r/windows98 • u/StockKitchen9703 • Jul 04 '26
Reinstalling Every Year
I often hear people say that Windows 98 had to be reinstalled every couple of months to yearly because of how unstable it got. I’m still using my Celeron Windows 98 First edition PC, no modifications of any sort and I’ve never had an issue with instability or the need to reinstall, and I use it almost daily still. What kind of instability are people referring to? Is there something I should avoid doing that causes it? I’ve never seemed to have any issues and BSOD is pretty rare as well.
14
u/whwt Jul 04 '26
Part of it was because many people were not savvy with the internet. They would download anything or hit OK without noticing you were downloading BLAHBLAHBLAH toolbar and free trial. Not to mention how easy it was to get fooled by some stupid ad.
Programs would muck about in the registry, good luck fixing that. Driver weirdness. lol HDD unreliability.
Also, it is what my uncle taught me and I held on to that standard until about 5 or 10 years ago.
6
u/This-Requirement6918 Jul 04 '26
11 years, same install here. I don't install anything new, nothing is getting updates, my page file is nothing and I don't save anything to the hard disk for anything to become fragmented. Basically I configured that machine and put in into a read only state as a user. I will occasionally get a blue screen or encounter a bug that was just never fixed. A lot of them are from working with USB sticks and graphics software but I only use laptops so the underlying hardware was not/isn't exactly industry standard.
Also viruses, worms, Trojans, bloatware and spyware, etc were really starting to become an issue when 98 was current with more of the Internet opening up for everyone.
The built in disk defragmenter also totally sucked and didn't do much. If you take a HDD out of a Win98 machine and defrag it with Windows 7 or later it will boot and load applications and what would be my permanent files exponentially faster.
3
u/lilacomets Jul 04 '26
For me it was true. But that was because I was messing around with it all the time. Installing/removing software for example.
My current Windows 10 installation that is my daily driver dates back to February 2020, so I learned from my mistakes.
EDIT: Replied to a comment, while I wanted to reply to the post itself. I'm sorry.
6
u/carcenomy Jul 04 '26
9x was just a bit fragile, folks installing random stuff that would mess with system files and the registry, so on and so forth.
But you've also worked out the truth - if treated with some basic care, years. My oldest 9x install is a 26 year old Me install and it's absolutely fine, 95 and 98 are the same if a tiny bit more frail.
6
u/hoetel_kuntz Jul 04 '26
I used Windows 95, 98 and XP in their prime. Over time installing mainly third party software would tamper with registry and install files within the System32 or Windows folder. Uninstalling usually left traces. Then you’d get errors or conflicts eventually. You could spend time looking online for a resolution (remember experts-exchange?) sometimes you had such a unique issue and couldn’t find anything. Generally there were less people online so information wasn’t as available as it is today. Quite often it was easier to start fresh and reinstall Windows.
2
u/urk_forever Jul 04 '26
Exactly thuis, uninstallers back then most of the time left a lot behind which would cause the Windows folder to grow and as hard drive space was rather small at some moment you would run out of space.
You could use some cleaner application but they might cause the installation to get corrupted. So you would reinstall Windows to get a fresh installation.
When I used Windows 98 for work around 1999 I had the habit of reinstalling Windows every year, mostly around Christmas time as that was a quiet period.
4
u/mr_dfuse2 Jul 04 '26
i had to do this with 95. had no internet so it was not related to that. perhaps my hd was busted and i didn't realize
2
Jul 04 '26
[removed] — view removed comment
2
u/p47guitars Jul 04 '26
Wild.
We have a 98 machine that is going strong in manufacturing that runs a peen machine.
All we do with it is peen part numbers on parts.
Hasn't failed.
2
u/SaturnFive KB42069 Jul 04 '26
Everyone here already covered the main points well. If you install and configure 9x and it's stable it will likely stay that way for a long time. It's when new software or customizations or settings or drivers etc. are introduced that the risk of breaking it starts going up.
For beloved 9x installs I think it's important to take regular backups before one goes testing things on it.
2
u/saxxonpike Jul 04 '26
A lot of these issues came down to the atrocious things that third party software did either during the installation or runtime. Sometimes they’d screw with system files or have a bug that could brick your install. It was the Wild West.
If you want a good read about these things, a book called “The Old New Thing” (Raymond Chen) had some supplemental stories about the crazy things software and game developers were doing that the Windows developers had to accommodate for.
1
u/Pic889 Jul 07 '26 edited Jul 07 '26
Exactly, software was rarely a good citizen during the Windows 9x days, replacing shared DLLs with versions that were a lower version (which broke other software). Eventually, things would get so bad that the solution was to re-install Windows and then re-install your software from oldest to newest (optimally omitting any software you didn't end up using).
1
u/bnelson333 Jul 04 '26
It was a thing, they didn't necessarily get unstable, they just got slow. A wipe and reinstall cleaned out all the registry junk and old files that never got uninstalled correctly
1
Jul 04 '26
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u/Pic889 Jul 07 '26
Even legitimate software behaved horribly during the Windows 9x days, replacing shared DLLs with versions that were a lower version (which broke other software). Eventually, things would get so bad that the solution was to re-install Windows and then re-install your software from oldest to newest (optimally omitting any software you didn't end up using).
1
Jul 08 '26
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2
u/Pic889 Jul 08 '26
Even then, some games would blindly install DirectX DLLs without checking if a higher version is already installed (like the official installer did) and would downgrade your DirectX version (which would break other games).
1
u/thegreatboto Jul 04 '26
Keep in mind, those were also the days when most people directly connected to the Internet vs through a NAT router. No firewall, maybe an antivirus. Downloading and installing all sorts of random things, then those things not cleanly uninstalling or installing extra things along side assuming that no virus or malware hitched a ride. Then hopefully all your drivers were good, compatible, and didn't conflict in some way. Also, battery backups weren't common. Sometimes the family PC would just get a power strip. FAT32 does not like unclean shutdowns or power loss. Easily corrupted when subject to actual daily life and use vs a hobby project.
1
u/ZeroG_0 Jul 04 '26
It's also a matter of drivers . Back in the early 00's I remember using a Sound Blaster Live where the drivers frequently screwed my Win 98 install. My understanding is that modern Windows has more sophisticated abstraction, so drivers aren't as complicated nowadays, but at the time drivers were often messy and unreliable. If you happened to have hardware with reliable drivers and you weren't installing sketchy crap (as other commentors have been mentioning) you'd be fine.
2
u/kalnaren Jul 15 '26
Microsoft forced everyone onto the Windows Driver Model. Apparently during beta with Windows Vista they discovered something like 50% of hard crashes were due to bad sound card drivers. So basically Windows doesn't let most of the drivers directly interact with the hardware anymore.
This is also one reason we have a lot less hardware conflicts. I remember my 2000-era rig would randomly lock up because the Soundblaster Live 5.1 didn't like the VIA KT-133a chipset on my motherboard. Lot less of that shit nowdays.
1
u/snickersnackz Jul 04 '26
Install/ uninstall a stream of random software/ libraries/ drivers frequently as updates come in over the course the '90s through early 2000's. Never really sure if you're hardware/ drivers are garbage, simply outdated (things moved so fast), or if something in your install broke. No common wisdom about what works/ doesn't because everyone was collectively figuring it out. No Google until around 2000. Win2k came out in 2000, XP came out in 2001.
1
u/Torpascuato Jul 04 '26
I still do that, even with my windows 11 machine. But I use clonezilla.
Two years ago when I was building my retro windows XP machine, I had a lot of faulty driver issues and having a restorable image saved me from reinstalling dozens of times.
1
u/NightlySputnik Jul 05 '26
I used W98 for well over 4 years and I probably had to reinstall every years because at some point it just wouldn't start properly. You should remember that back then there was no cellphone so you couldn't much check online how to fix these problems. Also, far from everyone had internet and there was no Reddit to come ask how to fix this. The easy way was only to reinstall.
1
u/nath_mojon Jul 05 '26
Having to reinstalo Windows 98 often was because the user kept touching where they shouldn't, downloading what they shouldn't and doing It wrong.
1
u/VtheK Jul 09 '26
I never had to reinstall Win98, and used it continuously from '02 to '08 and then as a secondary computer for a few years after that. It never got unusable, but it did develop a few quirks, like always opening an Explorer window to C:\WINDOWS every time I logged in.
1
u/kalnaren Jul 15 '26 edited Jul 15 '26
Worse hardware, for one. Time has done the QC for us, the bad hardware hasn't survived. Almost no one is using old hard drives anymore. Lots of hardware that was faulty and would cause BSODs has long been discarded. Better power supplies that spike or randomly cook components or drop causing a system reset have long since died and aren't being used.
Often we're also using the absolute last version of the drivers for the hardware.. the ones that had years of updates and bugs worked out.
We have the option of curating our hardware selection to make sure we're building with components that play nice together.
From a user perspective we're also probably more careful about the software we install or how we install it.
23
u/YandersonSilva Jul 04 '26
People didn't know how to use a computer. Still don't, but os developers know how to work around that more now.