Win 98SE on current laptops

I would love to run win 98SE on a new laptop. I have one copy of Win XP Pro on my desktop and I hate haveing to reactivate it. I like to do a clean OS install every once in a while, far to often for MS's activation program.

Is running win 98SE an OK option on a new laptop?

Let me know what you think.

Thanks

 

Drivers may be the main issue

 

All the software I want to run already runs on win 98se,
but I don't know about the hardware on the laptop?

 

That's what I mean. drivers for the hardware. 98 to start with has limited built-in drivers and some laptops have some hardware that don't work with generic drivers that might be easy to obtain. Probably you can find drivers but it will take a bit of searching.

 

As mentioned, drivers are going to be the main issue.
Most manufacturers do not make drivers for 98 any more.

Also remember that win98 cannot handle more than 1 Gig of RAM, so anything more is wasted. And in fact, win98 may not even boot with more than 1G of RAM. MS has a knowlegebase article about this, their solution is to artificialy limit the system to 768Meg. :-O
And the memory management in win98 is horrid anyway. This is one reason why you need to reboot a win98 box constantly.
You will also not be able to use a hard drive partition larger than 32 Gig. the FAT32 file system used by win98 cannot read partitions larger than 32 Gig. And Win98 Fdisk has problems recognizing drives over 64Gig.
And the FAT32 file system is woefully inefficient compared to NTFS. The cluster size is such that a rather large percentage of the drive space ends up being wasted. Converting a FAT32 drive to NTFS usually frees up 10-20% (!!) of the drive.

I'm also a bit confused about "hate having to reactivate it." Are you formatting your computer that often that spending 30 seconds in the activation window or 5 minutes on the phone is eating up your free time?
If you have to format that often, then you have other serious problems, which win98 is not likely to help you with.

 

Even if you are able to run and install everything on Win98, be aware that this windows has severe security issues. Depending on the sites you visit and the firewall you use, Win98 may last for 6 months...That is why my ISP does not allow Win98 in the Network; basically, it will be a warcamp for warm armies

 

What qwester said.

Drivers will be the main issue. If you can run your laptop without any realtime (sorry old DOS lingo here haha) drivers and just use it like that then sure go ahead, maybe win98se will detect and install generic drivers for you, but that's not likely.

Hey you can install windows xp and make it look like win98se, maybe that'll do for you.

Cheers,
Mike

 

I have used Win98SE for a few years without any firewalls, and never had security issues. Now I'm still using it without any firewall and antivirus (albeit for very light browsing) and still don't have any issues.

That's a lie. At least in Win98SE. I have been using an 80Gig hard drive with one of the partitions being 50Gigs in it for ages now.

And this, I think, is exaggerated. That is, it might be true, but only on very extreme cases. At 50Gig the cluster size is 16K. That means you can only waste up to 16K per file. So unless you have a bunch of really small files, the space waste will not be as big as to be noticeable. On smaller partitions - even less.

On my 50Gig FAT32 partition, where around 30Gig are used (mostly large files - music, videos, backups, but also some games), I have an overhead of 200Megs, which is 0.6%.

On my 20Gig FAT32 system partition, where the OS and various apps reside (here you may find a bunch of small files), I have 5.5Gigs taken with an overhead of 550Megs - 10%. That's quite a lot, but usually that's as high as it gets.

 

While in college I was forbidden to have Win98 no matter what antivirus or firewall I had installed. However, I did have Win98 on my second partition and used it occasionally. The biggest problem were some warm viruses in the network which did not kill my system but installed either ads or porn and unfortunately for me Tend Micro did not get them. Yet, my installation did survive college; not so with many of my friends installations. That is why I said that it depends on what pages one visits and how one manages his computer.
My current ISP also does not allow Win98...
Yet, Win98 remains my favourite OS because it was very easy to repair manually (1system disk for Win98, 4 for Win2000, 8? for XP). For 3 years in college I did not dare have Windows XP alone and dual booted so that I could always wipe out clean WinXP installation thru Win98; this was the only solution because I did not have a bootable XP disk.

 

Actually drives run faster on FAT32, that is why it is usually recomended to have FAT32 on none system partitions. But NTFS has the better reliability, can restors TOC easily.

That said I use NTFS on all my drives becasue FAT32 doesn't support files larger than 4GB, so I cannot store DVD images, or create a temporary image before I burn a DVD (usually the prefered technique for slow notebook drives)

 

I don't have any accurate data at hand, but I seem to recall that it was tested and empirically verified that FAT32 is more efficient for small drives, while NTFS is more efficient for larger drives (talking about performance, not wasted space), with the limit being somewhere betwen 10 and 30 gigs...

 

Thanks everyone,

On my Desktop (Win XP) I install alot of different software often for testing, and I like a clean install to start over, MS always makes me call a representitive about the number of times I reactivate.

The other 5 computers on my network run win 98SE and it's just alot easier
to repair and reload the OS without big brother looking over my shoulder..

I just switched to verizon DSL and am useing win 98se on my internet machine, as are most of the people in my area. We use our older computers for the internet and save our main machines for gameing/video/MP3s.
On our internet machines we keep a extra hard drive loaded and internet ready to swap out in case of trouble. Living in the mountains, most don't have broadband, power goes out often, and some don't even have a phone line.

Been useing a Toshiba 2100 CDT notebook with win 98se, the power connector is broken and I wanted to replace the Toshiba without spending money for win XP.

That being said, I think I may go Win XP for the notebook.

 

you can create an image of your hard drive, which will save you some time in reinstalling.
you can also dual boot (create some partion for Win98) and again this will save you time if you reinstall.

 

I do the same thing, I try many different things over time.

I use norton ghost (I'm sure there are others out there) to create and image of my OS.

Actually I create several images a long the way, OS active, Office active, .... This way I can step back to any point I want. Ghost will let you create an image from partition to partition or drive to drive. I always have "My Documents" and all the rest of my data on the D: partition or drive. This way only my applications get wiped out. I can try all sorts of stuff and then be restored to working clean machine in 10-20 minutes.

I know this does not solve you win98 question, but it may solve the activation problem.

 

Thanks David,

I hear alot of enterprise people talking about Norton Ghost to image their
HD's when they are setting up alot of the same computers at work. I thought
they still have to activate (type in the activation code) in each machine).

It would still save me alot of time to image the drive so I'm glad you mentioned it. Is it easy/hard to use Norton Ghost?

 

It's not hard to use Ghost, or any other imaging software. Just follow the instructions to create the image.

You will not have to activate, because you won't be installing the operating system. You'll be restoring a snapshot of an already install systems.

However, enterprise people that set up lots of machines in their workplace often go a different route - they buy a volume license edition of WinXP Pro (also known as Corporate Edition), which doesn't require activation.

 

Not sure what happens when you restore an image from one computer to a different computer, not something I do. I do not know how the activation software would react if the hard ware was not the same.

But for use on the same computer it is great and has saved me more time over the years than I care think.