It's really not that bad. There are plenty of socket 754 and 939 boards that will run Win98(SE) just fine, and I've used it as my main system on an nForce3 (socket 754) board. It installed OK on my AM2 (Via K8M890) board as well, complete with embedded (S3 Chrome9 IGP) video support - though I couldn't find a Win9x driver for the embedded (Realtek ALC883) audio (easily remedied with a cheap audio card, had I cared to do so) and once in a while it hangs for no obvious reason (having moved to using mostly Win2K on that system these days it's not worth worrying about). In fact, the only recent machine of ours that it *won't* install on is a GeForce6150B with nForce430 (haven't tried just plunking down some other working Win98SE system on it and trying to update drivers individually because I haven't been able to find any Win9x 430 drivers for it even if the unofficial nVidia driver here would support the 6150 - elsewhere in this thread I think I remember mention of an ECS nForce 4 board that purportedly supported Win9x, but I couldn't find drivers to download and try). But DOS 7.1 still runs fine there (and will run WFW 3.11 if you want to: with an 8 GB FAT32 partition its File Manager won't admit that free or used space can exceed 1.99 MB, but everything else seems to work based on a very cursory test) - as does DOS 6.22 (which I tried installing just for why-not - perhaps I'm getting old, but I can't say that I relished the thought of what it might take to optimize its RAM use and create a network-enabled system with it). That said, having more or less migrated to Win2K over the past 8 months or so I can't say that there's too much of Win9x that I miss there. Just about everything we used to run on Win9x (save for the occasional ancient DOS game) runs on Win2K, plus a lot of stuff that wouldn't run on Win9x (I do find it annoying that some things say they require XP, since there's little obvious reason why they should - haven't yet tried setting up Win2K to lie to them to see how that works). And with supported Win9x network protection software becoming hard to find using Win9x for surfing is becoming a bit dicey: AVG seems to be planning to drop Win9x support this summer, leaving only Avast - I think - with any active anti-virus protection, and while being up-to-date is less important for firewalls I'm not sure that ZA 5.5 makes me feel as warm and fuzzy as I'd like to (I tried Jetico but it doesn't seem to like some of my systems). Since we sit behind a modest hardware router we might be OK with just about nothing at all, but still... Dual-booting a Win2K logical partition off a Win98SE primary partition let's me use AntiVir, Comodo, and ThreatFire to protect both (not that I've removed AVG, ZA, and WinPatrol from Win98: even limited active protection is better than none at all) - and the FAT32 partition (where I've set up Firefox and Thunderbird so that their profiles can be accessed from either system) can easily be shared with the Linux system that I keep meaning to try out. With even just 256 MB of RAM Win2K seems nearly as responsive as Win98SE on anything but decade-old hardware, and at least as stable. I'm getting tempted to rip TCP/IP support out of the Win98SE system so that I won't be tempted to surf with it (our home LAN uses NetBEUI, so that'll still be accessible). Whoops - this may not be the right place to extoll Win2K's virtues, and given that I've been happy with Win98 until *very* recently I wouldn't want to seem to be knocking it now. Guess I'm just trying to say that a) there's still a lot of hardware on which it will run just fine (though relatively little *new* hardware where that's true) and b) dual-booting with newer Windows versions provides one easy way to keep using it safely. - bill
