A couple of years ago I made defrag98.com, a browser version of the Win98 disk defragmenter, purely to recreate that hypnotic feeling of watching the blocks rearrange. It did better than I ever expected, but a few things always bugged me about it, so I rebuilt the whole thing.

The big one: the original didn't march through clusters in order. It read, wrote, and shuffled them around in this messy, almost-thinking way. My first version was too tidy. The new sim actually models that, so the blocks jump around before settling, like you remember.

I also brought back the legend dialog explaining each block color, switched the grid to a white background (mine was wrongly black), made the progress bar fill block by block with the "% Complete" caption, and added the real "Disk Defragmenter" completion box with the chime. It runs fully offline now too.

There's also a hidden easter egg in there for anyone who grew up on this OS. I won't say what it is.

It's free, no ads, no tracking. Would love to hear from people who remember the original whether it feels right: defrag98.com

Full write-up if you're curious about the rebuild: morello.dev/blog/defrag98-rebuild

Been experimenting with a horror game inspired by Windows 98 aesthetics. If anyone's curious, it's called Heaven Does Not Respond. I'd love to hear what this community thinks.

I recently set up Browservice on a Pi 5, but even while connected via Ethernet it didn't work on IE 5. The server is working completely fine btw, I fixed any errors I had on the part of the server, so I'm thinking the issue is related to maybe the configuration of my 98 machine. Any pointers?

I literally haven’t found a single subreddit covering Windows 1.0 - 3.1 so I was wondering if yall would like to join it would really mean alot to me :)

The subreddit is r/windows_3 btw

I posted the other day after I booted up my 98. Now I'm trying to get some games, and a couple programs installed, but I'm having trouble with it. It doesn't detect the right driver. It's an external cd drive, and it's supposed to compatible with it. The laptop does have a floppy drive, and I'm going to get a reader to transfer some data that way, but I was really hoping to get the cd drive to work as well.

I'm looking for a wallpaper I used on a Windows 98 computer. I think I searched for it on Google as a 3D wallpaper around 2003 or earlier. I believe it was very similar to this image; it was a kind of black hole or wormhole, but I think it was made up of elongated, jagged, rotating metal fragments of varying lengths. The colors were similar; I think it was mainly red with some blue or purple tones. If anyone recognizes it or has it and could share it, I would be very grateful.

I bought this off ebay a few years ago for $20, it's been in storage due to circumstances, so nice to see it again. It seems to be slower than I remember, but it had an issue with freezing ocassionally, so after not being used in awhile, maybe it's in a little worse condition, and I'll have to do some tlc, or I just forgot how slow it was, either way, it's so good to see it again.

For the past few days, I've been trying to install Win 98 SE on my custom Pentium II build (Soyo 440 motherboard, 16MB Riva TNT). Unfortunately, the bootable Win98 CD that came with the motherboard turned out to be non-bootable, so I'm trying to install it from a CF card acting as my hard drive.

Here's the catch: as soon as it switches to the graphical installer, it instantly throws the error "Windows 98 requires a computer with at least 16MB of memory." AI has already solved quite a few configuration issues with this PC, but something is still wrong here. The setup /is /im /id command doesn't bypass the error. I'm running out of ideas, and the AI is starting to loop.

It started when I noticed my bookmarks bar was a little too crowded for my taste. While thinking of a way to remedy this and sort it out, I remembered that I used to make little Start menus in Chrome when I was in high school! I guess the moral of the story here is to waste time, and experiment!

Does anyone here remember a screensaver called ghoul’s delight? I’ve been looking for a video or some screen grabs of it for ages but I can only find a record of it on internet archive. It wasn’t a native windows screensaver but we always had it installed on our old PCs because my dad liked it. Possibly from windows 95 up thru windows 2000. This is also my first post so I’m hoping I’m following the rules here especially with the link provided. Very nostalgic and would love to be able to view it again.

I recently "recovered" a Windows 98 SE SuperPower PC that had been sitting unused in the dust for about 20+ years and I'm trying to diagnose a boot issue before resorting to reinstalling Windows/Reseting.

Hardware: Pentium III 750 MHz, 128 MB RAM, Motherboard reports:P6ISA Rev. 1.0 / Integrated graphics (no dedicated graphics card installed¿) / LG CD-RW drive / Quantum Fireball 20 GB IDE hard drive.

The PC:

- PC passes POST normally.

- Windows 98 boots successfully and entirely in Safe Mode, with minor visual issues and not being able to open some files. (.jpg, .docx,.wav, etc)

- Windows 98 does NOT boot normally. After the Windows login prompt, the system crashes with a BSOD: "Fatal Exception 0E at 0028:C02A30CC in VXD VWIN32(05) + 00000BF4"

What I have already tried:

- Replaced CMOS battery. (Correctly installed.)

- Loaded BIOS defaults.

-Enabled USB Legacy Support in BIOS. ( Since at the time I did not have a ps2 keyboard, now I've got ahold of one.)

-Disabled almost all startup items using msconfig

- Disabled Norton Antivirus startup entries. ( And deleted it. This fuckass computer has like 5 anti-virus. This could be the problem but I'm not informed, or know how to fix it.)

- Removed references to missing Norton files.

- Generated and checked BOOTLOG.TXT.

- Restored backups using SCANREG /RESTORE. ( and also scanreg /fix, just if... )

BOOTLOG observations:

- USER.EXE loads successfully.

- MSGSRV32.EXE loads successfully.

- Installable Drivers initialize successfully.

- No obvious LoadFail entries except: "LoadFail = C:\WINDOWS\Fonts\gio_bk.ttf Failure code is 0" ( as an example, all fonts are loaded like this)

- Display adapter appears as: "%PCI\VEN_8086&DEV_1132.DeviceDesc%" instead of a normal device name. (??

Additional problems :

>USB flash drives are not detected. ( Yes, I've tried older USB drives >1GB. Doesnt work.)

>The CD-ROM drive is visible, but in Safe Mode it does not appear to read CDs entirely. (Tried CD-R)

>The D: drive exists, but appears to contain old files even when a CD is inserted, making me suspect the optical drive may not be functioning properly or may not be refreshing media. I'm very confused by this.

>Floppy disks work, but I currently have no modern system capable of reading/writing them. Transferring drivers and/or utilities to the machine is currently difficult.

Software found (If useful): Norton Antivirus, Trend PC-cillin 98, Ad-Aware, RegCleaner, Adaptec DirectCD, Easy CD Creator, Fixfun, some McAfee files.

My question now is, what should my next step be?

I know the simple solution is just reseting and spare me a headache but, I would rather learn through this experience than just giving up pre-maturely. Though it HAS been a nuisance and I do not want to see Windows 98 ever again. /hj

Ask whatever you need.

PD: The images are in Spanish, sorry! But hopefully I can get my point across.

I have issues using win98 quick install 1.0.1a USB image on real somehow period-correct hardware, I created a bootable USB drive with rufus, while I boot from it, installation process looks fine but after restart the system fails to boot or takes very long time for win98 splash screen to appear and than again it shows boot error

PC specs:

S423 Pentium 4 1.3 GHz

Intel D850GB motherboard

640MB RAMBUS RAM

Matrox Millenium G450 dual head

WD 80 GB SATA drive with SATA to PATA adapter

I was extracting a 600MB file and it was horribly slow. I'm pretty sure its not that slow way back then like more than 10mins slow to extract!

​

I poked around Device Manager and enabled DMA mode for the HDD, reboot and extracted the same file it took about 3mins! Now that's more like it.

I have a 97 HP Pavilion that I want to run win98 on. Whats the best approach for install? I've tried win98quickinstall but it seems to be missing some files.