Windows 98 issues on a Dell Latitude D600

Windows 98 Setup Freezes when “Setting up programs on the Start Menu”

When installing Windows 98 SE on a Dell Latitude D600, the installation freezes at the point after it finishes “Setting up programs on the Start menu” but before it installs Help. Rebooting the laptop does not help. It does a Scandisk, continues to setup, again wants the TimeZone settings, Control Panel and freezes again after finishing Setting up programs on the Start menu. The mouse cursor moves, but there’s no hard drive or CD-Rom activity at all.

Since this laptop doesn’t have an onboard floppy drive, I’m using an USB floppy and I left this connected for install. As soon as I realised that Windows 98 SE doesn’t have proper USB support, I disconnected the drive and rebooted. Now setup finished and Windows 98 properly configures itself and loads properly.

Windows 98 won’t shut down and hangs on the shutting down screen

This frequently happens on laptops that do not have ACPI installed. For the machine to shutdown properly, ACPI must be enabled. To enable ACPI, click start, run and type Regedit. Scroll down to the following key in the Windows registry:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Windows\Current Version\Detect

Create a new DWORD value called “ACPIOption” and set it equal to 1.

In Control Panel, run Add New Hardware and click on “Hardware detection”. ACPI should now be detected and installed. After a system reboot all ACPI devices should be set up and Windows should shut down properly

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