A7N266-VM/AA

[jimbo99]

Anyone have experience with this board? I've put together several systems with this board and have had nothing but bad experiences with it.

The first notable thing is that emm386.exe won't load without popping up an error message. Then when doing installs of the drivers from Asus I have had lots of problems. I went looking for some answers and noticed alot of people have problems with this.

One of the first things I noticed were windows protection errors. On 3 different boards in a months time I had Windows protection errors. I managed to overcome them by removing the device referrin to the emm386.exe in the config.sys.

Now normally I would remove the config.sys and autoexec.bat but sometimes I need them to load the dos based CD drivers.

Anyway, I had several other problems with the original Windows 98. I had a customer come in who had upgraded his system and this board was installed. He had the original Win98 CD and couldn't get his Sound nor NIC to function. So, today I spent some time trying to figure it out.

I swapped his HD with one of my spares that I test with and installed from his CD. There was nothing I could do to get the NIC nor sound driver to work. In system properties under the NIC it said that the device had an error code 2 because NDIS.VXD nor NTKERN.VXD could be loaded.

Windows has a driver install problem and doesn't normally install NTKERN.VXD. I searched the new install and that file had not been copied. I used SCF and installed it and rebooted. Same error.

I downloaded the latest drivers from Asus for that board and wiped the install and reinstalled. I copied over the NTKERN.VXD and NDIS.VXD (it was already there) and installed the drivers manually. No luck.

I then decided to wipe the drive again and install XP to see if it would properly install the drivers. This went flawlessly. All components worked perfectly.

I then decided to wipe the drive again and this time used the Win98 SE disc. This went flawlessly and all the components worked perfectly.

This told me there was a problem with the original Win98 and this board and/or a driver issue from Asus.

I'm going to back this guys drive up and then delete the win.ini and win.com and see if Win98 SE will install over his original.

Anyone else discover this or have any other interesting things I should know about this board?

 

[Teq]

Well, there is a reason why MS no longer supports the original win98. Technology has moved on, you will find a lot of stuff that doesn't work with older OSs, more as time goes on.

For example: DOS and Win95 won't even spark up on an AMD chip.



<b>(</b>It ain't better if it don't work.<b>)</b>

 

[fiask0]

I built one of these boards for my friend, using an xp 1700 thoroughbred. It's an awesome board, but he's running windows XP. He does alot of dvd-ripping, some video editing and it works perfectly.

 

[Spitfire_x86]

nForce (1) boards have many problems with Win98. They work perfectly with WinMe, Win2000, WinXP.

Telling this from my MSI K7N420 Pro experience (nForce 420-D)

<b> "You can put lipstick on a pig, but hey, it's still a pig!" - RobD </b>

 

[YATLA]

I built one and it was simple and worked first time. It works great with WinXP. I'd recommended it for a value system if you're installing WinXP.

 

[Spitfire_x86]

It will be alsoi fine with WinME, Win2000 and Linux

<b> "You can put lipstick on a pig, but hey, it's still a pig!" - RobD </b>

 

[jimbo99]

While testing with Win98SE all the drivers work OK. There is a continuing problem.

Periodically, on startup, I get a blue-screen exception error. Other then that, the computer seems to work fine. Not that I want to use Win98se but the customer won't authorize paying for the upgrade. So, any ideas or explanations on how to rid the computer of this error would be greatly appreciated.