Since drivers for optical drives never need to be installed, (outside of Windows), a fair but fuzzy guess/ observation seems to be that the driver issue is different for different hardware.
In my G41 chipset machine, I had to install the Realtek audio drivers since I had no sound in Win & Media Center.! This despite that Win 7 "alleged that M$ generic sound drivers were installed. As you know, those drivers would have to be installed via floppy in XP. With that said in my H55 board, that drivers that Win 7 installed actually run the SATA drives as AHCI. Well Rit, I'm not exactly sure the Windows "generic" drivers work in all capacities.
It would be more informative if you could be specific about the board's actual chipset number, rather than the component controller hubs.Īgain, if this is in fact Intel 915, I've run the "Vista Upgrade Adviser" on my 915 board, and was informed that Vista would not be supported.
These boards are mostly at the five + year old mark It's also only 32 bit and can't be used with even later Pentium 4 CPUs, such as the "Cedar Mill" cores. This is obsolete hardware, and I'm sort of surprised that you state it at 3 years of age. I do not know how far forward in time Intel carried these numbers, but I do know that by the 965 chipsets, the ICH7 was the southbridge. The 82915 number you quote is the memory controller hub (northbridge), and 82801FB is the I/O controller hub (ICH6) or "southbridge". Drivers were not made available for Vista, nor will they likely be available for Win 7. If this is the case, Windows 7 is pretty much out of the question. INF's.If I'm correct about the number "chipset" you've quoted, you actually have an Intel 915 chipset board. The real problem would seem to be finding drivers for video, sound, ethernet, and other integrated devices that actually have driver files other than. SYS files or the like that would require Windows 2K/XP for compatibility. INF's to be 9x-compatible (as xrayer has done), because the only purpose they are serving is to specifically identify the devices on the motherboard. Unless I'm missing something here, all one should have to do is modify the. It looks like all this package (and the last working package for 9x) contains is a bunch of. INF files have "Signature="$Windows NT$"" and the package makes no mention of 9x/ME anywhere inside. I extracted the package with Universal Extractor on an XP machine. It would have to be done by someone who has one of said chipsets. Whether they could be "modded" and used is apparently still up for debate. sadly, the INF's in the package are all 2K and up (depending on the INF). Even if it were detected there'd still be that matter of drivers. That's not to mention the sound card, even though hdaudbus.sys is working, the sound card still isn't even detected. I suspect other issues would come up for graphic intensive games, and serious high-res videos. A Google search backs up that assumption (hardware acceleration isn't being truly disabled). You can see in that post that I'm having issues with Firefox 10.x ESR, although I suspect part of that is poor coding on Mozilla's part. I've been content to build all of my 9x systems with 845/865/875 chipsets so I haven't looked into the issue before.) (Sorry I don't have more to add at the moment guys, I need to see if I have any hardware laying around that uses these chipsets and find the time to do some testing.
I've been content to build all of my 9x systems with 845/865/875 chipsets so I haven't looked into the issue before.) Edited Septemby LoneCrusader It's a good driver, and has many uses, but the lack of being able to use non-full screen DOS boxes is an irritating problem. I would consider having to use the VBE9X driver a serious limitation. One for "working" hardware that can run, but doesn't have a full set of drivers, and another for "compatible" hardware that has a full set of drivers.
IMO there should be two separate categories here.
I have to use Bearwindows VBEMP 9x driver for the video card and the hard drive is in compatibility mode (which could be remedied with Rloew's SATA patch or an IDE hard drive). I did not mention that I found a driver for the NIC card in the post linked to. "Working" and having proper drivers for the chipset designed for a particular OS can be two different things.įYI, my Intel 945GCT-M3 motherboard is working just fine (98SE) with the only exception being the soundcard. The question that comes to my mind is how do "we" define compatible.