I was just thinking about installing a WIN 98 SE to my computer. my current system is working ok, but every now and then for osme reason explorer causes an error when system is booted up. after i restart it (normaly using win commands) it all works fine.

So my question here (if anyone knwos it) could there be troubles if i install WIN 98 SE? Could i have problems with playing games or installing drivers? I should say that my computer is quite old and has been through a lot of upgrading. some more are planned (like new power supply unit and maybe even 200GB disk).

So could i expct any problmes? or is this really just a more stable and reliable version of win98.


My problems go way back when i installed the current system it is actually an upgrade from win 95. my cousin lend it to me and shortly after replaced the disk for WIN 2000. i then had a little "aacident" :wall: and i had to reinstal the system. now i have some strange version of WIN 98. it's working ok most of the time but sometimes for no good reason it makes problems. Although i have to admit since i ran TuneUp utilities system maintenance it all works much better. no problems so far.

Hey dude, just a heads up.
You should have put this in "Technical Stuff"

Nope, SE is fantastic - it has DOS without any need for DOSBox and also runs Windows applications - Huzzah!

*grumbles about father swapping to XP*

Believe it or not, it's better to have XP now.
You don't realize how much you hate the older OS until you're actually stuck with them for a long period of time...

If you have a big HDD you may have problems.

You say you have big hd? If so can win98 read it without it being corrupt

Yep, you're HD obviously isn't supported with WIN98SE.

um xp is great just dont download service pack 2 and you cant play all the great oldies ......the computers in my schoolcan run all the old dos games it's kinda funny...:D

Ups! didn't see the techincal. was posting it all in a hurry.

So, disk problems... ok theh i will get a smaller disk when i upgrade.

I was more concerened about drivers (for graphics cards etc.).


I have XP at work. i know if you are administrator you can have more settings. but My work computer is 400Mhz with 256 RAm and everytime someone decides to print on my printer the whole system slows down. it's so slow that you write a sentence and you have to wait a few secs before you can see it onscreen. And when you open the system resources the whole thing goes up lke you are running some incredibly complex graphic game.


i had on my computer 400mhz processor with 64 MB RAm and it wasn't so slow. later when i upgraded it all to 310 RAM the only game from the time running slow was DOD and even that one only from time to time. everything else was smooth except for DivX players who had a prtoblem from time to time. i solved this by upgrading processor to 1400 MHz.

My point is WIN XP is more for new computers than for the old ones.

WinXP is good, but it takes alot of resources, so its not good for smaller computers.

Win98 SE is very good, but still buggy and you should expect it to crash at least once a day unless you never keep your computer running for a long time.

The solution to this is very often to reboot and restart.

I had W98SE running for 118 hours in a straight line, no crashes or errors, until I accidentally openend up > 20 Internet Explorer windows, thus overloading it into a lock-up.

Every Windows gets buggy if you leave it on for long times. I do remember that was the case with '98, though. Then once i buggered it up so I had to restart a load of times before it worked.. I probebly crappped it up.. That sorta ended our experiments with individual users on that.
We tried again on XP, it worked until I hacked my dad's password (which was 'password', incidentally)

if you want to play oldschool games 98 se is really good tho. im thinking of getting an old 500 mhz or somming and running 98 se on it so i can play shadow of the horned rat and b hunter. you can get software to enable it to deal with larger drives, or partition the drive up to hell and back. if you dont use it for internet it will live a lot longer but it still kinda needs to be reinstalled once evry 3 months to maintain peak performance. which can be a major annoyance sometimes. you can get software that claims to extand its peak performance life by deleting temp files and stuff, but i have had some bad experiance with these softwares.
a freind of mine has 2 harddrives and he physically swaps between his 98 drive and his xp drive as the hassel with multi boot sytems is that generally you are going to have to reinstall 98 long before you need to reinstall xp, and getting the auto recovery thing to recover your xp installation after you reinstall 98 and make it bootable can be major hassell (particurly if you have lost your admin password..)
different horses for different courses i guess. i would not recoomend using 98 se for internet tho.

I'm of the same mind as OMG, altough I disagree about reinstalling every three months. When properly maintained (regular defrags, registry cleanup, manual removal of temp files and Internet Explorer temps, occasional anti-virus scan while we're at it), it will work for a loooong time without any problems.
Now, if you are often installing/uninstalling software, this does crap up the OS. Also major changes in hardware can have a similar result.

Now here comes a subject I know about!

I have been using this computer with Windows 98SE for four years now, I have only ever reinstalled once (Corrupt HDD). I am always connected to the internet, and as long as you have good Anti-Virus software running all the time, a secure browser like Mozilla, NetScape or Opera, and some good Anti-Spyware software. Windows 98SE also runs old games fine, I've never had to mess with any of the DOS settings to run an old game, and most those annoying instructions like, 'Mount your CD-ROM drive by entering mount D:\' don't affect me! Finding drivers shouldn't be too hard, I can usually just look on some major driver supplying sites, or the manufacture's own website, and my hardware will work fine. One of the major hitches with Windows 98 is newer software, big companies like Adobe and Macromedia have stopped supporting it, so for their developing software an old version will have to suffice.

If you get Windows 98, and use it, I'm sure you'll have a fun and enjoyable experience which will fulfill your needs.