 chipset which i read that one of the regular pci wireless cards with the same chipset could connect to wpa2 so i am hoping the same can be done with the mini pci version, however there is a chance that either the card won't even be accepted by the m70 and / or the driver will cause the similar hanging problem and / or even if there is no hanging problem, i may not be able to connect to a wpa2 router or use wpa2 settings,  ( i will be testing odyssey client 4.56 with all this ). 

you mentioned the ACPI part, i actually didn't realize you could just enable ACPI after installing the os for the battery part. i could google search it and find out, however, do you know yourself on specifically how to do this? could anything go wrong? also do you know if this boot problem or boot failures are only specific to the bcm4318 ( dell truemobile 1370 ), or if it is common problem in the entire family and / or the specific driver version being used, such as the dell truemobile 1390 or 1150? this is mainly why i bought the rtl8185 card because i felt like if was gonna test something different, that it would be something that is in a different family of network cards and uses a different driver. i used driver version "3.104.64.52" for the bcm4318 card i have with hardware id of "PCI\VEN_14E4&DEV_4318".

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11 minutes ago, cov3rt said:

thanks for the information, i do not have the rloew patch and don't have any plans on using it yet, however if i do, i will use take this info into consideration. there was actually another card i just purchased that is on the way to test on the m70, it is a mini pci card based on the rtl8185 chipset which i read that one of the regular pci wireless cards with the same chipset could connect to wpa2 so i am hoping the same can be done with the mini pci version, however there is a chance that either the card won't even be accepted by the m70 and / or the driver will cause the similar hanging problem and / or even if there is no hanging problem, i may not be able to connect to a wpa2 router or use wpa2 settings,  ( i will be testing odyssey client 4.56 with all this ). 

you mentioned the ACPI part, i actually didn't realize you could just enable ACPI after installing the os for the battery part. i could google search it and find out, however, do you know yourself on specifically how to do this? could anything go wrong? also do you know if this boot problem or boot failures are only specific to the bcm4318 ( dell truemobile 1370 ), or if it is common problem in the entire family and / or the specific driver version being used, such as the dell truemobile 1390 or 1150? this is mainly why i bought the rtl8185 card because i felt like if was gonna test something different, that it would be something that is in a different family of network cards and uses a different driver. i used driver version "3.104.64.52" for the bcm4318 card i have with hardware id of "PCI\VEN_14E4&DEV_4318".

Sorry, I honestly don't know how the card exactly works...on the vogons.org forum I searched for help and assisted a few to install 9x on a D600. One of the members brought up he "broke down and paid for the patch" then mentioned the fix for the boot failure.

How to enable ACPI after installation

Edited by ~♥Aiko♥Chan♥~
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yeh i had tried that method you gave to enable ACPI before and it didn't really go too well this time either, it didn't detect anything new and so i manually had selected the ACPI 2004 bios option which did detect new things, but after restarting the system several times and trying to follow directions such as removing duplicate entries, all it did was create a mess and make it more complicated to work with the system and fix things.

right now i erased the storage and starting out fresh, im trying to see if i can install with the default ACPI enabled, so running without "setup /p i" and simply running setup.  

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so now i have the system installed with the default ACPI enabled and got everything working well with the bonus of the battery status showing now, only the wifi card is incomplete which i am waiting for the arrival of the rtl8185 mini pci card to test instead of the bcm4318mpg rev4 model. i was gonna see if anyone knows the latest driver version for the rtl8185 that works on 98SE or just any of them that they have experience as testing working, the regular hardware id is "PCI\VEN_10EC&DEV_8185", driver version "5.1114.0917.2009" was the last one i had checked that had windows 9x in the inf file, but the folder i got it from was labeled XP, the last one i checked that specifically was inside a folder with W98 labeled for it was "5.1103.1210.2007"

there were some manual things i needed to do after installing with the default ACPI being enabled, however it wasn't too difficult and was able to fix them ( not easy on every laptop ) which was resource problems related to the hard disk controller, display adapter and system board extension for ACPI bios, you have to remove the usb entries and controllers in safe mode though as it freezes for the pci universal serial bus controller in other devices, i did this for both the chipset inf update portion and unofficial usb mass storage devices. so you just need to have copied the inf update and unofficial usb updates into the storage somewhere, remove any usb entries, and run the updates, obviously going with the chipset inf update first, completing everything, restarting and proceeding onto the unofficial usb one later on ( depending on how you update your system ). 

for the others related to ACPI:

. you may get duplicate entries in device manager, if there are two display adapters, remove the
working display adapter, restart the system, it will re detect a monitor, then device manager should be rid of 
conflicts for the display adapter portion
. for the system board extension for acpi bios, note of which entry has the yellow exclamation mark with the 
resource conflict in device manager, go into safe mode and set configuration for the device where it has the 
message that this device is currently enabled or has a problem, then restart the computer and it should get rid 
of the resource conflict. 

it is not required to disable ACPI, however if you wish to install 98SE with ACPI disabled, run "setup /p i". 
this will prevent the battery status from working. 

if there is a resource conflict for the ultra ata storage controller after
doing a chipset inf update, change the controller to the primary ide controller,
restart system, then go to the add new hardware wizard, select no and have 
windows search for the device, click finish at the end, you should now have
both the optical drive and storage device visible with no resource conflicts. 


 

Edited by cov3rt
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