Computers are much more advanced than they were even a few years ago, but of course we all like to complain about the dumb things they sometimes do. It's easy to forget how clunky things used to be, though. Sometimes you have to remember where you came from to appreciate what you have, so one brave (and possibly foolish) YouTuber tried to use a late 90s PC running Windows 98 as a full-time machine. It works, but it's also broken in some interesting ways.
OldTech81 opted to use a computer from the Windows 98 era for that authentic retro experience. The device he settled on was a Compaq Armada E500 with 128MB of RAM, 12GB of hard drive space, and a 500MHz Pentium III CPU. This was a killer laptop when it came out in 2000, and it still has a leg-up on some modern machines. For example, there's a built-in optical drive, a removable battery, and more ports than you have on a new MacBook Pro. Most of them are obsolete, but still.
You're probably imagining the experience of using Windows 98 would be terrible, but OldTech81 reports it's not bad. The Armada E500 has enough power to keep the OS chugging along nicely. Basic things like navigating settings, installing programs, and loading local content isn't appreciably slower than modern computers. You can even play MP3s and (low-resolution) video. The Armada has a standard USB-A port, and Windows 98 supports USB drivers. So, OldTech81 was able to plug in an external mouse. Video-out over VGA still works as well.
[embed width="640" height="360"]https://youtu.be/dA58zWmQfC4[/embed]
Getting work done on the Windows 98 machine was possible, but not ideal. No modern software supports Windows 98 anymore, but with a few kernel tweaks, OldTech81 was able to get older versions of OpenOffice and Mozilla Thunderbird designed for XP running on Windows 98. Thunderbird turns out to be important, because trying to load a web client for email is simply not happening. Even though Windows 98 works fine locally, it doesn't know how to operate on the modern web.
The most recent browser that works on Windows 98 is Internet Explorer 6, which was released nearly 16 years ago. Most web pages don't even load, and those that do are completely broken. The only solution is to use more kernel tweaks to load a better browser, but even then the most recent one that works is Opera 11. That's almost seven years old, but most websites will at least work. Some larger sites like Facebook simply use up all the computer's RAM and never finish loading.
It's possible to use Windows 98 for some things these days, but things fall apart when that machine has to talk to anything else on the internet. It's remarkable how far the internet has come in the last two decades that software and hardware from that era can't even access most content.
