Windows 98 is usually the hardest of the three targets I test for on a retro PC build — DOS, Windows 98, Windows XP. It’s old enough that later chipsets and onboard audio were never designed with it in mind, but new enough that people expect a “beige box” build to run it without a fight.
Where it actually lands
Across the machines I’ve tried it on, Windows 98 support tends to track how late the chipset is:
- The Dell OptiPlex 380 has a BIOS RAM-limiting mode built in for exactly this, and is the cleaner, lower-drama Win98 build of the two OptiPlex machines.
- The OptiPlex 760 doesn’t have that RAM-limiting option, and its
ICH10southbridge andAD1984AHD Audio codec are late enough that onboard sound under Win98 is still an open problem. - The Dell Dimension E520 landed somewhere in between — some genuinely useful Win98 roles, but more of a hybrid machine than a clean answer.
On all three, DOS was consistently the easy part and Windows XP the natural fit — it’s specifically the Windows 98 window that narrows as the hardware gets newer.