I don’t know if people collect old software the way they collect old hardware, but I came across a Win98 upgrade disk that I will happily send to whoever wants it for the cost of the postage.
Such a deal!!
You can retire your Win 3.1x or Win 95 and move on up to the end of the 20th century!!!
If you’re the type who likes messing around with old computers (whether real or i emulation), I want to point out that it’s kinda fun actually patching Windows 98 with all the unofficial patches, and getting KernelEx, an open source program that will let you run Windows NT/2000/XP level programs. You can see Windows 98 at it’s absolute best.
I’d love to play with our old 286 with the amber screen (not that it exists any longer) just for a stroll down memory lane, but that’s as far as it goes. Finding this disk was a hoot and for some reason, I can’t bring myself to throw it away…
I get that. I’m just trying to help you “sell” it.
I’d love to make a 98SE partition so I can play some of my old games that won’t run anymore on 8, but the problem is that 98, even the SE version was buggy enough that unless there’s still someway do download the upgrades from Windows, I don’t know how well it will run. At this point, I’m sure I could crack the games and just upload them, and it wouldn’t take much space on my 1.5TB HD, but I’m just not sure how well it will work, and deleting a partition is a PITA.
Running the games in compatibility mode doesn’t work.
I never had any problems with 98SE.
Microsoft used to have two operating system lines, Windows and Windows NT. Windows was backwards compatible to DOS and allowed direct hardware accesses. NT was architecturally different and had the HAL (hardware abstraction layer) which prevented DOS type direct hardware access. A lot of older games won’t run under any version of NT because the HAL gets in their way. Most DOS games in my experience will run on Windows, though many will not run on NT, for the same reason.
Microsoft decided to “merge” their operating systems with Windows 2000. That way they would only have one product to maintain and develop. You can’t merge an operating system with a HAL with one that doesn’t have a HAL. Either you have a HAL or you don’t. What Microsoft really did was killed off the Windows line and forced everyone to NT. The problem was that there were too many people running software that wouldn’t run under NT back then. So mid-way through Windows 2000 development they switched gears and made Windows 2000 for businesses (just another version of NT) and hastily threw Windows ME out the door so that they would have something to sell to their home users. As you’d expect, Windows ME was therefore a buggy piece of crap. The “merge” happened at XP, and we’re all running NT now.
That means that Windows SE was probably the best of the Windows series. All of the stuff that had been hastily thrown out the door for Windows 95 was fixed, some new features were added, and the initial bugs of the first edition of 98 had also been fixed. I ran Windows 98 SE for a long time back in the day. It was a good operating system for what it was. Being a Windows and not an NT, it’s vulnerable to having a misbehaving program trashing the entire OS and crashing the computer (the HAL in NT helps protect you from that). On the other hand, since 98 does allow direct hardware access, it’s probably the best OS to run early windows games as well as older DOS games. Many of these won’t run under any version of NT even using compatibility modes.
This is an upgrade version of 98SE, which means that you need at least a disk from an older version of Windows in order to install it. I think it will accept anything from a floppy from Windows 3.0 or 3.1 up to a regular install CD of 95 or 98 (a pre-SE version of 98 that is). You don’t need to have an earlier version of Windows installed. All you need is the disk from an older version.
Windows 98 won’t install on hard disks over a certain size (I forget the size off the top of my head but you should be able to google it). There’s actually a patch that increases this size, but the last time I downloaded that patch, Microsoft’s web site would only download it to a computer that was running Windows 98. I pointed out to Microsoft’s tech support that you needed the patch to install 98 and couldn’t get 98 running to download the patch unless you already had the patch and that they had created a catch 22 there, but the guy from Microsoft tech support who answered me seemed to have no clue what I was talking about. I don’t know if they ever fixed that. If you install this on a virtual machine, make sure that you keep the virtual hard drive small enough that 98 can install on it.
You’d be better off installing it on a virtual machine. Only VMware (which has a free version called Player) has native Windows 98 driver support, though it’s possible to set it up on VirtualBox with some extra work.
Not only is creating a partition an annoyance, but there are many machines it just will not boot on. It wouldn’t boot on my AMD Sempron, for example.
As for the upgrade status–Windows 3.1 can be found on abandonware websites. The same websites where Microsoft will stop people from downloading other stuff, so I don’t think they care. Anyone into DOSBox gaming gets a copy.
Would 98 even run on a 286? I know it wouldn’t run well, anyway. Really need the power of the Pentium for those 9x Windows releases.
I would have jumped all over this offer about 10 years ago. Some late era 9x stuff got really annoying trying to run on vanilla 98 (and just for silly reasons, not for anything SE actually added), which was what I had. Finally gave in and bought XP for that reason rather than any need for XP.
No. It required at least a 486. Windows 95 required a 386. Windows 3.1 was the last version that ran on a 286–and even that was limited.
I thought Windows 98 was great. I had about zero issues with it and used it for a pretty long time. XP was even more fine tuned and I used that until Windows 7, which is my favorite.
I need to dig up a video where someone uses upgrade disks to go from DOS to Windows 7.
No, I think they were of separate generations. I know our 286 didn’t have a CD drive - did anything of that era? I just got to thinking about the olden days of home computing, wondering how that once-mighty 286 would seem to me today.
I doubt anyone is interested in such a disk, but it’s been fun and informative reading the posts. I had a Dell running 98SE and it was a work horse. I am not a big fan of change just for the sake of it, and if it isn’t broken then don’t fix it. When I bought a second computer with the then new XP, I decided to format the drive and install good ole 98SE.
As you can imagine, it did not work very well. It would boot but behaved quite erratically. The old OS was not compatible with the new hardware, particularly the amount of RAM.
Times are a changing in the PC world. New PC’s are designed to maximize the new operating systems. The old BIOS is replaced by the new UEFI (Unified Extensible Firmware Interface). It’s my understanding this became the standard with the introduction of Windows 8. It is much more robust, adds security and other features, and adds functionality at the hardware level even without an operating system. It is for this reason I won’t upgrade my now ancient laptop(6 years old…lol) from 7 to 10. That and the Windows 8 debacle. Although I may create an image and upgrade to 10 just to see what happens, then revert back if I don’t like it or have issues.
There are people who collect old software, games(even DOS-based) and hardware.
I knew only two great OS first is my Win98 and second WinXP SP2, best what humanity can create.
Wowee, Windows 98 eh? That’s pretty old!
I remember using Windows 95 (that machine was upgraded to Windows ME), but we no longer have that machine. Most of my programs run under windows 7, and any that don’t can run under XP. 
Virgins?
Yes, they could also collect virgins.
What???
Windows ME was awesome! And it came in so many versions
Like…
Windows WTF?!?
Windows BSOD
Windows OMFG NOT AGAIN
Windows F-ME
Windows PWNED
Windows Meh