I have just reinstalled W98 SE ... got it working in basic mode ... hence i am here... but I have no sound and the display is minimal colours. The hardware profiles say there are conflicts and the drivers are not installed (unfortunately, I did not make a note of the hardware/drivers before I reformatted). The problems are PCI devices ... and I do not know how to find and install the correct drivers for them. Can any one help, please?

Also, my internet broadband connection does not work when I boot up - only when I take out and reinsert the USB connection. Any ideas why this is happening?

Thanks in advance for any help you can give.

Chris

The first thing you should do, if you haven't already, is find out the make and model of the motherboard and get the drivers for it.

The word "conflict" in PCI device error messages refers to incorrectly assigned PCI resources. The problem usually lies with the system assigning a single Interrupt Request (IRQ) line or I/O address space to two different devices at the same time. Although current PCI specifications require that drivers be able to handle "shared" IRQs, it doesn't always work out that way.


If that's what is happening on your system, here are three things you can do to try to eliminate the conflict(s):

1. If the devices are actual PCI cards (that is, not built into the motherboard) you can put one of the devices into a different physical PCI slot; doing so can force the system to reallocate IRQ and I/O resources at the next boot-up. If your video card is an AGP card, the possibility of an IRQ conflict still exists, because the AGP slot is usually hard-wired to share an IRQ line with one of the PCI slots (exactly which slot is shared depends on the model of motherboard).

2. If your BIOS' setup program has a setting to enable/disable Plug-N-Play (PNP), sometimes toggling to the alternate setting will clear things up.

3. In Device Manager, you can manually configure resources for each device, although this method can take a bit of "trial and error" to find a non-conflicting configuration.

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