Upgrade Questions

[Dabbler]

I plan to upgrade an old box that I have. Old CPU is Celeron 667/66 working with an 82810E Intel chipset. I don't know what number the board is. The box is so old (2000) that I'm still running Windows 98 SE, although I plan to upgrade to XP when I'm done with the hardware.

I've purchased an Intel D101GGCL mobo, 2.93GHz Celeron D 341 processor, and 512MB DDR 400Mhz PC3200 SDRAM. Assuming form factor compatibility, etc, I have a couple of questions regarding the upgrading process:

1.) Are Windows 98's PCI Steering/PnP capabilities sufficient to completely re-configure my IRQs, DMAs, and port settings? Or should I jot down all my resource settings before installing the board and then go back to manually re-configure to the original settings after the board is installed?

2.) Will the new BIOS Rom automatically detect the proper IDE info for my HDD and optical drives? Or will I need to force-feed the info into the new BIOS by way of a boot disk or something?

3.) Should I anticipate problems running a relatively new cpu/board on such an old OS?

In short, will I be able to mount the board, make the electrical connections, and then sit back and let Windows do the rest? Or am I in for a long haul of re-configuration headaches?

Any help would be sincerely appreciated.

[Snod Blatter]

1) I've managed to do this without problems before now, but of course you may get different results. I also like to boot into safe mode and delete every device under "system devices" before making the switch (in device manager). Otherwise you end up with two of each device, and that can't be good... and 98 is perfectly sufficient with IRQ's and such, in my experience.

2) It should detect them just fine.

3) Some versions of 98 don't like CPU's above 2.4GHz, they throw up a networking related error (I think). MS has a downloadable fix for it, though, so you should be good to go.. as long as you use the Intel INF updater for chipset drivers

[Dabbler]

I hate to seem obtuse, but as you can tell, I'm quite new to some of this. Won't the new BIOS come with the necessary drivers? If not, can I download the proper ones from Intel (the chipset is an ATI Radeon 200)? Finally, will the drivers be compatible with 98?

[786ARS]

microsoft stated that 98 has already been phased out as of '04, and so, you wont be finding many things that support it, i would start a new build, as you will find it hard to put new progs onto it.

[flanzig1]

You may also need to upgrade the power supply. Your system probably came with a 200 to 250w PSU. something in the 325 to 350W range should work.

[glc]

Your new motherboard is not compatible with Windows 98 at ALL, don't even try it. You are looking at a wipe and XP install.