Fake out a setup install program

I could swear I've asked this before, because I've done this before. And I've been googling and doing forum searches without getting an answer, so I think I must be going crazy.

Out of all of the new software for my motherboard, I've gotten it all installed except for one thing: The sound card utilities, which refuse to install unless it's 98se.

I faked out the installer for the Intel chipset utilities by changing HKLM\software\microsoft\windows\current version\version number, and that worked fine and now I've got the chipset drivers all in place and they work fine. I even extracted the individual driver files for the sound card and installed those, and they seem to work. But the setup for the sound card's utilities (such as its fancy replacement for the Sound icon on the task bar) still refuses to run.

You'd think someone would have written a universal "installer fake-out" utility that would allow you to force an installer to work. But I can't find one when googling.

Anyone know of a universal way to fake out an installer?

Sorry, just curious, but I think I missed why you would go to so much trouble instead of installing SE to begin with. I just don't know the reasoning.


ps- I've been playing all the games I own at 1600x1200x32 resolutions without a hitch.

Because he is probably using something good like win2k.

Nope, he's using 98.

Well that is retarded then. I had a program that was like that back when I was using 98 I just dumped it too bad that's not an option in this case.

think I missed why you would go to so much trouble instead of installing SE to begin with.

Because I've got so much STUFF installed and working under 98, and so many little tweaks and things, and everything is (was) running just perfectly under 98. I don't want to have to start over again by installing a new OS if I don't have to. It would take me months to get the system back to where it was if I went to a new OS. At that point, I'd skip SE completely and go straight to 2k. But before I do that, I want to give this existing installation of 98 a fighting chance.

I mean, yeah, I did do a parallell installation of SE and it worked for most of the stuff. But migrating everything and making sure each app works and has all its settings and everything is just a lot of work that I'd like to avoid if I can just get the freaking soundcard working under 98.

But even taking everything else into account, it's a good academic question: How do you fake out an app to make it think it's under a different OS?

Well, I bit the bullet and installed SE. It turns out that my copy of SE was a non-OEM version that allows you to upgrade instead of installing fresh. So I did a 98->SE upgrade, and things seem to be working. There's a lot to do yet before I'm sure all is well, but for now I think it's OK.

Yeah, I was wondering why you didn't just do an upgrade, but if you didn't think you had an upgrade copy, that makes sense then. I've done the 98 to SE upgrade several times and found it to be pretty smooth.