working_girl

SHORT VERSION: What Win98 T22 drivers might be in conflict with a special sound driver from a 10 year old music program, causing it to not work properly, namely making it unable to use CPU power adequately?

LONG VERSION (very long and kinda tricky, but please, PLEASE, hear me out): So there's this software synthesizer called Reality, issued by Seer Systems in 1997. It is now discontinued and support is not available. I used it on my old computer, a 466 MHz Pentium II running Win98. That was about 5 years ago, the old computer is dead and gone, but now I need to retrieve my work from that period. Reality works only with Windows 95 and 98, and since I didn't want to upset my current XP setup I bought a used IBM T22 ThinkPad (900 MHz Intel Pentium III). I thought things would go smoothly, cause the laptop's specifications were superior in all aspects to that of my old computer, plus I read good things about the T series. Things did not go smoothly.

Since it's been a long time since I installed Win98, I didn't do it well. The Device Manager was full of question marks, exclamation marks, it was a mess. But I didn't care, I installed the sound driver I downloaded from IBM, and then I installed Reality, and IT WORKED FLAWLESSLY. Then I wanted to install my MIDI interface, cause the manual mislead me (it says that the unit will work with Win98, but the manufacturer's website states it only works with Win98SE upwards). Long story short - I messed up the system completely, got a blue screen on Windows startup, had no way of fixing it. Since the install was a mess anyway I went and formated the hard drive and started again.

This time I installed all the drivers proprely on initial Windows run (first time around I clicked the Skip File button a lot) and everything seemed to be in perfect order. I installed the soundcard drivers, then Reality. It worked terribly. The sound was hideously choppy and unusable, the CPU meter showed overload on the simplest task. I have to say I was deeply annoyed by this. From that point I tried everything I could think of: installed (and reinstalled) every driver and utility that I could find on the IBM driver page, installed the latest DirectX for Win98 (that's 8.1 I think), reinstalled Reality, I even tried repeating the faulty previous install - NOTHING WORKED. At this point I'm pulling out my hair, how can a program that worked on an inferior system, and on a sloppy OS install, not work when everything seems to be in order? My idea (after hitting my head against the wall a lot) was that the problem had to be with the drivers. Or particularly, THE DRIVER.

Reality has a special sound driver. It appears in the Device Manager under Sound Controllers as Reality. I'm not really sure how it works, the program lets you chose which soundcard you want to get sound from, do you want the output to be WaveOut or DirectX, stuff like that, but I think that all sound generation goes through the program's special driver. So my guess is that the driver is somehow in conflict with some of the more advanced features of the T22, like AGP (I don't really know what that is, some sort of hardware acceleration) or the Infrared Port, disrupting Reality's use of the system's CPU power. That would explain why Reality worked on my old computer (had none of those features) and on the messy OS install (installation of those features was skipped).

So, to conclude with a reprise of the SHORT VERSION: What Win98 T22 drivers might be in conflict with a special sound driver from a 10 year old music program, causing it to not work properly, namely making it unable to use CPU power adequately?

THANKS A LOT, if you've read any of this. And if you have any ideas or advice concerning my problem, please reply, it will be greatly appreciated.

PS: I should also note that I tried installing other music software and it worked without a hitch, which led me to conclude that the problem is most probably with the Reality driver. I also tried disabling some System Devices in the Device Manager that I thought might be causing the problem, which in effect only gave me a blue screen on Windows startup, and after failing to fix the new problem I formated the hard drive, again.

TriggerFinger

I checked the website and yes, I believe there are drivers for Win98. I am just concerned about the install that you did. Skipping files is not a good indication. I suspect a bad Win98 install CD. May be you can start from there. Get a good/working Win98 CD.