Best Laptops That Runs Windows 98

[Bracamonte]

Hello, I've been wondering which laptops are considered the best to run Windows 98 on. Are there laptops that have at most 1 GB of RAM, a built-in wifi, and has a good amount of GHz that can run Windows 98 almost flawlessly? Currently I have a Dell Inspiron 3800 that runs Windows 98, but it is already showing its age. It has a broken hinge, dead CMOS battery, a battery that no longer holds a charge, and constant hanging.

[cov3rt]

Hello, I've been wondering which laptops are considered the best to run Windows 98 on. Are there laptops that have at most 1 GB of RAM, a built-in wifi, and has a good amount of GHz that can run Windows 98 almost flawlessly? Currently I have a Dell Inspiron 3800 that runs Windows 98, but it is already showing its age. It has a broken hinge, dead CMOS battery, a battery that no longer holds a charge, and constant hanging.

you could try the dell inspiron 600m, make sure to pick one with the 64 MB of mobility radeon 9000 graphics, because some only come with 32 MB. there is a driver for the ethernet, you can put a mini pci wifi card, and pretty much find drivers for all the other devices, however, i would rather use this laptop for a windows 95 build with the pcmcia slot and wifi card combo being a perfect match with the other specs, i tested it and almost all drivers were there except for some reason i could not get the pcmcia slot to work or at least i didn't know how to set it up, could possibly be because of missing drivers or updated drivers needed too, i also couldn't find a working ethernet driver, with windows 98, some games may need up to 128 MB or possibly 256 MB of video ram and possibly a faster processor so the inspiron 600m wouldn't be the best choice. the only other laptops i've researched so far ( i recently got into the laptop business, i buy and sell them, and i noticed the hp dv4000 models with mobility radeon x700 graphics would possibly be a good candidate, dell latitude d810 with mobility radeon x600 graphics, or dell inspiron 8600 with geforce fx go 5650 128 MB gpu ) 

[Bracamonte]

So the Inspiron 8600 can run Windows 98?

[farfigs11]

So the Inspiron 8600 can run Windows 98?

Yep

 

http://www.msfn.org/board/topic/162360-windows-98-on-a-2006-laptop/

[sdfox7]

I highly recommend the IBM ThinkPad T series. Very well built and durable machines. I have a T40 with 32MB video memory and the first with USB 2.0. This machines uses DDR RAM. It is very light at around 4 pounds. Includes the Intel 2100 internal wireless card.

http://sdfox7.com/win98/files/win98t40.jpg

There are multiple models that IBM officially made with Windows 98 drivers/support. You can go with the T42, T41, T40, T30, T23, T22, T21, T20 (Pentium 3 or Pentium 4 M based with PC100 RAM and USB 1.0). All depends how fast you want to go. There is also the legendary ThinkPad 600 series (some of the older 600's come with Pentium II processors).

Note that the T30 is the last with a serial port. The T42 is the last model that "Officially" supports Windows 98, but some have gotten it running "unofficially" with the T43: Windows 98SE on Thinkpad T43: http://forum.thinkpads.com/viewtopic.php?t=33287)

I would recommend 256MB RAM. I don't want to start a flame war but in my opinion, once you get to 512MB-1GB, Windows 98 doesn't really benefit from that much memory unless you are using Photoshop.

I also love the ThinkLight!

http://www.thinkwiki.org/wiki/ThinkPad_History

[rloew]

Disable Virtual Memory in Device Manager. Then tell everyone that 256MB is enough. If you can, enjoy.

Otherwise, silence is golden.

I don't have Photoshop, but one of my Programs uses 27000MB of RAM.

[sdfox7]

RLoew,

The performance with virtual memory disabled under Windows 98 is very good. In fact, there are sources that suggest disabling it if you have more than 64MB RAM.

"Silence is golden."

Did I say something I shouldn't have?

[pangoomis]

1.15GB is the limit, Windows 98SE runs absolutely fine and the RAM is really beneficial if you want to surf modern web with Opera 12.02, or similar. Or watch HTML5 video, or use Flash, or play games like SimCity4 or NFS:MW 2005 (they work on 98SE )

Instead of disabling swap, use ConservativeSwapfileUsage=1.

Edited July 25, 2015 by MrMateczko

[oscareczek]

Did I say something I shouldn't have?

 

I would recommend 256MB RAM. I don't want to start a flame war but in my opinion, once you get to 512MB-1GB, Windows 98 doesn't really benefit from that much memory unless you are using Photoshop.

[rloew]

With swap disabled, you get a clearer picture of how much RAM you are actually using. Instead of slowing down to swap, you get errors.

It was not a recommendation on how to configure a system.

I would think 256MB is rather low unless you are a fairly light user. With just a few Browser Windows open I am seeing 500MB allocated in System Monitor.

[sdfox7]

RLoew

I use this ThinkPad T40 for web browsing, Office documents, and email, so I guess I would consider myself a "light" or "average" user.

With Office 97, Firefox 1.5, IE 5.5 and Opera 10 I can be quite productive (legacy system speaking), and all 4 programs are light on resources.

Edited July 25, 2015 by sdfox7

[rloew]

Then 256MB is probably fine for you, but recommendations need to apply to a much larger group of users.

I run a business that depends upon users who find even 1152 MB is too little.

Edited July 26, 2015 by rloew

[M()zart]

I'd say 256 Mb is not enough (now). I was running a PC with Windows 98 and 256 Mb of RAM for several years (about 2008 - 2012) with lots of experiments and trying to run as much stuff on it as possible. And 256 Mb was not enough for later CASUAL games, which could be run on Windows 98 with Kernel Ex. Not big DVD games, but even smaller casual games. For example, Plants and Zombies hardly run on this PC, and I was not able to see the game's music video. Mainly it was because of amount of RAM, not processor. (Still I was able to complete the game )

For some time I didn't want to buy an additional 256 Mb stick because I didn't want to invest even a small sum of money in that old PC. In 2012 I bought a not used stick for around 12$, and just after a month the PC stopped working completely (it seems, because of HDD controllers on the maindoard). I don't know whether this is because of the "new" stick or not, but now it does not work with or without the stick. The system was faster with some apps and games, but somewhat less stable for that month.

Offtop - recently I saw a math puzzle game that requires 2 GB of RAM. Crazy.

Edited July 27, 2015 by M()zart

[sdfox7]

I'd say 256 Mb is not enough (now). I was running a PC with Windows 98 and 256 Mb of RAM for several years (about 2008 - 2012) with lots of experiments and trying to run as much stuff on it as possible. And 256 Mb was not enough for later CASUAL games, which could be run on Windows 98 with Kernel Ex. Not big DVD games, but even smaller casual games. For example, Plants and Zombies hardly run on this PC, and I was not able to see the game's music video. Mainly it was because of amount of RAM, not processor. (Still I was able to complete the game )

For some time I didn't want to buy an additional 256 Mb stick because I didn't want to invest even a small sum of money in that old PC. In 2012 I bought a not used stick for around 12$, and just after a month the PC stopped working completely (it seems, because of HDD controllers on the maindoard). I don't know whether this is because of the "new" stick or not, but now it does not work with or without the stick. The system was faster with some apps and games, but somewhat less stable for that month.

Offtop - recently I saw a math puzzle game that requires 2 GB of RAM. Crazy.

 

Yes, I acknowledge that everyone will have different experiences using their operating system. There are many different configurations possible.

 

I simply stated that if you use Windows 98 as intended, you can get by with 256MB without a problem. As a matter of fact, 64MB ought to be enough as some Win98 era mainboards can't even cache more than that. Gaming, in my opinion, is not casual use.

 

I can run YouTube on Internet Explorer 6.0 SP3 in XP with Flash Player 18.0.0.209 and it only takes up ~100M RAM.

 

[CamTron]

I don't know how rare they are, but the Gateway Solo 9550 is the most powerful laptop designed for Windows 98 that I've seen. It's got a 1.2 GHz Pentium III, up to 512 MB RAM, Nvidia Geforce2 graphics, built-in WiFi, and tons of ports.

 

It's way easier to get a powerful desktop for Windows 9x. Most of the laptops that run Windows 98 are either so ancient and fragile that I wouldn't want to carry them around, or they have very low specs.