If you still have an old laptop somewhere around, or a Windows 98 operating PC in your garage and feel a bit nostalgic of the times you used to play Quake, Hexen, Prehisto, POP3D or Pinball, we might just give you a reason to wipe the dust off them.
Unofficial Windows 98 SE Service Pack might just be enough to bring your old computer back to life. The application comprises all the updates released for Windows 98 Second Edition and will most definitely add more compatibility, stability and overall performance to your old PC.
Although Microsoft never released a service pack for Windows 98 SE, Alper Coskun put together a pack of patches available through the online Windows Update site and added a little something extra.
It's extremely easy to install, requiring very little user intervention. In fact, a bit more customization is what the application lacks: unfortunately, you cannot choose the individual updates to install, as the application installs all of them.
Unofficial Windows 98 SE Service Pack is a collection of 120+ updates and hotfixes, solving some of the most bugging issues of Windows 98 such as the 512 MB RAM cap limit, creating a lot of problems while trying to open a MS-DOS session or booting up.
Some of the available tweaks in the pack allow you to increase your 16 bit Direct Memory Access channel buffer to its maximum size of 64 bites, or to disable the screen-saver when the Disk Defragmenter is active.
Included are the Visual Basic 5.0 SP2 and 6.0 SP6 runtime libraries, OLE Automation Libraries 2.40.4522, Visual C++ 6.0 SP6 runtime library, JET 3.5 SP3 update, Microsoft Layer for Unicode, HTML Help 5.0 or Windows Scripting Host 5.6.
Some of the optional features in the pack, that add more functionality to Windows 98 are MetaPad 3.5 – an alternative Notepad, optimized swap file usage, better WDM and USB support, Command Prompt Here, an animated boot and shutdown logo or the Windows 2000 color scheme.
You can easily uninstall the service pack at any time by using the Control Panel but keep in mind that not all files are removed. Only about half of them are deleted from your system so only use this option if you encounter serious problems that you consider to be related to the SP installation. Creating a backup before the service pack installation, should help avoiding this kind of issues.
And finally, you must know that Unofficial Windows 98 SE Service Pack only comprises operating system updates only, and does not update Internet Explorer, DivX or Media Player to their later versions. Also, it only works with the English version of Windows 98 SE.
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