| Reviving Windows 98 | COMING SOON |
|---|
Bringing Windows 98 Back From The Grave 
Windows 98 can be a real bitch to use in the modern day, especially if you're running it on an actual old pc instead of virtualbox. I have compiled a quick guide of things you'll probably want to save you a couple hours of web searching:
This is without a doubt the first thing you should burn onto that CD-R. It contains all the up to date patches for Windows 98 along with some unofficial patches. It also installs Direct X 9, updates many things, and improves stability. It also gives your PC decent enough USB and Network support. I was honestly surprised I could plug in my old USB 2.0 flash drives and use them effectively after this update. Just don't remove them when anything on them is open, or your computer might bluescreen. One PC I own does this, while the another hasn't yet. The update wont please everyone, as it installs unwanted updates such as getting rid of the 98 boot screen, installs IE6 and replaces the windows 98 iconset with ME icons, but many you can choose not to install.
The second worst thing about reviving old computers is finding old drivers that work. That's why it's best to use the best software you can to identify the exact model of all your parts, and Everest has yet to fail me on this.
If you get internet working, you'll immediately notice that most websites wont even work. This is because most active websites use a new SSL standard that no browser on Windows 98 supports. It is not something that (to my complete knowledge) can be completely fixed, but with some newer Windows 9x browsers you can access some websites with older versions of SSL encryption. Your 3 good options are Firefox 2.0, Retrozilla 2.1, and Opera 10.10, and they aren't the best in 2017. Firefox 2.0 will load many pages poorly, but it still has many great addons like NoScript. Retrozilla is actively being worked on, but it's few speed tweaks are seemingly it's only advantage at the moment. Opera 10.10 will render some websites better, but it's very slow on old hardware. You'll also need a newer msimg32.dll inserted into the SYSTEM directory, so I've zipped up Opera and that file to make this easier for you.
Due to size limitations back in the day, most Win9X games wont fully install themselves to your hard drive and require the game disc be inserted to play. If you're going to cheat and pirate old games, you're going to need virtual clone drive to mount the disc images you download so windows 98 will think there is a drive inserted with a CD in it.
Windows 98 relies on web browsers to view images, and I'm sure you already have seen how long it can take them to start up, so let's get a good imageviewer. Irfanview is a great program for this, and it supported windows 98 until 2012