alt.hn

3/31/2025 at 4:10:45 AM

Win98-quickinstall: A framework and installer to quickly install Windows 98

 https://github.com/oerg866/win98-quickinstall

by userbinator

3/31/2025 at 9:22:46 AM

This reminds of the Ghost (was it Norton Ghost?) tool. I use to experiment with the file system and try out many many all kinds of softwares from Internet and software CDs. Those CDs use to come with 100s of softwares of all kind. I use to buy them and then try out every single one of them. I use to maintain an index, using IYF, to find a software in any of those CDs.

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.

by smusamashah

3/31/2025 at 12:17:21 PM

Ghost was descended from my absolute favorite late-90s / early 00s tool, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GoBack which, as you say, let you undo absolutely anything you did to your machine.

I wish I had something like it on Mac.

by dmd

3/31/2025 at 4:33:01 PM

> GoBack was designed by Wild File, Inc., a company located in Plymouth, Minnesota. The software was shown at COMDEX in November 1998 and released in December 1998.

> 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.

by astrostl

3/31/2025 at 4:34:51 PM

You're right, the article said "replaced by" and I assumed it had some lineage, but no.

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.

by dmd

3/31/2025 at 4:41:11 PM

Since Catalina the OS itself is in a read-only volume and everything else is separate - by default, respectively "Macintosh HD" and "Data" as exposed in Disk Utility. Strictly speaking, I think programs cannot change the OS or boot sector. The only thing I know of that can is a macOS upgrade itself, and it does automatically take a pre-upgrade snapshot for the ability to restore.

by astrostl

3/31/2025 at 4:52:06 PM

Sure, but suppose I run something that spews all over, say, my homebrew install. That's not "part of the OS", but it might as well be.

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.

by dmd

3/31/2025 at 5:07:15 PM

Time Machine can do that. Whether they're automatic or manual backups, you can boot your system in recovery mode and restore from a backup to fully revert to a previous snapshot. It will require a reboot and the speed of execution will depend on the size of the changeset from the current state.

by astrostl

3/31/2025 at 2:42:26 PM

GoBack was great. I gotta believe there's a way to manually instrument this using `tmutil` to create incremental APFS snapshots and some middleware code that knows when to wait for for the FS to be idle, but that's handwaving a ton of details.

by spmurrayzzz

3/31/2025 at 1:02:08 PM

Superduper is a useful Mac utility, as is CCC (Carbon Copy Cloner)

by Synaesthesia

3/31/2025 at 1:14:16 PM

Those are backup tools, which have little to nothing to do with what I'm talking about.

by dmd

3/31/2025 at 2:56:48 PM

Reminded of DiskFreeze (or something ismilar, Freeze was for sure in the name), that i installed in my PC after seeing it as some cyber cafes. Basically, one partition with all the software was under this DiskFreeze, and another partition / disk where I stored documents and files. DiskFreeze restored the disk/partition with OS+software on every restart, meaning that I was infected or corrupted or anything, a simple restart would fix the machine.

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.

by 101008

3/31/2025 at 5:26:34 PM

XP had a good snapshot/restore tool: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_SteadyState

You can install a write filter on later embedded versions of Windows but this was available for home or café use as well.

by rzzzt

4/1/2025 at 12:10:10 AM

The early ~2008 Linux-supplied dirt cheap Acer Aspire One A110L netbooks came with small (8GB?) and horrifically slow SSDs.

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...

by Nexxxeh

3/31/2025 at 8:41:31 PM

It was simply "Ghost" before Norton bought it and made it more terrible and bloated over time. We (at a computer shop I worked at) used Ghost to build a pre-OOBE image for several common Windows configurations and then just image them to new PCs in a few minutes, then apply the license key afterward.

by pixelbath

4/1/2025 at 1:05:21 AM

Symantec left our team - which was basically identical before and after acquisition - pretty much alone beyond adding in some (badly needed) release process and i18n requirements.

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!

by nigel_bree

3/31/2025 at 9:55:21 AM

Kaspersky was the very best, it could handle any bad case better than any of the others.

I used to use the cataloging software WhereIsIt. It was really genious.

by unixhero

3/31/2025 at 10:35:07 AM

I also reinstalled windows one too many times and used norton backup.

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

by txdv

3/31/2025 at 7:30:28 AM

I debated building something like this for a couple years with my "Ultimate Windows 98 PC" [1]

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.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YETxI4rA_gs

by CursedSilicon

3/31/2025 at 1:50:54 PM

It's not disk rot since I use SSD's throughout

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".

by userbinator

3/31/2025 at 2:15:39 PM

While these posts are well written, one is about a cheap Chinese flash manufacturer, the other unknown, and the author muses that it may be the control chip or firmware, not the flash itself.

by bbarnett

3/31/2025 at 8:29:59 PM

Samsung famously "fixed" the retention problems in firmware by having it periodically rewrite data in the background, but that doesn't work if the SSD is powered off.

by userbinator

3/31/2025 at 7:49:37 AM

I remember having to constantly reinstall win98 back in the 2000s. It felt like the OS kept corrupting its own filesystem. I ended up "borrowing" a debian potato CD from a professor's desk and never went back to windows (or his office).

by nurettin

3/31/2025 at 8:07:11 AM

Back then reinstall without formatting the drive felt like resetting system to defaults and was practised by almost everyone. I'm pretty sure W10 and W11 has similar feature nowadays by default.

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".

by pndy

3/31/2025 at 8:53:44 AM

I still consider Windows 2000 the best Windows ever made. NT under the hood, slim, up-to-date, extremely stable, it ran all the games I wanted. I managed to grab a burned CD with a full version somewhere, the keys were not yet checked online for multiple installs. For a long time, all software and every driver for XP also worked for 2000. I think I should find an old retro PC and install W2000 on it, just for fun.

by enopod_

3/31/2025 at 3:52:38 PM

Agree, W2k was peak Windows. Even the UI effects, like subtle drop shadows and fade-out animations looked tasteful, and were smooth on pretty average HW.

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.

by rollcat

3/31/2025 at 9:44:43 AM

I really liked both stability and that subtle change from dark grey GUI colour to gray with a really subtle yellow hint that made it more pleasant to my eyes. So was the default blue background colour instead of teal green more appealing.

> 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

by pndy

3/31/2025 at 10:06:38 AM

I remember things differently. Perhaps it was because I was working with older hardware or something I don't know but Windows 2k felt so slow to boot.

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.

by mcny

3/31/2025 at 12:44:14 PM

IIRC with XP they late loaded a lot of things to get the desktop showing faster than 2000. My experience at the time was that while the desktop might have loaded faster it wasn't actually usable for quite awhile after I was looking at it, but that might have had more to do with all the crapware on many XP machines I used at the time.

XP definitely needed more ram than 2000 to function acceptably. I remember 128mb being slow but tolerable on 2000 and absolutely brutal on XP.

by reginald78

3/31/2025 at 5:51:29 PM

>My experience at the time was that while the desktop might have loaded faster it wasn't actually usable for quite awhile after I was looking at it

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.

by Suppafly

3/31/2025 at 1:09:39 PM

> IIRC with XP they late loaded a lot of things to get the desktop showing faster than 2000

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prefetcher - that's the thing they introduced in XP to speed up loading the system and programs

by pndy

3/31/2025 at 4:13:24 PM

Interesting. I have the opposite recollection. Perhaps it has more to do with the hardware I was using.

by recursive

4/1/2025 at 6:42:59 AM

NT5 beta 2, before 2000 was enshittified.

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.

by NikkiA

3/31/2025 at 12:39:36 PM

Windows 9x suffered from DLL hell. So every time a program was installed it potentially overwrote dlls with a different version often older or incompatible. Windows 2000/XP just redirected the installer's dlls into a per program location preventing this which is a large reason those versions were so much more stable.

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!

by reginald78

3/31/2025 at 2:47:27 PM

I definitely remember the DLL hell experience that manifested as an older 2d game overwriting some DirectX dlls in the OS with older versions, and suddenly all my FPS games stopped working.

That was a fun one to troubleshoot as a 12 year old kid.

by antisthenes

3/31/2025 at 11:17:04 AM

It did.

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.

by geon

3/31/2025 at 8:01:36 AM

Fun fact: I (re)installed windows 98 so many times due to crashes, slowness, viruses etc that even now, 20 years later, I remember every digit of the 25 digit activation key.

by jonplackett

3/31/2025 at 8:05:28 AM

And I'll bet I remember the exact same key ;)

by Codes

3/31/2025 at 2:06:29 PM

I still almost remember all of a certain infamous "FCKGW" key for WinXP.

Haven't installed it in... 20 years?

by alabastervlog

3/31/2025 at 5:18:40 PM

FCKGW-RHQQ2-YXRKT-8TG6W-2B7Q8

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.

by srvmshr

3/31/2025 at 5:21:14 PM

I had the first, second, and fifth sections down for sure, and some almost-remembered version of the other two but also couldn't remember which order they went in.

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.

by alabastervlog

3/31/2025 at 5:41:50 PM

In those days of yore, the P-III was our first home computer (Hard to imagine for kids today that a family of 5 could have one PC shared between themselves).

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

by srvmshr

3/31/2025 at 9:48:14 PM

That was my first CPU! Thanks for the flashback.

by culopatin

3/31/2025 at 8:48:25 PM

W7XTC-2YWFB-..?

by userbinator

3/31/2025 at 9:39:39 AM

Funnily enough, I use this as the base for my password (plus some other stuff) for anything I need strong protection for.

by ramijames

3/31/2025 at 7:42:04 PM

I hope you weren’t also using the key above then…

by jonplackett

3/31/2025 at 8:25:04 AM

Running Win98 is still the most reliable way to get Discworld Noir to actually run; a gem of a game, made almost useless by the aggressive DRM practices of the time.

Bookmarking this for future use :)

by tpoacher

3/31/2025 at 8:54:19 AM

For games like these I tend to use a base Win98 image with DOSBox and then mount the game as a separate drive, disable the Windows shell, and auto start the game.

by pathartl

3/31/2025 at 9:04:27 AM

I’m surprised nobody has created a way to automate this process - I imagine that any tool that makes it trivial would be quite popular, given what a pain it can be to set up manually.

by LocutusOfBorges

3/31/2025 at 3:32:28 PM

I actually dev a project called LANCommander which can be used as a sef-hosted digital game distribution platform ala Steam, Epic Games, etc. It has built in support for redistributables. What i would actually do is make the DOSBox/Win98 combo a redist and then have the individual games require that redist.

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.

by pathartl

3/31/2025 at 3:47:21 PM

Decided to take a look at LANCommander since it sounds interesting - looks really cool! But the website is currently giving 502 errors, so I'm only able to see the README.md

by piperswe

3/31/2025 at 5:15:39 AM

Good work, I still use Windows 9X for emulation for DOS, 16 bit Windows, and 32 bit Windows programs. I do legacy systems and retro programming on them.

by orionblastar

3/31/2025 at 6:18:10 AM

What do you use it on? Do you have dedicated hardware, dosbox/pcem, a vitrual machine of some sort?

by krige

3/31/2025 at 6:22:47 AM

Virtual Box VM.

by orionblastar

3/31/2025 at 3:58:39 PM

I recommend emulators like 86box or PCem instead, they're much better for such old systems than VMs.

by Narishma

3/31/2025 at 6:27:23 AM

How'd you get it stable on that? IME it tended to crash even more that regular 9x did.

by krige

3/31/2025 at 8:46:50 PM

There are patches to fix TLB invalidation bug, memory limit, and several other things.

by userbinator

4/1/2025 at 1:53:46 AM

Bought a minipc for a project, tried Win11, didn't hate it, but was surprised how little and poor the legacy software compatibility was.

I ended up staying awake until 2am having a blast rolling a 98se VM and discovered softgpu: https://github.com/JHRobotics/softgpu

by washadjeffmad

3/31/2025 at 2:55:02 PM

Not GP but I have had the same experience. I exclusively use 86Box for anything older than XP these days and it works fantastic. The ability to swap in whatever hardware you want is so much fun.

by accrual

3/31/2025 at 6:57:02 AM

> with a custom data packing method that is optimized for streaming directly from CD to the hard disk without any seeking

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. :)

by iforgotpassword

3/31/2025 at 9:32:32 AM

This is definitely an interesting part of it. Copying a few hundred megs from CD to HDD doesn't take long even for old hardware, but when I was setting up a win98 rig last autumn to test some 3dfx cards it took the common ~45 minutes to get through the main install, and that's before you get into the post-install cycle of installing any software/drivers/updates that need reboots. The "unofficial service pack3" is one I'd love to integrate as it includes support for USB mass storage which made the machine a lot easier to work with

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.

by keyringlight

3/31/2025 at 7:29:54 AM

This was definitely a thing in the optical disc era of games where seek times were horrendous. In record mode, this is done by just overloading the file read functions, recording a list of file, seek position, and read size instructions, and then using that to build a .dat file. In play mode, the function is overloaded to ignore file opens and seeks, and to just read from the contiguous file. This requires the load to be perfectly deterministic, and preferably without redundancy.

by h0l0cube

3/31/2025 at 6:29:08 AM

> 60-90 seconds

Thats impressive speed for an install that not just copies pre-installed system, but also includes Hardware detection and selective driver installation phase.

by rasz

3/31/2025 at 6:33:36 AM

Linux detects all your hardware and use drivers accordingly at every boot - some seconds

by szundi

3/31/2025 at 7:43:14 AM

Did it do that so comprehensively and reliably in 1998?

by badgersnake

3/31/2025 at 9:13:01 AM

AFAIU the part that's doing it here is also the Linux part of the installer, so Linux either way. But I feel Windows was always slow with getting new devices ready at least until Windows 7, 8.1 felt much better, no idea how current 10/11 fares.

by fps_doug2

3/31/2025 at 2:25:30 PM

Reliabily yes. Comprehensively .. may have been an issue.

by pjc50

3/31/2025 at 6:53:37 AM

Linux can be easily and simply modified by anyone to suit their needs; Win98 cannot. You are comparing apples to oranges.

by sneak

3/31/2025 at 7:03:26 AM

That's not their point? Linux has all the drivers lying around on disk and on every boot just does hw detection and loads the appropriate ones. It takes a few seconds. You can take a Linux install from a modern AMD system, stuff it into a 10 year old Intel system and it will boot up instantly. No driver install no "getting your devices ready" screen that shows up for a minute or two.

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.

by iforgotpassword

3/31/2025 at 7:59:33 AM

Windows 9x existed at a very different time.

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.

by haileys

3/31/2025 at 6:39:27 PM

One thing that helps this is that most of that really buggy hardware has fallen into the wastebin of history and everything attached to a "modern" W98 machine should be plug and play compatible. PCI solved most of these issues. ISA cards gave Windows 98 and especially 95 a bad rap. Well, that and early USB controllers and devices. There was a whole lot of brand new driver code being tested in production back then.

by jandrese

3/31/2025 at 8:33:08 AM

For those who don't want to install: https://copy.sh/v86/?profile=windows98

by zb3

3/31/2025 at 8:36:04 AM

I have Win98 in an 86box just for fun, and yet it feels like that version runs much more smoothly...

by nness

3/31/2025 at 3:07:04 PM

Interesting! Maybe it's taking a more direct path to emulating the hardware. I found I have to use pretty modest emulated hardware in 86Box to have performant results.

by accrual

3/31/2025 at 10:19:53 AM

We need one of these for the Raspberry Pi, but native. And old monitor + pi inside would be an amazing retro PC build. I have it running on DosBox, but it's not that great.

by klaussilveira

3/31/2025 at 7:32:26 AM

Is there something that lets you install Windows 7 64 bit as a new install? That's the last version before ads and other unwanted features.

by Animats

3/31/2025 at 7:36:26 AM

You can install Windows Firewall Control, some v4.9.x.x (before someone acquired it and ruined it by changing it drastically on v5 onward) and block all the garbage.

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.

by HenryBemis

3/31/2025 at 7:22:56 PM

"my digital life" forum has many scripts for windows 7 installation (including patches).

by yyyk

3/31/2025 at 6:28:59 AM

Very cool!

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.

by imiric

3/31/2025 at 8:30:21 AM

I stumbled upon this tool [1] recently that does not slim down the image like you might want to but gives you a lot of options what to remove via an .xml file [1] https://schneegans.de/windows/unattend-generator/

by Gansejunge

3/31/2025 at 7:04:50 AM

From my understanding, as someone whose job was Windows deployment for a few years, is... kind of? Admittedly my experience is with deploying to a lot of machines at the same time rather than to several machines more frequently.

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.

by SpecialistK

3/31/2025 at 7:55:32 AM

WDS has been deprecated - you now need to use Configuration Manager. Which means giving them more money. Because of course it does.

by razakel

3/31/2025 at 9:04:33 AM

I believe MDT as a whole has been deprecated too. You can't use the Windows 11 ADK for the WinPE image and they're very much pushing toward the Provisioning Package / Intune method.

by SpecialistK

3/31/2025 at 2:12:20 PM

I'm too far away from a windows machine for far too long. Is it possible to run Windows 98 on modern hardware especially when no one would be shipping any drivers?

Also, what's the use case for it?

Lastly, wondering if MS still sells Windows 98 if someone needs because of some specific reason.

by wg0

3/31/2025 at 3:13:45 PM

Yes, actually! Search for user "O_MORES". They're active on Reddit and possibly Vogons. They have successfully dual booted Windows 98 and Windows 10/11 on modern hardware. The key is to use a supported PCI/PCIe graphics, audio, and network cards then slot them into a modern motherboard. The sheer speed of modern hardware makes up for a lot of shortcomings.

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.

by accrual

3/31/2025 at 8:13:51 AM

After getting blue screened one too many times with Windows 98, I ordered a Red Hat Linux CD.

I never went back to Windows and still use Linux to this day, nowadays with NixOS.

by aussieguy1234

3/31/2025 at 10:50:54 AM

This is very cool but who is installing Win98 so much that this is useful?

That said I am all for this project, I just don’t know who would use it.

by naikrovek

3/31/2025 at 2:57:39 PM

Retrocomputing has blasted off into a larger hobby as of late. I think it's a combination of COVID free time in 2020, plus the demographic that grew up with early Windows is now old enough to appreciate the OS more and wants to re-experience it with modern tools and knowledge.

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.

by accrual

3/31/2025 at 3:29:10 PM

That's exactly what I was looking for, around 28 years ago ;)

by andix

3/31/2025 at 8:01:43 AM

This may install fast but it certainly looks hard to get going with it...

by RedShift1

3/31/2025 at 8:12:20 AM

This project builds the installer, there is nothing, other than Microsoft copyright, stopping someone from hosting compiled Install CD itself.

by rasz

3/31/2025 at 10:55:44 PM

but why not just install manually, keep an image?

by redeeman

3/31/2025 at 2:01:13 PM

This just begs the question: Why was the basic Win98 question so ^%$#^% slow?

by gwbas1c

3/31/2025 at 7:16:51 AM

Interesting. Will try.

by BloodOverdrive

3/31/2025 at 8:39:35 AM

No offence to Windows lovers, but my God is this ugly. Current versions of Windows look great. But back then Windows looked horrible. Apple managed to produce beautiful interfaces back then, as they do now.

by submeta

3/31/2025 at 8:08:45 AM

Who on earth would like to install that?

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.

by piokoch

3/31/2025 at 8:13:58 AM

Apparently a fringe opinion, but Win98SE was IMO the best iteration of Win95.

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)

by rickdeckard

3/31/2025 at 9:14:26 AM

Your memory seems to fail you. Win98SE was the most stable of the 9x series. ME was the bad one.

by fps_doug2

3/31/2025 at 11:31:56 AM

Your reading seems to fail you. That's what they said :-)

by Zambyte

3/31/2025 at 12:40:50 PM

> Win 98ME

Windows ME was not a release of, nor branded with, Windows 98 whatsoever.

by theandrewbailey

3/31/2025 at 3:05:41 PM

Right. And a fun fact for readers, it's technically Windows "Me" (title case) and advertising has it read as "me" as in me the person, not "M.E." as Millenium Edition.

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.

by accrual

3/31/2025 at 5:02:23 PM

Part of the thinking behind the "My *" naming for those directories was forcing applications to handle spaces in paths properly.

by estebank

3/31/2025 at 6:08:00 PM

That was definitely part of it... as XP SPs released, they locked down application access to read/write where applications typically shouldn't, including in their own Program Files directory, and this did bork some applications even though it was supposed to redirect the changes to a different directory.

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.

by tracker1

3/31/2025 at 6:42:41 PM

No, but in practice it was Win98SE3. Also, it was obsolete before it was even released. There was basically no reason to run WinME instead of WinXP, especially on a new machine.

by jandrese

3/31/2025 at 9:24:43 AM

Win98SE was the final usable Win9x version and the most stable version of them all.

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.

by barotalomey

3/31/2025 at 9:37:55 AM

One of the big changes with ME was cutting out DOS mode as much as they could, and if you're doing a system for retro computing then it's hard to see why you'd constrain what it's capable of. If you don't need that and you've blacklisted 95/98 then I don't see why you wouldn't go for win2k onwards as it'll be a lot easier to work with, but it's a different animal.

by keyringlight

3/31/2025 at 3:03:15 PM

Yes, agree on Window Me. It's not a lot of use for a retro gaming system by default. It's not too difficult to rollback some of the changes and re-enable the ability to exit to MS-DOS 7, but it is extra steps for not much gain.

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.

by accrual

3/31/2025 at 3:00:33 PM

I just wanted to add that Windows 3.X is capable of running independently of DOS and BIOS calls. By default yes, it uses the BIOS for disk access. But with a disk driver (e.g. Microhouse driver, FastDisk driver), Windows 3.X can live entirely in 32-bit protected mode. Windows 95/98/Me are the same way, they are real 16/32-bit hybrid kernels that used DOS as a bootstrap but nothing more.

by accrual