Is it still possible to buy, or put together, a top of the line system that
will be able to run the original Windows 98? Seems like the latest chips
from Intel only support 98SE and above, and even newer chips will only
support XP.

Any thoughts on this?

On Thu, 10 Feb 2005 20:27:26 GMT, "darkrats"
<darkr***@hotmail.com> wrote:

AFAIK the chipset driver itself will run on Win98 (FE) as
well as SE.  One snag can be if the integrated audio only
has a WDM model driver rather than the VXD type.  Win98 (FE)
may be upgradable to support WDM driver, I vaguely recall
that after applying all the Microsoft patches that FE ends
up pretty close to being SE.  I can't guarantee success
though.

Another thing to consider is that "top of the line" means
different things to different people.  These days, top of
the line to many, means minimum of 1GB memory, a 48bit LBA
Hard drive, both are issues with Win98 as it's Scandisk and
Disk Defragmenter can't support 48bit LBA.  3rd party tools
like Norton Speed-Disk and Disk Doctor are suitable
replacements for those Win98 tools, but 1GB might be the
real limit you can expect for Win98 memory support, and even
@ 512MB or higher you'd need use a System.ini vcache entry
(Google will find details on this "system.ini vcache
Win98").

At worst you could always buy from someplace with a good
return policy, then IF it didn't work out you can choose to
buy WinXP or return the part(s), even if it means a small
restocking fee.

Or get a Windows 2000 Professional, most drivers are the same as the XP
ones, and it wil go faaaster ;-)

On Fri, 11 Feb 2005 09:06:28 +0100, Wim Cossement
<em***@notset.be> wrote:

??

Win2K is not faster than 98, nor is XP.  Win98 outright
flies during OS operations but in more demanding, actual
applications it makes very little difference.

I meant that 2000 is faster then XP.

On Mon, 14 Feb 2005 13:52:26 +0100, Wim Cossement
<em***@notset.be> wrote:

Oops!
Definitely true for the GUI in default configuration.

On Thu, 10 Feb 2005 20:27:26 +0000, darkrats wrote:

Would you put bald tires on a brand new car?

If your goal is to save the price of an XP license then use Linux. There
are a lot of absolutely free versions Linux available that you can either
download off of the net or buy from http://www.linuxcentral.com for about
$2 a CD. I'd suggest either Mandrake 10.1 or Fedora Core 3. They come with
a full complement of software including OpenOffice for your office needs,
Evolution for E-mail, PAN for newsgroups and Firefox for browsing. Linux
is a vastly more powerfull OS then any version of Windows. If you can't
bring yourself to move away from Windows then get XP Home, it's not that
expensive especially if you buy it bundled with your new machine. If
you've been able to live with Win98 then XP Home will do everything that
you need to do plus it will support all of your new hardware. On top of
that it's orders of magnitude more stable then Win9x.

How can you tell if you have USB 1.0 or 2.0?
Unreliable - diskettes or FDDs ?
replacing hardware reactivation of Win XP