Hello friends and welcome to a new episode of Nomadic Dmitry channel
In the previous episode we have discussed installing Windows XP and Linux
on IBM T42 which is an old computer, but still capable
It's not modern, but still usable for some use cases
We are going to discuss something different today - Windows 98
You remember it, right? It's the operating system that always crashed and was very unreliable
I was using Windows 98 for 4 year and it was crashing nearly all the time. Every single problem even in one of the applications
could drag the whole system down.
This operating system was interesting because it was relatively lightweight
And specs of computers in those days were not that great, so it was able to run on typical home computers
Current versions of Windows are based on Windows NT architecture and the old versions were based on DOS + Windows combination
Windows XP was an attempt to combine Windows for both home and corporate worlds
Windows XP was also not stable up to Service Pack 2
Today I'm going to use Windows 98 on relatively new hardware
This is an Optiplex 780 which I purchased 5 years ago for 100 dollars
It has the Core 2 Quad processor
It has all the modern parts and we can experiment with it
I already installed Windows 98 here and the process was not easy
I installed it on a Virtual Machine first
Then I copied files from that virtual machine to a hard drive
I made the hard drive bootable
Then I've created the system files and set the MBR on it using the commands that you see on the screen
The big problem is memory limitations because Windows 98 is not supposed to run on more that 1 Gb of RAM
You need to set up your computer accordingly and disable additional memory
Let me show you how I did everything here
The first thing that you need to do is to set up your computer properly, disable some BIOS settings
Disable the unnecessary disk drives, disable additional CPUs
Set the memory limitation to 256 mb to be to at least install the operating system
You can actually modify system.ini file to use additional memory there
Let's reboot the system and see how it works
I'm sorry this is actually Windows 10 I have installed here - obviously it won't boot on 256 mb of RAM
Let me plug another disk drive and use it here
Here we have Windows 98 booting up and Windows 98 always had some problems with FAT32 filesystem
That's why it verifies the file system for the errors
There were many glitches back then and everything was unstable
It also frequently complained about the system drivers like shown here
Then it finally boots, but here is the problem - there is no driver for USB mouse and keyboard
It asks you to plug the PS/2 keyboard and mouse here and I don't have those
But there is a solution to try Windows 98 - somebody on the internet has created the live CD of this Windows version
And surprise - it works with the mouse, at least you are able to do something here
The operating system keeps finding new devices
In the old versions of windows you need to manually install driver or spend hours figuring out how to configure those
sometimes it detected those devices fine though
Sometimes it even caused blue screen and crashes
It asks to reboot, but if I reboot I'm going to loose all the things that I configured here
Ok, the live CD doesn't make any sense, it doesn't work properly
It doesn't work and I should attempt loading a real Windows 98 one more time
Let's boot from a hard drive, but this time in a "Safe mode" to avoid driver problems (F8 button during the boot)
The loading of Windows 98 even on a modern hardware takes a lot of time because it was not optimized before the Windows XP
Seeing this logo makes me smile - so many memories
It's interesting that I'm able to fully load to Windows 98 and things seem to work fine (except the display driver)
You can now run all your old Windows games and even some DOS games and applications
I also had lots of fun as a kid when I tried to remove all Windows files and see how long the Windows works after that
There are some drivers missing, I can install those and see if it works better. But you can still run Windows 98 on relatively new hardware
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