[Gloucs] As if I needed more reasons not to use Windows....

[Paul Broadhead]

Hi folks, here's a story for you.

I finally updated by desktop machine from a Celeron 300MHz to a rather
nice Pentium 2.4 GHz beast.  I bought a new motherboard and bits from
ebuyer and assembled it all on Friday.

I was rather nervous when I booted from my existing Redhat setup from
the the old machine into the new kit but it all went fine.  The hardware
detection program suggested I remove several things and correctly setup
my new bits, Within seconds I was logging in on a nice fast machine!

As it happens, the hard disk also contains a rather old and unused
Windows 98 partition too.  This was previously used for games but
nothing runs on a Celeron 300 these days so I had made an new machine
for the kids a couple of years previously.  I thought I'd give this old
setup a try on the new hardware.

However, it failed to boot with a fatal error "While initialising device
NDIS: Windows protection error".  I eventually got the thing to run by
single stepping the boot and excluding ndis.vxd, a crucial component of
the networking software,  After may reboots and CD changes I had all the
new hardware setup sorted but the ndis problem persisted, I could not
access the network.

Back into Linux I started googling and eventually came across  Microsoft
Knowledge Base Article - 312108
<URL:http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;312108>.

"SYMPTOMS
When you are installing Windows 95 or Windows 98 on a computer that has
a CPU that runs at 2.2 gigahertz (GHz) or faster, you may receive the
following error message:
While initializing device NDIS: Windows protection error
CAUSE
The timing calibration code in the Network Driver Interface
Specification (NDIS) driver causes a divide by zero if the CPU runs at
2.2 GHz or faster. This problem does not occur with CPUs that run at 2.1
GHz or slower."

I was rather surprised.  I was event further surprised that I could not
just download the fixed driver.  I have to contact Microsoft support and
pay for the fix!  Guess what?  There will soon be 5GB more space for
Linux on my hard drive.

Regards,
Paul