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[Sindi Keesan <keesan AT iamjlamb.com>]

Having given up on two computers that won't boot linux with DR-DOS, or do 
plip (or in one case work with PCI cards) we bit the bullet and tried to 
use a PII that a friend gave us as 'known working', with only two ISA 
slots so I was going to save it for just Windows, which I would rather 
keep on a separate computer from DOS and linux because I can't defrag 
without Windows unless I boot from a floppy disk.

The first drive we put in (for Windows/DOS) already had Win98 on it which 
I think my partner had upgraded from Win95 to try to make an upgradable 
modem work at 56K instead of 33K  (This made it run at 28K instead, 
possibly because it was from 1997 when there were two 56K standards and 
this is the one that lost out).  For some reason all the longer directory
and file names had been truncated to ~1 (8-character) so I retyped them, 
which fixed a lot of links that were not working, and put back everything 
in the start menu (startm~1 did not work, 'start menu' did).

I deleted Opera and Realaudio instead of retyping them.  Uninstall leaves 
Opera directory there.  

Got the modem working (like the other 56K it connects at 28.8 or 31.2K in 
Windows).  Windows tells me the sound card is already in use but I think 
that is an IRQ problem to be solved later.  Fixed the video problem by 
putting in a PCI card.  Reinstalled Opera and went online for the 300K 
Virge PCI driver (can't get it with lynx because you need to read an image 
number now).  It loaded part of the home page and crashed.  Opera caused 
an invalid page fault in module opera.exe.  Did some reading on this and 
Opera 5 was having trouble with Win98 but they fixed that.

Uninstalled, reinstalled, and it gets this page fault within 10 seconds
while loading every time, even offline.

DUN, telnet, hyperterminal, realaudio all work.  Nothing else has crashed 
Windows so far that I recall.

Is this just one of those computers that is not going to work right with 
Windows under certain circumstances?  We have one other computer that had 
the identical problem and it is my main computer and does fine with BL2 
and BL3.  A DFI.

We are going to try this same drive in a nearly identical (Gateway PII) 
computer from the same friend.  And try one other drive in here (with a 
different installation of Win98 - we must have one on a hard drive 
somewhere) to see if it also can't run Opera.  It looks like rain anyway, 
and what could be more fun than moving drives around and resetting CMOS.

After which I may have to stick DOS and Linux on the one working Win98
computer that I set up, working with Opera and a sound card (Windows liked
that Opti) with Win98 on a drive that cannot be partitioned with PQMagic
because it has EZ-Drive (something they used to put on drives so you could
you drives over 504MB with an older controller) and we can't get it off.
This time I will check with a test DOS/linux drive to make sure linux runs 
on that computer before getting too far into formatting etc.

Would there be any problem with putting Windows and some DOS programs on 
the first partition (first drive) and splitting a second drive up among 
two more DOS partitions and two linux partitions?  I really don't want to 
install Win98 again to another drive.  I never want to even see Win98 
again at this point but so far can't get sound to work in linux.

Maybe Netscape won't crash on a computer where Opera does crash?  All I am 
after is a way to use Realaudio.