Category Archives: Bugs

Those Win9x Crashes on Fast Machines…

Posted on June 2, 2020 by Michal Necasek

It is well known that Win9x variants prior to Windows 98 have a tendency to crash on fast CPUs. The definition of “fast” is of course fuzzy but the problems were known to occur on AMD K6-2 processors running at … Continue reading →

Posted in AMD, Bugs, Intel, Microsoft | 24 Comments

Memory Trouble in Stormville

Posted on April 18, 2020 by Michal Necasek

The OS/2 Museum recently acquired a genuine Intel DX79SR (Stormville) board. Together with its close siblings DX79SI (Siler) and DX79TO (Thorsby), these were the last “great” Intel motherboards, supporting the big LGA 2011 socket for the Sandy Bridge E platform—but … Continue reading →

Posted in Bugs, Intel, PC hardware, PC history | 14 Comments

Linux 2.4 APIC Hang

Posted on March 16, 2020 by Michal Necasek

The other day I set out to install SuSE Linux 7.3 (Linux 2.4.10 kernel) in a virtual machine, primarily with the goal of evaluating if the included MARS_NWE NetWare emulator is any good. But I couldn’t get anywhere–the boot floppy … Continue reading →

Posted in Bugs, Linux, PC hardware | 16 Comments

EMM386 and VDS: Not Quite Working

Posted on February 26, 2020 by Michal Necasek

The other day I set out to solve a seemingly simple problem: With a DOS extended application, lock down memory buffers using DPMI and use them for bus-mastering (BusLogic SCSI HBA, though the exact device model isn’t really relevant to … Continue reading →

Posted in Bugs, Development, DOS Extenders | 2 Comments

The Cape Cod Disaster

Posted on December 16, 2019 by Michal Necasek

Here’s a motherboard Intel very quickly wanted to forget about: It’s the Intel CC820—or Cape Cod—desktop board, a product that was late to market (not unusual) and within a few months, the subject of a recall (quite unusual). As the … Continue reading →

Posted in Bugs, Intel, PC hardware, PC history, Pentium III, RDRAM | 45 Comments

More on NX Insanity

Posted on November 29, 2019 by Michal Necasek

This article was supposed to be published about two years ago but got forgotten and ignored until now. It’s not the only such article. Perhaps it will start a new “better published late than never” series. After looking more closely … Continue reading →

Posted in AMD, Bugs, Intel, Microsoft | 13 Comments

Same Old Disk Bug

Posted on June 24, 2019 by Michal Necasek

After I Kryofluxed my MS OS/2 SDK 1.01 disks, I once again tried installing the OS in a VM. While the system booted up fine, it stubbornly refused to get past FORMAT. At the end, after going through all the … Continue reading →

Posted in Bugs, Microsoft, OS/2, Virtualization | 2 Comments

NetWare 3.12 vs. Large IDE Disks

Posted on February 1, 2019 by Michal Necasek

Recently I had an occasion to find out why NetWare 3.12 using the shipped IDE driver (IDE.DSK) behaves, very, very strangely when let loose on disks bigger than about 500MB (a very foolish thing to even try). The driver loaded … Continue reading →

Posted in Bugs, IDE, NetWare, PC history | 46 Comments

Crazy World

Posted on October 17, 2018 by Michal Necasek

After I successfully upgraded two Windows 10 VMs to the 1809 release at the beginning of October, I tried to do the same with more VMs and an actual laptop this week. But I couldn’t, no update was offered. While … Continue reading →

Posted in Bugs, Microsoft, Random Thoughts, Windows | 9 Comments

The History of a Security Hole

Posted on August 31, 2018 by Michal Necasek

Warning: If you do not care for the finer points of x86 architecture, please stop reading right now—in the interest of your own sanity. A while ago I was made aware of a strange problem causing a normal user process … Continue reading →

Posted in 386, BSD, Bugs, Documentation, PC history | 44 Comments