Replies

I have built hundreds of machines now but still fall foul of this, the coolers supplied with athalons (at least where I am) have to be fitted the right way round, they have a step in the base plate that fits over the raised section at the end of the processor socket. The other way round they do tend to overheat, sometimes so fast that the system will not start.

voice modems have the ability to distinguish fax and voice calls and can have an audio input to use as a sort of hands free and answer phone. This will not affect net phone etc as that is controlled by the software that takes your audio data from the soundcard (and hence from the mic) and encodes it for transmission as part of the TCPIP packets you transmit over the net. for example a webcam with a mic allows you to see and hear over the net but does not use any part of the modems voice capability.

There are several IRQ’s that ar classed as system, that is they are reserved for use by default.
3 and 4 are com ports,7 is printer port 1 etc. 14 and 15 are the IDE disk handler, the individual ide channels are 14 and 15 and so their parent device, the disk controler also is listed as using them, ‘cos they are all the same device.
The physical ports at the rear of the machine are the com ports, they are “assigned” IRQ and address by the motherboard bios to give you some flexibility. If you are not using them you can disable them in the bios and, even though they may still be listed as allocated to the ports, you can use them. This is common with modems when they switched from using the ports to being internal.
The other commonly available IRQ’s are 9 and 5. 5 is the second lpt port that is rarely fitted but this is generally picked up by sound cards.
So, if your original modem is on com1 irq 4 then disable com2 (irq3) and use that for a second modem.
It would definately be a bad thing to reassign the IRQ’s for the disk controller, even if it is possible.

It is true that there are two ports and they are allocated the names com 1 and 2, they do share IRQ’s with com 3 and 4 but not base address. I seem to have missed the bit which states that this is a second modem. If they are plugged into real com ports i.e they are external modems then they will obviously use the IRQ for that port, if one is internal (or indeed both are)you could disable the port in bios and use its IRQ

A ups would definitely be the best option in most cases, over and under voltage, spike and power loss protection. The supressed trailing sockets are pretty good but can be expensive for what you get. I live right under the power lines and our mains voltage is a little variable, especially in stormy weather so I use a UPS. The problem with lightning protectors is they tend to be of the fuse variety, when I worked in digital CCTV we fitted them to all units (cameras tend to be on high metal poles or outside buildings)and they had to come back for new ones when they got “hit”. I have seen units for telephone lines to protect the modem and PC but they dont seem to be widely available.

its usually ‘cos they’re linked instead of embedded and the document can’t find the link.

you may well get some RFI interference but you shouldn’t get any spikes or voltage variancies, if you did the Vac manufacturer wouldn’t get the unit past the testing authorities i suspect. almost all power supplies now are auto sensing and adapt to the the input voltage and frequency, this also makes them much more tolerant to input changes and less likely to fail, lightning is a different matter but more of a problem to modems than PSU’s.

irq sharing is common as some devices preclude the use of others or are quite happy to use the same interrupt.
if you’re installing a modem i assume you won’t be using com2 (or 1 if you use a PS2 mouse) so you could disable the port and use its IRQ

are you using any fax software that runs in the background, this holds the modem and waits for incoming calls.

You can convert a drive to FAT32 after installing win98 but not during the setup. If you’ve already formatted the drive then it makes no difference. I would suggest that you run FDisk and select the large disk support option, delete all the partitions, put a new partition on (create primary) and then restart and reformat. If you have to install win 95 before 98 then version A will only give you fat16 and you will have to convert after installing.

Incidentally, if you go into fdisk and remove all partitions and then boot from a setup floppy the setup process will create and format the partition for you.

This sounds very much like you’ll have to format the disk and start over. On the subject of the setup files, if you by a system with the files already installed they are “normally” in windowsoptionscabs, thats where I usually put them too as it appears to be a standard.

This can also be caused by the monitor setting being wrong, if you have selected a standard 640×480 monitor for example you can’t select a higher resolution. You also didn’t mention if the graphics card is built in or seperate.

if the machine is recent enough, and it sounds as though it is, you could boot from the win98SE CD, again by changing the boot order. This will allow you to set up the system. you can also access all the files you require to reformat or fdisk the drive. I have hasd problems in the past with setting up 98 on some systems and the problem can be resolved by using the switches for setup to avoid memory check, disk check etc. To list them boot from the CD and at the prompt type setup /?. If there are any remains of windows then you need to remove the win.com file from the windows directory. This is usefull if you 1. don’t have the original serial number and need to use a new one or 2. if you want to upgrade but leave all the data on a drive intact, eg from 95 to 98 or 98 to 98SE, the only headache being it preserves the file system so a FAT16 disk cannot be converted to fat32 during the install.

yup,
http://www.symantec.com/sabu/ghost/ghost_p…l/features.html
This is the full version but ghost walker will stand alone. most IT depts I have worked for use it for cloning

You can do it with ghost walker from (now) norton. You need to boot from a floppy and the name must be the same length as the original.