OK, so, many packs and packages exist to enhance 98SE beyond its original state and well beyond its fully-Microsoft-updated state at this point.

• 98SE2ME
• 98SESP3 (3.55 as of this writing)

There are other minor packages like NUSB and such but I'm mainly talking about the larger packs here.

The point: what ones do you install to get an optimal setup of 98SE these days? My current belief is that 98SESP3 contains the most useful things in 98SE2ME and 98SE2ME is largely useless unless you want some niche changes, but you could perform those yourself manually. I may be wrong, which is why I'm asking here.

At one point I'd installed both on one system, and I'm not entirely sure what I created by doing that - I was largely ignorant of the specific changes of 98SESP3 at the time (not that I know them all now, but I understand far better). I don't recall what order I installed them in, but it worked alright in 99.9% of cases but seemed unstable/incompatible with a few things once in a while (though that could just be more 98SE being flaky on me than the packs).

If you know of any other enhancements please let me know of them, including the above two major changes I am aware of:

• RP9
• NUSB (is this included in SP3?)
• KernelEx
• 98MP10 (I don't care for this myself but it's a cool achievement)

I may have forgotten some due to it being a few years since I was fully immersed in the 9x community last, so forgive me if I missed your favorite or your personal project in my little list.

Currently this is what I'm doing on 98SE systems:

1. Install 98SE.
2. Install NUSB to get access to flash drive for data transfer.
3. Install SP3.

I'm about to set up another of my 9x boxes (Toshiba Libretto 110CT) over again and I want to know if there's something I could be doing better or something I'm missing out on.

I would also install Internet Explorer 5.5 or 6.0, which update system files and libraries to newer versions.

Many newer programs that run on Windows 98SE will demand newer versions of COMCTL32.DLL and MFC42.DLL, both of which are available in IE 5.5/IE 6.0.

Depending on what you use the system for, you'll also want to upgrade DirectX to 9.0c: DirectX 9.0c End-User Runtime August 2006 (if that link dies in the future, you can get the archived version here: https://web.archive.org/web/20061122035939/http://download.microsoft.com/download/2/1/e/21e186a5-30b8-4cc0-888a-db4abb111405/directx_aug2006_redist.exe)

Yeah I install IE6 as well, I forgot whether it was included in SP3 or not which is why I didn't mention it. DX9 is included in SP3, but I do install that as well (used to do it separately before it was included).

Thanks for the input.

Edited May 14, 201610 yr by Yushatak