Finally, the PC of my dreams.
Or it would have been in 1998. That was the year that Google was founded, the
first module of the International Space Station was launched, and Microsoft
became the biggest company in the world, propelled there in part thanks to the
success of this operating system,
Windows 98. That was so long ago that
many of our staff weren't even born yet, let alone using computers. So, since
this sucker still boots up, and I want to know what they think of Windows in
the 32-bit era, we are going to go for a little ride back in time. But not before
we take a ride on this segue to our sponsor, Build Redux. They make it easy
to configure your new build with support guides to help you along the way. We're
not all Linus. They also offer competitive pricing as compared to building a PC yourself. So, head to
buildred redux.com/lus and start your new build today. Anthony
has generously allowed us to borrow scale once before when we tried out some
questionable game controllers, and we don't know the actual origins of this
PC, but the piece of paper on the front gives us a pretty good hint at its
history. We suspect, though we have no way of knowing for sure, that it worked
for decades in an offline environment, likely exclusively running the software
for a way station for trucks next to the highway or waste at a landfill before
being retired. That's all speculation, though, as whatever software was once on
here is now long gone, leaving only the OS. This particular Windows 98
installation is not an entirely fresh out-of-the-box experience. Some software
had to be installed for the joysticks and USB didn't work without first
burning drivers onto a CD. But it's otherwise good old Windows 98 exactly as
I or at least as I think I remember it.
All that remains then is to see how quickly our whippers snappers adjust to
an operating system whose exciting selling features included things like
support for DVD playback, multiple monitors, and the FAT 32 file system.
Fat 32. I'm going to be awesome at this. My elementary school ran Windows 98
until like grade six, I think, and then we upgraded to like Windows 7. It was
like, whoa, this is quite the upgrade. I
think my first Windows was 7. Yeah, I
didn't start using computer till I was like, I don't know 10, 12 or whatever.
So, I was 2 months old when this operating system got released. Windows
XP was my first system. So, back in the
day, this was my daily driver, Windows 98SE. I spent a lot of my life using
Windows 98SE and Windows 95. All of my schools had Windows 95 or 98. I did
pretty much everything that you would normally do with a computer on Windows 98. Man, is it clunky today. Like, I
can't rightclick the taskbar to get task manager. I can't right click the start
menu to get anything. It's just very bare bones. There's something charming
about that, man. I swear this runs better than like Windows 11. It's so
responsive, honestly. Like, okay. All right. So, Oh, man. Look at that lag.
You can actually change that. Oh. Oh, menu animation. Yes. Yes. There you go.
Now it pops up. Windows update. Holy. Is it just as bad as it used to be? I don't
know. This kind of looks pretty cool to me. That whole vapor wave wave kind of
came in. Vapor wave wave. Vapor man. Network neighborhood. the amount of time
I spent fighting with this back in more
the XP days. You know, you'd click entire network and it just it wouldn't
be there and you'd go into all the different settings for it and try and
get file sharing working. It was it never freaking worked properly. My
briefcase. Okay. No clue. That's not in any of the Windows that I've tried.
Given that it says briefcase, I assume it has something to do with files. Can I
open it or no? I was going to say files, but there's a my documents thing right
there. I don't know. important files maybe. Yeah. Okay. I remember opening
this, reading this and being like, "Wo!" and never touching it. Not understanding
what this did at all. When I was a kid and I was like using Windows 95, I
accidentally like dragged my briefcase into the recycling bin and I was like, "Oh crap, I just broke something."
Contains files you want to work on at a different computer. Oh, that was for
syncing with PDAs and other things that you could uh pull out from your computer
and then take along with you. So, like you'd have a personal digital assistant,
like a small little computer or a handheld device. So, you you put files
in here, it saves onto whatever floppy disc you have. You'd have files that you
could drag into your briefcase and they'd be synced to your your device for
the next time that you left. And then when you came back, they'd be synced back into your computer. I guess that's
why it's called briefcase. That's kind of cool. Who uses briefcases, though?
That's a real question. Is that a '90s thing, or do people still have
briefcases? I I don't know. I never used it. Not a single time. I would use a
floppy disc to transfer my files until I was in grade eight. And my friend Tiger
brought me my first USB thumb drive. It was 16 megabytes,
not gigabytes. So, it could only hold about four times the amount of a floppy
disc at. I just had to install drivers for it on the library computers all the
time because they would wipe every time you use them. So, I had to redo it every
time. All right, what's next? Flashy desktop background. Come on. I know
this. I know this. Okay. This is how you would change your background. I see. All
right. Oh, this is easy. I remember being in an elementary school. They
didn't have the software to lock this stuff out. We would change the
backgrounds on all the computers and play with the screen savers. You had the
little pipes going. Oh, you can change the color. Let's make it something
stupid. Oh my god, I remember these. Oh, they're
all so awful. Here, let's do clouds. And I want it stretched. There we go. Yeah,
look at that. That's easy. There we go.
That's horrible. Here's the size of the font. Oh man. Red blocks, pinstripe, tan
st. Ooh. Is that flashy enough for you or do you want flashier? I definitely
had a bubbles background at some point. What? Let's turn on active desktop. Why
not? Active desktop's really weird. It's always been kind of a crapshoot. What
we're looking at here is actually a web page. I can copy this link here. I can
click on it. It'll open a web page that no longer exists. And we can add stuff
to it like widgets and stuff. You can have weather, traffic reports, news, and
any other web page data at your fingertips. You could actually set it up
with uh like a full web page that you built yourself. I did that once. Had a
habit of crashing a lot. Please tell me
we have uh After Dark. Where's my toasters? After Dark had the flying
toasters. Yeah, 3D pipes. Yeah, there we
go. We would just sit there and like watch it fill the whole screen.
Hours of entertainment for like an 11-year-old Jake. Yeah, I like that.
Now, there's a multiolor one. Hold on a second. Did that come later? You can do
multiple pipes. They might just be different colors. Yeah, there they are.
Yes. I remember this being a lot cooler.
That's actually faster. I like that better than like going all the way into
your settings and like changing it. Why don't they have these features on modern
computers? This is so much fun. Audio recording. Yeah, there's a sound
recorder program. Oh, right. There's no search. Hey, you accessories. Yeah.
Communications. Um, nope. Oh,
entertainment. Dial up. Can you record in Windows Media Player? What's dial up?
Virtual sound canvas. Okay, this has got to be it. Here.
Noep.
No. I don't want to get stumped. Sound recorder. There it is. Jesus Christ. I
looked at it earlier and I totally missed it. Sound recorder. Yay. I did
it. Okay. Yeah, here it is. Man, I'm good. This application, so much time
spent in it. It's the default wave file player in Windows 98. All right, here we
go. This microphone doesn't seem like it's from 98. This looks a little
advanced. I'm not going to lie. Hello. Okay, but we got to create a voice
recording. Is that right? That's weird. Oh, yeah. It shows up a little bit. I
think I'm going to talk really loudly.
We on window 98. I'm feeling so great.
Hi, anonymous writer. to set up this video. You suck. This is probably going
to sound like absolute ass. Now, the thing about sound recorder is that it
limits you in terms of how long your sound recording can be because it asks
you how long it will be. So, once I hit the 60.75 second mark, it'll no longer
be recording and I'll have to play it back and listen to my voice in a very
scratchy and honestly probably very quiet manner. Oh, it's really bad. Let's
try reverse.
Okay, that sounds awful. At least you get audio and you get a nice little
update of the waveform as you're going through with sound recorder. I can't
read this. I changed all the colors. Cool. Don't wave. That's going to be a
big file. We got to compress that. Man, I still know how to use this. Play it
through the front jack. Well, see, you said CD drive and I thought I was
getting familiar with this and then you said plug in the headphones to the CD
drive and you've lost me already. I don't think I ever actually tried to use
the 3 and 12 mm jack on the front of the optical drive. It's not playing through
these now. Hot changing my audio device probably won't work. Is the CD already
in here or and my sound settings just went away.
Oh, playback digital or analog? Use error correction. H speakers. Do do I
have to go to a different program to actually listen to it? What's going on
here? This is definitely like more tedious than it would be on a modern
operating system. Multimedia devices.
It has to be in here. What even is this? A wind groove. Okay, so not Windows
Media Player Volume. Oh my god, my audio thing went away. It's not down there
anymore. Did I break it? Oh, CD player. Let's go. Okay.
Crap. I even saw it in there.
Yeah, that makes sense. All right, this drive is in use. Okay, get out of here.
Windows Media Player. That actually sounds pretty good. Oh, this kind of
hard. I like it. I'm messing with this. You and me, baby.
M. This is a sick groove. Man, they just have so much control and it's like
immediately available. It all just works. This doesn't work actually. But
this is not front panel audio in the traditional sense. What that is is
dedicated to the CDROM drive. So, it's
obviously on the CDROM drive because the way CDROM drives worked for audio is
that you had a little cable that came off of the CDROM drive that went into your sound card that either piped out
analog or digital audio because Windows just couldn't do like digital extraction
or at least not all drives could do digital extraction back in the day.
Yeah, that's that's just how that worked. So, it's smart enough to know. I
never used that functionality and I feel like a lot of people didn't because it
went away very quickly. But yeah, old tech, man. No one can figure that out.
How is that hard? Okay, what else do I got to do here? Oh, where do you check
your system specs? Goodness gracious me. Hold on. No, I know how to do this.
Settings. Control panel. That seems right. Of course, I changed all the
colors, so now this is just horrible. Task manager, right? Is that even a
thing on these? I don't remember. I feel like yes. Printer, regional settings,
sound system, telephone. What the What is that? Oh my gosh. She can make calls
on this thing. That's wild. Uh,
system. There it is. Yes. Wait, the CPU
is not in here. Crap. How is it not system? 256 MGB of RAM. I love it. That
tells me we got to be at least Pentium 2 era. Pentium 2. There it is. To find out
the hardware specs of this PC completely within the operating system without
opening it up. You'd think that you just go to uh device manager here, which
would help, but it's not going to show you everything. The processor is not here. We got the network adapters. We've
got the monitor. I have a CD rewriter. Fancy. You want me to find the CPU
megahertz? No. Dr. Watson with some kind of utility
that I remember using at some point for diagnosing something. But if I recall
correctly, it was not actually included in the base operating system. So that's
probably why it didn't come up with anything. Accessories, system tools,
hardware info utility, which I believe is still part of Windows, believe it or
not. MS Info 32, I believe. Oh, genuine
Intel Celeron processor. 256 MGB of RAM.
Wow. Windows manage swap file with a I guess a 6.4 gig or yeah gig hard drive.
Am I just dumb? Yeah, probably. I would love a hint. The writer for this project
also suggested top row DirectX. DirectX,
maybe DX Diag. Oh, you I didn't want you to tell me. I was actually going to
guess that, which you can still run today. Celeron MMX. Oh, I got to wait
for it to load. I see. Not that anybody actually uses it anymore. Oh god, it's
so frozen. Crucially for us, it tells us that.
Okay, we're running an Intel Cel Celeron. Celeron. Celeron. Ew. Celeron.
Jeez. I've seen this word so many times, but I do not know how to pronounce it.
Hope it's one of the cool ones. like a 300A 330 megahertz.
That's pretty small. Pretty slow. I
don't know much, but I know that this is a troubleshooting step that you'd go through anytime you had trouble with a
game. They'd ask you to run DX Diag and then save it and send them the dump. I
don't remember how we even sent dumps back then. Maybe email. I guess it's an
attachment. I have a Rage 2 AGPG GPU.
Yes, this is a Rage 2C. The Rage series is so weird to me cuz like they they
changed the the naming scheme so many times. This came out before the first
GeForce. Before the first Radon at least. All right, what's next? Real time
hardware monitor. Oh yeah, we can monitor our system. That's task manager.
No. Control altdelete. Oh, that is not it. See anything I actually had to do
back then? No problem. Stuff I didn't
do. Big problem. Device manager hard
performance. Yes. Now, this tweak UI thing. This I never saw back in the day.
So, maybe there's something in here. No resource meter. That seems right.
There it is. I did good. I mean, it's
not a great performance monitor, but it's there. That's monitoring our system
right here on a monitor. Okay, there we
go. This is the very early version of our modern task manager. So, our file
system, we can see the amount of data being read or written to. Memory
manager, how much memory is allocated, and we can see that that caused the CPU
to work a little bit to show that. Oh, yeah. You can connect to another
computer to log that computer's information. Yeah, this is actually pretty useful. Seldomly used because you
weren't multitasking that much because Windows 98 was unstable.
What is any of this? That one works. I
only play the real games here. That's how I used to play solitary, too. It's
got to It's got to click somewhere, right? Games. Okay. Civ 2. I'm with it.
Wait. An illegal operation. Wait. Keep tennis here. We're going to
play Civ. Yeah, we're really living the retro life here. GDI resources. I do not
know what a GDI is. I know you need more deep background, but we're up against
it. If only I could get to the taskbar. It's a barrier. It's stopping me. I've
probably clicked like a hundred times on a frozen screen. And I know clicking on
a frozen screen does nothing but make it worse. So I assume it's rung game.exe.
Oh, I love command and conquer. This is probably going to be the MS DOSs version
even though. Yeah, that's a DOS window there. DOSs games don't have any concept
of drivers. Or in fact, they do. The problem is the drivers are on the game
developer. So, in order for any kind of
anything to work, we need to set it up first. This setup actually has a pretty
good sound card selection. Sometimes they could autodetect, but a lot of the
time you had to choose. Now, none of these say crystal, but the crystal card
is supported via Sound Blaster Pro or Pro 2. So, I'm going to go ahead and hit
enter on that. Now, we can run the game, and we'll actually get audio. Oh. Oh,
we're in the game. Command and Conquer. I've heard of that game, but I've never
really played it. Oh my goodness. Yeah. Sorry for your loss. I ain't reading all
that. Command and conquer is so good. I don't know what I'm doing. Am I the
boat? What's happening? Okay. Wait, wait, wait. What's going on here? I
don't really need the barracks, but if I build it there, it's an RTS. I'm
guessing something's being blown up. I
don't know if it's me or if it's something else. I should probably wait
for the Humvees to get in. Wait, there's more people. Wait, who are that? Oh,
those are my guys. Okay, let's go team. Don't want any damage. I'm like, uh, I
got a little bit of damage on my Humvey. No, I didn't. Cool. Wa, that moves. What
is that? Wow, they really just throw you in here with like no explanations.
Intelligence is still coming in, so we can't tell you a lot. Everything's just
like a pixelated blob. Yeah. So, this is
like 320 by 200. Good old Westwood. EA
did an EA and killed them. Ooh, this looks fun. Okay, I'm super down. Single
player game. Here we go, boys. I used to love these kind of 3D blow everything up
video games. Terminal Velocity is a pretty good one. I wanted to play Quake,
so I'm kind of disappointed. This is kind of wild, you know, cuz I couldn't
afford to play 3D games back when they were in their early stages like this.
This compared to the games that I had to play. This is awesome. It reminds me of
this game that I would play at school on the Mac called I think it was like Spect
Vector. Vector was called Vector. It was freaking awesome. Wireframe Tanks. Oh,
it's it's running way too fast. Unless this is supposed to be this fast on the
link battle cycle. Many of these early games actually had their physics tied to
the CPU clock speed. So, there were some games that I would play on our old
Windows 3.1 machine and then I would try to play again once we upgraded that
simply weren't playable anymore because they would run far too fast. And I'm
told this is actually one of those games. Yeah, it's like speeding up and slowing down depending on what's on
screen. Oh, rocket ammo. I got rockets. Oh, alt is rockets. Okay, cool. Rocket
launchers. Boom. Yeah, get kaboomed.
Kaboom. This is actually kind of fun. This is way better than that other game.
I wish this heads up display wasn't taking up like 60% of the screen. You
can see how the the textures are kind of
warping. Wow. The scale is pretty messed
up. Stuff looks real far away from you on the mini map and then it turns out it
is very close. The terrain is kind of
cruddy. This is from the days back when 3D was still kind of new and uh how
exactly you should render textures in
relation to the camera at any given point in time wasn't entirely a hard and
fast thing yet. Doing it correctly as we do it now cost a lot in terms of
computational power. Oh my god. Except I don't know where the walls are. They
just appear right in front of you and then you die. This is uh an interesting
experience. And that fog drawing in is pretty interesting as well. It's like
dithering. Whereas usually you'd get like a banding effect instead. It's hard
to gauge if you can actually drive over something. Oh, and I'm dead. All right.
If you flip over, you die. What is that? That's not fair.
That was not bad. Not bad for first run.
Man, I would have played the crap out of this. I want to play internet games. Did
I get the internet working? Hold on. Holy, it works. Okay, this is the
website we played on in elementary school. It was called andacon.com.
Oh, it's still there. No way.
Wow. This hasn't changed a bit. They have they even added games, dude. This
this this game. This is what we played. Quicksand Hell. Oh my god. Oh man. It's
really slow. Why is this computer so h wow. All right. Shout out Andicon
Arcade. This was a lot of my childhood. A lot of these things are pretty similar
to how they are nowadays, honestly. It might look different, but I don't think
it's really come that far in terms of, wow, I have to click 17 different times
to change my refresh rate. That's still kind of the case in Windows 11. I like
this. We should all run Windows 98 instead of 10. I'm already a Windows 98
pro. If you liked this fun archaeological dig into an old operating
system, you might like the time we took a look at its even older predecessor.
Windows 95 on a laptop was pretty special and a lot of fun. So go check
that out.