Win98-quickinstall: A framework and installer to quickly install Windows 98
github.com
github.com
Anyway these softwares use to have there crack/patch tools with them (with music and effects and whatnot). These cracks often had virus or trojen in them. I have bored my windows many many times. Ghost helped with that immensely. I had 1 or 2 fresh install with basic setup ghost backup always available. After every bork, it only took a minute to restore my windows to fresh clean state. Kaspersky was the best anti virus back then, no other tool repaired my corrupted softwares like it. Norton anti virus use to scream only after getting infected itself.
We have it lot easy now.
I wish I had something like it on Mac.
> GHOST (an acronym for general hardware-oriented system transfer), now called Symantec™ GHOST Solution Suite (GSS) for enterprise, is a disk cloning and backup tool originally developed by Murray Haszard in 1995 for Binary Research.
^^ GHOST was not descended from GoBack
As for something like GoBack on Mac, if you're using a recent macOS and have an APFS filesystem you can take/restore whole-disk snapshots with Time Machine, tmutil from the CLI, or a third-party tool like Carbon Copy Cloner.
Time Machine is file-based, whereas GoBack was block-based. GoBack could revert absolutely anything - even changes a program made to the OS or even to the boot sector! If you did something that made the machine not bootable, it was still a matter of seconds to boot into the GoBack supervisor and ask it to revert to a previous state.
APFS is quite powerful but its functionality hasn't been really exposed very well to the user.
Can apfs snapshots roll that back? Probably? But that functionality isn't exposed to mere mortals (and certainly not on the startup volume).
If there's a way to do this:
1. make-some-kind-of-snapshot abc123
2. make some changes all over the place (I don't know where!) that i then want to revert
3. restore-to abc123
and at this point, the entire system is exactly, precisely, bit for bit how it was after step 1 -- and where step 3 takes just a few seconds -- well, I'd love to know about it.
The trick to install a software was to disable it, restart, install it, enable it again and restart again. I only did that after installing a software and test it for a few hours or days, which of course didn't mean anything, but at least I didn't see any visible problem.
You can install a write filter on later embedded versions of Windows but this was available for home or café use as well.
Back in the days of such things, we'd upgrade the RAM and use Windows XP with the write filter to make them great little machines. There was an SD card slot in the side that would happily store files.
The SSDs were very limited in read-write cycles from what I remember. More noticeable they brutally slow at writing. By shoving all the writes into RAM instead of direct the SSD, everything ran more smoothly.
If you wanted to keep any changes (usually due to OS or software updates) then you ran a batch file that wrote out the changes to the SSD before shutdown. Otherwise you shut the machine down and all your changes were immediately forgotten.
RAM Upgrade: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n3WVb1dL--o Enhanced Write Filter: https://www.prime-expert.com/articles/a04/speeding-up-ssd-ba...
Almost the entirety of the growth in the size of the imaging executable, which did get hugely bigger, came from a constant drive to add capability to the NTFS support to match the FAT support, most crucially to allow the images to be edited in Ghost Explorer. The initial NTFS support that Ghost had prior to the Symantec releases was really crude, basically the content in the .GHO file wasn't files, but a raw-ish dump of used disk extents that it tried to always put back in the same place to avoid having to fix up attribute runs, whereas the FAT16/FAT32 content was basically a file archive where all the filesystem allocation metadata got recreated on the fly.
Customers wanted and pushed hard to have NTFS images editable, and that made life really hard - the approach that was ultimately taken meant creating a full read/write NTFS implementation, and those aren't small. And the design of that code interacted really badly with the C++ exception implementation in DJGPP (which before that work had begun, I had warned them about), so that eventually exception frame information was taking up ~25% of the on-disk size of the UPX-compressed binary!
I used to use the cataloging software WhereIsIt. It was really genious.
I am not clever enough to understand that I could just do it with linux by disk dumping into an image, but hey, old times
I found that I could take the machine to vintage computer events and it would (generally!) behave the entire event. I'd then take it home and put it back on the shelf for a few months. After I'd bring it back down to use it again, it'd throw a fit and usually require a reinstall! It's not disk rot since I use SSD's throughout
While this hasn't happened (this time) it's a constant looming concern, particularly when pressed for time to get something up and running for an event.
SSDs, unless they're very old SLC/MLC ones, do actually suffer from bit rot a lot more than magnetic/optical media. The unpowered retention ratings of new TLC/QLC flash is rather horrifying (months, not years or decades like they used to be).
https://goughlui.com/2023/10/10/psa-ssds-with-ymtc-flash-pro...
https://goughlui.com/2016/11/08/note-samsung-850-evo-data-re...
If you want a reliable SSD for old systems, an SLC-based CF card is a good choice; it doesn't need to be very big (8GB is plenty), and the retention characteristics are also "period-correct".
When I had chance to grab 180-days trial of W2000 I was shocked how stable it was - not seeing blue screen every few mins but modals with errors instead was... an amazing experience. The store where I've got my Celeron-based machine was installing 98 for everyone, not looking at licenses, all the legal stuff at all and when I ask guys there if they could drop W2000 they said that "it's a bad idea - many games won't work".
Speaking of "workstation grade" Windows, you can still approximate this kind of experience by using "deshittification" scripts from around the Internet. IIRC I've used <https://github.com/Raphire/Win11Debloat>. There are also enterprise-oriented release channels that keep some of the new bloat away, I think you can convince your existing installation.
Personally I'm more offended by recent macOS updates - probably since it's my daily driver, so I notice it more. I had to resort to things like MDM profiles to keep it in check.
Modern software just feels worse. I don't think it's nostalgia. A few years ago I've had my first experience with OS X 10.5 on a PowerBook. The system looked and worked better than modern macOS, even while the hardware was hot and somewhat struggling. Everything I needed from the OS was there (except for a performant web browser and less heat/noise). I'd switch.
> I think I should find an old retro PC and install W2000 on it, just for fun.
I made a W2000 install in VirtualBox with most of the old software I was using back then - of course without network connection outside. IMO that's much easier than dusting out old machine and wondering if it'll work at all after so many years but ofc there are people who dig that - I admire their dedication
https://bellard.org/jslinux/vm.html?url=win2k.cfg&mem=192&gr...
This was written 7 years ago, and rather amusingly, part of it is called TEMU.
I know it isn't a fair comparison since the computer with windows XP was newer and I don't remember the details but I remember thinking windows XP boots faster than 2k.
XP definitely needed more ram than 2000 to function acceptably. I remember 128mb being slow but tolerable on 2000 and absolutely brutal on XP.
This, I think the fastboot stuff probably seemed good on development machines used at microsoft, but on the cheap computers loaded with OEM garbage that they were pushing as being capable of running xp, it mostly loaded the desktop and then locked up for several minutes to finish actually booting.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prefetcher - that's the thing they introduced in XP to speed up loading the system and programs
I would have stayed on it, but my video drivers (Rendition Vérité 2200) at the time were time limit locked and the next set of drivers released didn't support the betas anymore.
2000 was the next best thing, but it was definitely a step backwards from beta 2.
Most people recommended a complete reinstall every 6 months well through the XP era but I found this was hardly ever necessary after I switched to 2000. Conversely, during my 98 days I never had to schedule reinstalls, Windows had rotted apart by then forcing me to do it!
That was a fun one to troubleshoot as a 12 year old kid.
Or perhaps it was because I dualbooted 98 and 2k.
All my warez were on a fat32 to be accessible from both. Somehow the audio in my mp3 collection got replaced with audio from my movies.
Haven't installed it in... 20 years?
I had bummed out my P-III 700Mhz desktop so many times, while tinkering with System32, INI files & experimental software etc., in grade school that this key is seared into some part of my cortex.
I typed it a lot of times, but still probably only in the (high) tens. Crazy how long it sticks in one's memory with relatively little spaced repetition.
I was the experimental, eldest summer child in my home. I used to break things trying, open up the hood & change RAM or other stuff, add/remove peripherals & their drivers -- and to the extent of nuking Windows entirely to try out Redhat 7/8, Knoppix, and other esoteric software (because partitioning sucked back then & also, why not for the fun of it). I used to load up dozens of software on that tiny Seagate 20.4GB drive until it crawled & failed. A clean wipe & reinstall used to soon follow.
The only parent-child contract was to bring back Windows XP to its usable state when direly needed by my mother to type/edit her dissertation chapters about women suffragette literature. I have broken & fixed Windows so many times, I could sing tunes to product keys
Bookmarking this for future use :)
That way if you wanted to make changes like install patches on Windows or change the DOSBox config you only have to do it to the redist.
I ended up staying awake until 2am having a blast rolling a 98se VM and discovered softgpu: https://github.com/JHRobotics/softgpu
This is nice. I've always wondered why they don't do this with the core parts of the os and then only extract additional components and drivers. But maybe back then the core was only a few MB and it wouldn't have helped so much...
I remember the setup taking ages. With 9x I don't think any install ever lasted longer than a year, so I did this a lot. :)
On a side-note, walking the line between annoying and entertaining was the noise of the HD during install, which sounded like techno music and I should have recorded it. Weirdly it was only during the win98 install that it made that type of sound.
Thats impressive speed for an install that not just copies pre-installed system, but also includes Hardware detection and selective driver installation phase.
This has nothing to do with being open source or being customizable. It's simply pointing out how fast hw detection is not only possible but the norm on other systems.
PCI wasn't a given. Plug and play wasn't a given. You couldn't even reliably enumerate all hardware on a system.
Hardware detection back then involved a lot of poking at random IO ports and seeing what happens, using heuristics to select an appropriate driver. This is as dodgy as it sounds and would crash or hang your system if you weren't lucky.
Then you can also use ClassicShell and have the 'good old Start Menu' as you prefer to have it.
There are also a bunch of privacy tools that can disable most of the garbage/uninstall the "Apps" and improve privacy with a few clicks.
I stayed in Windows 10 for 7-8 years. After I tried Win10 and I saw how my machine(s) work better on the same (10yo hardware) I switched everything to Win10 with the above 'measures' (plus the hosts from someonewhocares) and I haven't had any annoyances for years.
Is there an equivalent tool for Windows 11? I've used MSMG Toolkit and NTLite in the past to slim down the ISO, but it was a very manual and tedious process, and I still have to babysit the installation itself. I would like a tool that takes a predefined config file of what to remove, and then creates a fully unassisted installer. Obviously bypassing the online account shenanigans.
You can use audit mode from the OOBE of a fresh install, install your apps and changes, then run sysprep /generalize to clear the GUIDs and return to the OOBE - capture the image after the generalize but before reboot into the OOBE and the image will be a generalized install. All you need to do is restore the image (using a disk cloning software, dd from *nix, or a network server like FoG) create a ESP to boot from, and you have an image that can copy to any device at the speed of the disk or network.
Microsoft has a Deployment Toolkit (MDT) which can take a Windows install image (a WIM) and copy it to a machine then run other tasks as part of a Task Sequence. This is handy for small to medium sized businesses: a WIM can be a sysprepped image like mentioned a paragraph up, so you can include big changes like removing features or installing apps and updates. But then it can be configured, using a Task Sequence and/or an XML file, to do things after the Windows install like join a domain, create a local account, install certain apps, run Windows Update, etc. It also supports driver detection and installation. MDT can be accessed using a USB boot drive or a PXE network boot (Windows Deployment Services, WDS) and then you just choose the Task Sequence you want then walk away for an hour. But there is a learning curve: people have whole careers specializing in this stuff. There is a more expensive and powerful MS solution called SCCM that can do much the same stuff (and a lot lot more) but the concepts are the same.
What Microsoft are pushing toward now is what I'll call the "smartphone model" - IT departments don't reimage a machine as soon as it shows up, but instead register the device with a MDM like Intune. When the end-user receives the device, they are forced to use a corporate Microsoft account and then the desired configuration is pushed from the cloud. Without a MDM configuration ("Windows Autopilot") you can use a tool called WICD to create a configuration and save it as a "Provisioning package" which, when on the root of a USB drive that's inserted during the OOBE, will do the same configuration steps. I call this the smartphone model because according to MS, the Windows "factory reset" feature is all you would ever need rather than a traditional wipe-and-reinstall.
What I would advise for a home poweruser is to build a Windows image 2-3x a year in a virtual machine: do all your updates and tweaks and app installs in a VM, then capture the image using your disk cloning tool of choice (I do a bootable Linux session plus dd piped into gzip), preferably to a network share. Then use that tool on your target devices to restore the image: it will write at about 112MB/s over gigabit Ethernet and after the reboot will install your drivers and make the install unique.
Also, what's the use case for it?
Lastly, wondering if MS still sells Windows 98 if someone needs because of some specific reason.
For use cases - for me at least, it's for fun, nostalgia, and because I enjoy diving deeper into old hardware and OSs that I didn't have the experience to when they were new. Everyone has their own reasons, but I think this is a common one.
No need to buy Windows 98 anymore though, clean known-good OEM ISOs are available on WinWorldPC along with accompanying product keys.
They do, in fact buying Windows in a commercial setting basically entitles you to all the prior versions: https://download.microsoft.com/download/6/8/9/68964284-864d-...
I never went back to Windows and still use Linux to this day, nowadays with NixOS.
That said I am all for this project, I just don’t know who would use it.
I don't personally install Windows 98 nearly often enough to justify a tool like this, regular vanilla installs are fine with me. But some do a lot of benchmarking and testing on modern hardware, e.g. user "O_MORES" has a configuration to run Windows 98 alongside Windows 11 and frequently expands it.
This is MacOS in 1998: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Mac_OS_8.1_emulated_insid...
I think this is way uglier than Win9x.
And Bob's your uncle
I can understand installing Win 95, sentiments, blah, blah, first "real" windows MS system (Win 3.X was still some kind of windows manager on top of DOS).
But 98?
Maybe let's go hardcore and go with Win 98ME, the worst operating system ever (with Vista as a strong second-place contender), at least we can experience random blue screens, which were the major feature introduced by 98ME, and that surely should be replicated by a simulator, to feel those old vibes.
For me it was faster, more stable, more polished than Win95.
(a bit more bloated with the IE-integration, but that was easy to strip away)
Windows ME was not a release of, nor branded with, Windows 98 whatsoever.
Kind of interesting history there - "Me" was intended to show the PC was becoming more personal. I think WinMe added some new "My Documents", "My Pictures", etc. that came with Win2k and later XP which helped drive the personal aspect. Then later "XP" was meant to be "eXPerience" as in a new PC experience. Microsoft was a bit more fun back then.
So many poorly written applications broke through those days. I may be thinking of Vista/Win7 though, the time has muddled my brain a bit.
How so? Windows NT and 2000 were not designed for home use, and Windows ME released (September 14, 2000)[0] over a year before Windows XP released (October 25, 2001)[1].
[0] https://news.microsoft.com/2000/09/14/microsoft-announces-im...
[1] https://news.microsoft.com/2001/08/24/an-Inside-look-at-the-...
There's a crapload of late 90s / early 00s Windows games that isnt compatible with modern Windows, so running or emulating Win9X is really the only way of accessing them.
If you are doing Win9X today, you would only be using Win98SE or you're doing it wrong.
And let's not mention Windows Millenium again.
IMO, the main reason to run Windows Me over Windows 98 SE is if one likes the Windows 2000-style shell updates that were bundled into Me. Me also has a more mature network stack and some other updates ported over from the 2K kernel. If one likes those features then by all means - re-enable DOS mode and it's a decent alternative to 98 SE.