The developer Eric Voirin has been tinkering with one Win98 QuickInstall mentioned framework for installing Windows 98 as quickly as possible found that Microsoft intentionally delayed certain activities with its old operating systems.
Voirin, better known by his online alias Oerg866, has been working for some time on a framework designed to create pre-configured installation media for Windows 9x systems. He is also looking for ways to speed up the installation process beyond simply shrinking the amount of data to be installed.
Like he’s over now X/Twitter announced, many years after the end of support for Windows 98, he has now found a way to significantly speed up the process of installing drivers for hardware newly discovered by the system: you just have to remove an artificial delay in the process set by Microsoft.
There is a “hard-coded delay” when the system actually detects a new device when detecting new hardware. By patching the SYSDM.CPL file for Windows 9x systems, he has now largely removed the intentional delay and reduced it to just 300 milliseconds, says Voirin. The waiting time of a total of eight seconds is more precisely divided into two steps.
First, a default generic name for the class or device is displayed for three seconds, before the name and a logo for the device are displayed if a driver is found. After this, there is another five-second delay, which Microsoft integrated on purpose. The older generation among us may still remember various adventures when installing drivers for new hardware in Windows 9x PCs, including the sometimes exhausting waiting times like at this point.
But Microsoft probably had its reasons for integrating a set delay here. On the one hand, in the days of the old operating systems, it probably made sense to allow some time to pass until the new hardware had initialized. On the other hand, they apparently wanted to give the user enough time to “digest” the information displayed.
