Where to download drivers from?
Community Forums/General Help/Where to download drivers from?
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| I'm building a Win98 machine from salvaged parts and have two sound cards (ESS and Aztech Labs) that I would get drivers for. Unfortunately the manufacturers' websites are dead and my every google search directs me to many scam driver download websites that make you download their clients/toolbars and such. So... Does anyone know a decent website with large selection of drivers that they can recommend? I would really appreciate it. Last edited 2011 |
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| The manufacturers' websites are dead, and so is win98. Why do you even want to build this machine? |
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| Nostalgic reasons... |
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| OK. I have a boxed version of OS2/Warp. Wanna buy it? |
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| No nostalgic connection with OS2 for me. |
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| driverguide.com has many old drivers available for download... One major word of warning, though: If you plan to connect that windows 98 machine to the internet without a hardware firewall in place, know that it will take an average of less than 10 minutes these days before you're an unwilling participant in some random botnet, thanks to the zillions of unpatched vulnerabilities present in windows 98. |
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| It is true You would be better off installing a ultra-lightweight linux distro like Puppy, DSL or even try a medium-weight one like xubuntu. Hopefully one of them will get the essential hardware going without problems and you will end up with a far more useful and safer machine than a win98 rig! and with modern browsers/software etc..  I have an old pentium 2 hp laptop running DSL i keep under our guest bed. It is actually a useful machine again for guests to use the net. Worth a try. Here are some linkies (i suspect one of these will work): http://www.damnsmalllinux.org/ http://xubuntu.org/ http://puppylinux.org/main/Overview%20and%20Getting%20Started.htm Last edited 2011 |
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| OK. I have a boxed version of OS2/Warp. Wanna buy it? How much? |
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| How much? You seriously want it? |
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| I will give you 50p if you pay the postage :D Last edited 2011 |
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| I will give you 50p if you pay the postage :D Bizarrely, someone is selling it on eBay for 50 quid. |
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| I don't doubt it for a second :D |
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| know that it will take an average of less than 10 minutes these days before you're an unwilling participant in some random botnet, thanks to the zillions of unpatched vulnerabilities present in windows 98. Not true. I had Win98 running until last year, when the comp. PSU died. Not a single virus/infection in the machine - all I needed was to install zonealarm's firewall and that was it. You can even install Firefox 2 on it and surf pretty much every website, without glitches. As for the ESS audio drivers, a quick google search showed me this link. Doesn't know if it is the one you're looking for... And here is another list for Aztech Labs but you should know the card model to get the correct one... (tested both sites, neither ask to register/download/install anything) Last edited 2011 |
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| My problem with Driversguide and soundcard-drivers is that the actual downloads are not the drivers, but rather their clients with spyware. So I guess I'm SOL on this one... |
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| hmmm... have you tested those links? I just downloaded one random from the second link, and it was a bunch of .VXD, .INF, .CAT and .DRV - which are drivers. Not a single exe, no spyware. |
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| those files -are- the drivers. Drivers do not have to come packed in an EXE. Point your hardware manager's driver locator at a .inf file and you will see what i mean. The inf file will basically tell windows what to do with the others. (that is the "choose location manually->have disk" option by the way) Last edited 2011 |
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| ANY download from driverguide.com gives me a 948,144 byte executable that's infected. Audio-drivers.com (aka soundcard-drivers.com) redirects to driverguide.com Of course I trust cnet.com, but those aren't the drivers that I need (and I looked through the list on the site - they don't have them). |
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| You may check your computer for viruses then... maybe you're being redirected (take a look at your 'hosts' file) or something. Seriously. Try this link: http://www.soundcard-drivers.com/dgdlsm.php?driverid=131137 On the page that appears, scroll down, type the word that appears in the box and click on continue. This should download a file called "Win9x.zip", with the following files inside it: AUD3328.DRV, AUD3328V.VXD, AZT3328.CAT, AZT3328.INF, JOY3328.CAT, JOY3328.INF, JOY3328V.VXD, MPU3328.DRV, MPU3328V.VXD, OPL3328.DRV and OPL3328V.VXD If the download shows anything different, you'll probably have an infected computer. |
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| Personal rule of thumb: always always ALWAYS scan absolutely ANY file with executable content - PDF, VBS, EXE, JAR, RAR and so on - with something like MWB Anti-Malware before running/opening the file. I learned this the hard way when I let my guard down. XD |
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