As I mentioned in an earlier post, I’ve been fixing PCs on the side–so far all Windows machines, little wonder that is–and I have finally reached my threshold for the 9x family. Yesterday I picked up a Windows 98 machine that the owner wanted upgraded to 98 SE, they had a disc why they waited some seven years is another question, and they wanted it cleaned of malware and viruses. No big deal, right? Wrong. The machine was infested, badly, and I estimated it would be a 10 hour cleaning at my hourly rate which would be a giant bill. So I offered the next best solution, for a flat fee I would supply another hard drive with 98 SE installed and service packed, as well as installing a 60 day trial of Norton AV (yes, root kits and all), Firefox, Spybot, and Open Office. Sounds good so far. Wrong again.

The trouble I’m encountering is that 9x’s hardware support is even worse than nearly all of the Linux distros I have used and this is the hardware original to the machine. Add the fact that it is some exotic Dell build when they were using ATA/66 PCI controller cards rather than having it burned on the board is a recipe for disaster. The first hurdle was to just get the new disc formated and the OS strapped. It was not happening on the Dell because the install disc would choke when trying to communicate with the drive. So I had to fish out another plain box and perform all the tasks up to the reboot at which point I needed to yank it and drop it back into the Dell. Working that out took some 3 hours of trial and error with the majority of errors being carbon based. Next up, drivers.

Thankfully, Dell’s service numbering system works like a charm and I was able to track down nearly all the drivers, excepting those that the owner added later. However, actually installing them in another matter as 98 wants to keep referring back to the source disc to crack open CABs for this and that which 9 times out of 10 results in it saying the driver was installed when actually it was not. I’m down to the network card and some bizarro PCI bus issue which I’m guessing is the chipset but with each attempt and subsequent failure I’m watching my GP nosedive.

But hey, Redmond, keep it up!  You are helping keep my wife in shoes with your crufted up, broken ass OSes and she thanks you for it!