The Pains of Installing Windows '98 on a "Modern" Machine - Nostalgia Nerd

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The other day I had an urge. An urge to install Windows ’98 on a machine that was made several years after 1998 and to see how easy it was (Take a look at these lovely minimum requirements!). This I feel in hindsight, was an error. Now, what I perceive to be a modern machine and what you perceive to be a modern machine, may differ. My definition may be out by quite a few years. The machine in question was a Dell Precision 360, Pentium 4 (Hyper Threaded!) with 512mb RAM… to all intents and purposes, a machine I would have dropped my jaw at in disbelief if it was around in the late 1990’s.

You see, My Dad kindly donated to me, a Dell Precision 360 tower. Quite a heavy lump (the Dell, not my Dad). Running a clean install of Windows XP effortlessly at the time. But, I’ve already got a machine running XP, and I wanted to re-live the 90’s with a classic ’98 experience. What better machine to try it on I thought?…. I could use it for early Windows gaming, DOS gaming and to run a multitude of Encarta and Edutainment type programmes, as well as watching Buddy Holly by Weezer in crystal clarity… Oh, no, wait, that was Windows ’95. Anyway, I thought it would be a good idea. So I grabbed the machine, almost giving myself a hernia, grabbed a copy of Windows ’98 on Compact Disc, and got cracking……. It went…. as you might have expected……..

FORMAT C: /q

Formatting Windows 98… Wahey!<br>This was the first step to take. Wipe the drive clean of that hideously easy to use XP OS; I mean, why stick with what’s easy? Who wants to use an OS that has been designed to run on the technology you’re using?! No one. Not a single person. Anyone I can think of would opt to install a completely outdated OS no matter what it takes… Fortunately, this initial part of the process went without a hitch. It was lovely to get back into DOS and type those raw commands directly into the computer. POWER. CONTROL.

The next step was to slam in the Windows ’98 installation CD and kick things off. The machine can happily boot from the CD-ROM drive, so there’s no problems on that front. No floppy discs to slow things down or to become corrupted at the slightest whim, ruining your brand new operating system.

Ok, so that worked, which led onto the….

Windows ’98 DOS Installation Screen

This brought back some fond memories. Those text based "graphical" DOS screens. These screens were made with sheer love to try and make the interaction with DOS look like something it was not. Thankfully this screen went without a hitch. Trusty Scandisk then fired up and did an impressively quick analysis on the 40gb drive tucked inside this machine. And then came the start of the problems…

Windows ’98 Installation Screen

Windows attempted to load it’s graphical elements to continue the installation in a "more pleasing" manner. I for one, wished it hadn’t. For here began the woes of the next 12 hours (Yes, that’s not a typo, I spent 12 hours getting this machine fully operational). The problem was, I was using a Dell wireless keyboard and mouse plugged into one of the USB ports. The Windows ’98 installation, was expecting either a serial or PS/2 mouse and keyboard combination. Therefore the Dell was falling back to USB emulation to try and trick Windows that is was using PS/2 interfaces. At this early stage, this was less than successful. Indeed, trying to press any key resulted in a completely random character on the screen. I’m not talking about the same characters for each key either, oh no. I couldn’t even map keys to other keys because quite literally, every keystroke initiated a completely random character. Pressing enter one minute produced a "J", the next minute it was a space, then it had absolutely no effect for the next twenty or so pushes.

Anyway, I managed to muddle through this part of the installation (for the first time) with repeated key bashing and hoping for the best. Windows then proceeded to install.

Although the installation timer estimated 36 minutes, it took about 10, which was lovely. I remember trying to install ’98 in the 90’s on my Cyrix 5×86 and watching the installation time just creep higher and higher, rather than the opposite. Technology Win.

"Starting Windows for the First Time"

Ahhhh, yes. The lovely greeting that appears on the first install, if only for a matter of seconds on this particular machine. Windows ’98 was installed! Well, the bare bones of it was. For the next ten minutes, the installation proceeded to setup plug and play...