Windows ME wifi

[Matthew Renna]

I'm building a retro pc with a p4 HT 2.8ghz, an FX 5700 ultra, and 3 gigs of ram
Are there any wifi cards that you could think of that support windows ME because I've only found one.
Also, is there a way to make windows ME able to work with that much ram?
I'm gonna use ME by the way because when I had that fx 5700 ultra with a in 98 build, whenever I installed the card drivers, the pc would not boot unless I went in safe mode and removed the drivers.

 

[boosted1g]

why dont you just use powerline adapter to have ethernet and skip the problem all together.

 

[Phillip Corcoran]

I suggest you have a re-think about the OS you're going to use - - ME is a terrible choice for anyone.

Don't use anything earlier than XP (which is what ME should have been except XP wasn't ready then so Microsoft released ME as a stop-gap, one of the worst decisions they ever made). You'd be landing yourself with endless amounts of hassle & frustration if you go with ME.

 

[Matthew Renna]

Well I'm gonna install xp on another drive, I wanted to put ME on antoerh drive just for fun

 

[Matthew Renna]

I was thinking about wifi because I found an extremely cheap adapter that I think would work
https://www.amazon.com/Belkin-F5D7000-802-11g-Wireless-Desktop/dp/B004IVEYS6/ref=sr_1_5?ie=UTF8&qid=1509063417&sr=8-5&keywords=internal+wifi+card+windows+98

 

[BFG-9000]

The Linksys WUSB54GP is Wireless-G and has 9x drivers. It doesn't appear to be new enough for WPA2 though, only WPA--but that's a lot better than most Wireless-B adapters that only have WEP. Should certainly be secure enough for an offline PC on an internal network that is not connected to the internet.

The usual solution for up to 4GB RAM is the R Loew patch, but some Germans apparently also patched vmm.vxd and vmm32.vxd.

ME works great, I use it with the small and light shell from 95 so there's none of that crashprone Active Desktop crap, with all of the plug-and-play and newer drivers of ME. Of course System Restore never worked right until XP, but when you can clone the system using only Windows Explorer, why ever bother with it?

 

[Matthew Renna]

So that wifi card would allow me to browse the web with ME?

 

[Matthew Renna]

I assume my router would allow the card to connect to it?

 

[BFG-9000]

Browse the web with what? There's no remotely up-to-date browser for it so most secure pages won't load, plus it's SMB1.

And there are no updated antivirus definitions or any recent antivirus either.

 

[Matthew Renna]

firefox 12, with kernelex, you can get firefox 12 working on windows 9x and that browser works with almost every site. It's just for fun

 

[BFG-9000]

KernelEX for Windows 2000 will run 6-year old Firefox 12.

KernelEX for Windows 9x says this in its own wiki:

there are reports that Firefox 10 runs on some ME/98 systems, but also reports of other people that it hangs or crashes, regardless of the above-mentioned settings.

Firefox 11 installs and runs unmodified on KernelEx systems, but are slow and have noticeable rendering glitches.

Firefox 12 freezes after a few seconds.

Firefox versions 13 and higher cause an error in MSVCR100.dll and don't start.

So the newest completely stable Firefox for 9x using KernelEX is 3.6.28, which at this point is hardly better than the 2.0.0.20 that works without KernelEX.

 

[Matthew Renna]

I'v done windows 98 in a virtual machine and firefox 12 worked with kernelex

 

[ragnar-gd]

Regarding Memory, ...

... in a nutshell:

Basically, if you are willing $20 for a commercial patch by Rudolph Loew, 3.5 GB is possible IF your MoBo supports that..
Otherwise, after some tweaking, 2GB is possible without spending money IF your MoBo supports that.

Read here:
https://msfn.org/board/topic/118097-day-to-day-running-win-9xme-with-more-than-1-gib-ram/

Btw: The "german patched version" mentioned above by BFG-9000 (no offense) is an illegal copy of RLoews patch. BFG-9000 most probably didn't know that. RLoew complained about that theft on msfn.org

 

[ragnar-gd]

Regarding WiFi:

If you want WPA2, there is no working solution with a WLAN-Adapter, neither internally, nor as an USB-Stick.
No. Such. Thing.
If you consider a less perfect solution, connecting a
TP-Link TL-WR702N
http://www.tp-link.com/en/products/details/TL-WR702N.html
...solved the problem for me (i use this with two laptops running W98SE)
It connetcs to your LAN-port, and additionally you connect it to a USB-port for power.

Caution: You additionally should have a software-firewall on ME with this solution, as the device provides no NATting in the necessary configuration.