I knew W98 was feeble but WHat the..

[kjavds]

I know that Windows 98 has trouble with today's exotic devices and getting their drivers correctly installed, but this situation has me climbing the walls!

Background: my old laptop has built-in USB port with some Intel controller. It works just perfectly great. I have an older MP3 player/storage-device and I can access it via USB just fine. Of course I had to expressly load the driver supplied for it (for W98) from the included CD.

So how come I can IN NO WAY -- AND I'VE TRIED EVERYTHING get a simple modern half-gig thumb drive (aka flash drive) to even be acknowledged, much less recognized, in the Device Manager. 'Also tried rebooting while device was plugged in but to no avail.

I should be informed of a place on the net where I can download a generic driver for this and ALL thumb drives. Can anyone here please assist?

[BertImmenschuh]

I don't think you'll find a generic driver that works with all the various brands of thumb drives. The companies are protective of their product.

Please be aware that many of today's USB products are USB 2.0 and in order to have support for their drivers/software the version of Win98 HAS to be the Second Edition [Win98SE]. That was the first version that gave support for the drivers included with USB 2.0 devices.

Many thumb drives will have Win98SE drivers downloadable from the makers' site, some will actually work with Win98 but it's only a try and see situation.

A lot of your frustration can be resolved by some knowledge about the Operating Systems and devices. Win98 wasn't feeble at its introduction, it's just that a lot of things have changed since its introduction in May of 1998 and its two succeeding developments, SP1/Service Pack 1 for Win98 and Win98SE.

[tom.tdw]

you could switch to linux (or at least multiboot), ubuntu's driver support is great:D

there is no generic driver for win98, i'm afraid
win 98 is just not designed for USB devices (bill gates famously once managed to crash a win98 during a demo by plugging in a USB scanner)