A friend has a Compaq Presario 2286 which was very clogged with proprietary preloaded software and was taking 5 minutes to boot. I reformatted the hard drive and tried to load a clean OEM version of Win98. After the hardware detection phase of the intall, the pc rebooted but could not continue because of the following error message: “VMM32.VXD Missing/Unable to load.” I could get the pc to boot into safe-mode and verified that the file was intalled on the hard drive. I tried to load windows 3 times before I finally gave up. I’ve tried disabled the caching in the bios (cpu, video)as well as the virus detection. I also removed the modem, and disabled the onboard sound. The only component left was the onboard video which uses shared memory. Ican successfully reload windows using the Compaq restore CD but this also intalls all of the other “crap” along with it which is what I wanted to avoid. Anyone know why this pc doesn’t like the OEM Win98?
