Come the middle of this year, Windows 98 enters the so-called "non-supported phase." At that time, all Microsoft support for the product will cease except for online help, and even that online help may be terminated with 12 months notice from Microsoft.

Now as many of you know, ninety-eight was a good year for Windows. Windows 98 Second Edition was the best home-user version of the operating system developed in the 20th Century. Chances are you may want to keep your copy of it running well past Microsoft's cut-off date. Even if you buy a new computer running XP, it makes sense to keep Win 98 SE running on your older, less powerful hardware.

With Win 98 support fast disappearing, now is the time to create your own Windows 98 Support & Reinstallation Kit consisting of your original setup disc plus copies of all updates, patches, utilities and drivers which make Windows 98 run at its peak.

A 10-step process

The following 10 steps will let you preserve your copy of Windows 98 in amber:

  1. If possible, start with a copy of Windows 98 Second Edition, not the original Windows 98. If you don't already have it, you can probably pick up a copy at second-hand sales for a song.
  2. Create a safe place for your Win 98 disc plus all other support material.
  3. Make sure you have a copy of your 25-character Windows 98 Product Key. If you obtained Windows 98 pre-installed on a new computer, the product key may well be located on the Getting Started with Microsoft Windows 98 manual, under "Certificate of Authenticity." Make multiple copies of this product key: Use a CD-safe pen to ink it on the non-data side of your installation CD and store the manual together with your installation CD.
  4. Collect all the installation discs for your Win 98 applications. If you've downloaded Win 98 utilities and applications from the Internet, copy the downloaded files onto floppy, Zip disc or CD and store them too. Make sure you keep a record of any related product keys or IDs, too.
  5. Visit your software manufacturers' sites and grab all program updates. Use a search engine such as Google to track down the appropriate sites.
  6. Visit your hardware manufacturers' sites and grab all the most recent Windows 9x drivers. Also, gather together all your original driver disks and place them with the rest of your Reinstallation Kit.
  7. Create a couple of copies of the Win 98 startup floppy disk (Start -> Settings -> Control Panel -> Add/Remove Programs -> Startup Disk) and store them with your Reinstallation Kit.
  8. Consider a subscription to Drivers HQ for $US29.95. You can then download the site's Driver Detective utility, work out which drivers your hardware requires, and gain access to the site's extensive list of drivers and driver updates. Alternatively, you can try the free Driver Guide.
  9. Gather together all Microsoft's patches and updates for Windows 98 and burn them to CD or copy them onto a backup disk.
  10. Create a documentation library by printing or saving to disc troubleshooting articles about Win 98.

I've summarised this list in a checklist you may wish to print out and then use to ensure you've covered all bases in creating your Reinstallation Kit.

geekgirl.tip: Track down other resources

A search at Google for "essential Windows 98 utilities drivers" will turn up additional useful resources, such as Software Design's collection of Windows utilities.

Your patch kit

The most difficult part of the whole process is ensuring you have all the Microsoft patches and updates for Windows 98. If you use Windows Update to keep your operating system up to date – as Microsoft recommends – all the patches are installed on-the-fly. That leaves you with no backup copies. So you need to download and save copies of every single update available. How do you do that? Via Microsoft's Windows 98 Updates for Corporate IT Managers site:

  1. Create a folder called Windows 98 Reinstallation Kit.
  2. Go to the Corporate IT Managers site and download everything, even if you don't think you need a particular update – although you can probably do without Windows Media Player 6 and NetMeeting. The total download, minus WMP and NetMeeting, is around 12 megabytes. To save the files, click each in turn, print the page which describes what the update does and print any linked Knowledge Base articles. For example, the Windows 98 Second Edition Shutdown Supplement has a link to a Knowledge Base article on troubleshooting Windows 98 shutdown problems; if you read that article, you'll find another link to a more comprehensive article about Windows 98 shutdown problems. Print all this documentation.

Note: If you'd prefer to keep copies of the update documentation on disk instead of printing it all, when you view each documentation page click File -> Save As in your browser and save the page to your newly created Windows 98 Updates folder.

Once you've stored the documentation for an update, click Next, accept any licence terms and, when the File Download dialog box appears click Save (do not click Open!) and save the update to your Windows 98 Updates folder.

  1. After downloading everything at the Corporate IT Managers site, visit the Internet Explorer site and grab your preferred copy of Internet Explorer and any updates. If you're happy using IE 6 or later, you can probably skip this step, but if you wish to continue using IE 5.01 or IE 5.5, hit the Internet Explorer 5.x downloads page and also check out any pre-IE6 downloads on the Internet Explorer Critical Updates page.
  2. Visit Mr Scary's and grab anything which wasn't included in the other sites, such as DirectX 8.1, the Visual Basic Runtime libraries, and DCOM version 1.3.

Your documentation library

To supplement your Windows 98 library, visit the following sections of the Microsoft site and save or print any articles which catch your eye:

Burn and save

Once you have all the Microsoft updates stored in your Windows 98 Reinstallation Kit folder, you may want to collect all the other bits and pieces – hardware drivers, application updates, essential utilities, and so on – and place them in the same folder, organised into appropriately labelled sub-folders.

geekgirl.technote: Naming update files
As you save each Windows Update file, give it an identifiable name. For example, the Windows Script Support file is called ste50en.exe. When you click the Save button, give the file a more descriptive name, such as Windows Script Support ste50en.exe. That way you can identify the file in future and you've preserved the original name as well.

Finally, burn the entire folder to CD or copy it to a high-density disk. It's a good idea to make two copies, one to store near your computer and the other to store elsewhere in a safe place, together with any other original discs or documentation for your Windows 98 Reinstallation Kit.

© 2003  Rose Vines

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