 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 wanna know what they think of Windows in the 32-bit era, we are gonna 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 buildredux.com slash Linus 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 whippersnappers adjust to an operating system whose exciting selling features included things like support for DVD playback, multiple monitors, and the FAT32 file system. FAT32. I'm gonna be awesome at this. My elementary school ran Windows 98 until like grade six, I think. And then we upgraded to like Windows seven. It was like, whoa, this is quite the upgrade. I think my first Windows was seven. Yeah, I didn't start using computer till I was like, I don't know, 10, 12 or whatever. So I was two 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 98 SE. I spent a lot of my life using Windows 98 SE 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 right click 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 leg. Ooh, ooh, 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 kinda 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 fricking 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 gonna 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, whoa, 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 wanna work on at a different computer. Oh, that was for syncing with PDAs and other things that you could 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 put files in here, it saves onto whatever floppy disk you have. You'd have files that you could drag into your briefcase and they'd be synced to your device for the next time that you'd left. And then when you came back, they'd be synced back into your computer. I guess that's why it's called briefcase. It'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 don't know. I never used it, not a single time. I would use a floppy disk 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 disk 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 elementary school. They didn't have the software to lock this stuff out. We would change the backgrounds of 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. Right blocks, pinstripe, tansta. 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 crap shoot. What we're looking at here is actually a webpage. I can copy this link here. I can click on it and it'll open a webpage 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 webpage data at your fingertips. You could actually set it up with like a full webpage that you built yourself. I did that once. Had a habit of crashing a lot. Please tell me we have 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 multicolor 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, they're right. There's no search. Hi-yo. Accessories. Yeah. Communications. Nope. Entertainment. Dial-up. Can you record in Windows Media Player? What's dial-up? Virtual sound canvas. Okay, this has gotta be it here. No. No, I don't wanna get stumped. Sound recorder, there it is. Jesus Christ, I looked at it earlier. 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 gonna lie. Hello. Okay, but we gotta create a voice recording. Is that right? That's weird. Oh yeah, it shows up a little bit. I think I should talk really loudly. We on Windows 98. I'm feeling so great. Hi, anonymous writer. 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. Girl, is it the flow? That makes it mad up. Yeah, that sounds awful. At least you get audio and you get a nice little update of the Wave form as you're going through with sound recorder. I can't read this. It changed all the colors. Cool,.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. So 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 three and a half millimeter 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. Hmm, speakers. 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 control? 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. Oh. Crap, I even saw it in there. Ha ha, yeah. That makes sense. All right. This drive isn't in use. Okay, get out of here, Windows Media Player. That actually sounds pretty good. Oh, this is kind of hard. I like it. I'm not messing with this. You and me, baby. Oh. 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 CD-ROM drive. So it's obviously on the CD-ROM drive because the way CD-ROM drives worked for audio is that you had a little cable. It came off of the CD-ROM drive that went into your sound card that either piped out analog or digital audio because Windows just couldn't do digital extraction or at least not all drives could do digital extraction back in the day. Yeah, 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 could figure that out. How is that hard? Okay, what else do I gotta 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 they 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, telephony. What the, what is that? Oh my gosh, you can make calls on this thing? That's wild. Ah, system there it is. Yes. Wait, the CPU's not in here. Crap. How is it not system? 256 megabytes of RAM. I love it. That tells me we've 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 a device manager here, which would help, but it's not gonna show you everything. Like the processor's not here. We've 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 megabytes of RAM. Wow. Windows managed 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, 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 Celeron. Celeron, Celeron. Celeron, ew, Celeron. Geez, 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 the 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 AGP GPU. Yes, this is a Rage 2C. The Rage series is so weird to me because they changed the naming scheme so many times. This came out before the first GeForce, before the first Radeon at least. All right, what's next? Real-time hardware monitor. Oh yeah, we can monitor our system. That's Task Manager, no? Control, alt, delete. 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. Better. What is any of this? That one works. I only play the real games here. Yeah, that's how I used to play Selma 2. It's gotta click somewhere, right? Games, okay. Civ 2, I'm with it. Wait, an illegal operation? Wait, keep Dennis here. We're gonna 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 task bar. It's a barrier, it's stopping me. I've probably clicked like 100 times on a frozen screen, and I know clicking on a frozen screen does nothing, but make it worse. Assume it's rungame.exe. Oh, I love Command and Conquer. This is probably going to be the MS-DOS version, even though, yeah, that's a DOS window there. DOS 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 auto-detect, 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 gonna go ahead and 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's 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 on my, oh, I got a little bit of damage on my Humvee. No, I didn't, cool. Whoa, that boots, 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, cause 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 Macs called, I think it was like Spectre, Vector, Vector, it was called Vector. It was fricking awesome, Wireframe Tanks. Oh, 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, I got rockets. Oh, alt is rockets. Okay, cool. Rocket launchers, boom. Yeah, get kaboomed. Ba ba ba ba ba, ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba. 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 textures are kind of warping. Wow, the scale's 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 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 costs 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 an interesting experience. And that fog drawing in it 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. Ba-bow, ba-bow! That was not bad. Not bad for first run. Man, I would have played the crap out of this. I wanna play internet games. Did I get the internet working? Hold on. Holy shit, 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. 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 shit? Ah, wow. All right. Shout out andacon 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. It'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. FreshBooks. I'm gonna go ahead and guess that you're not an accountant. And if you are, that's okay. We still love you. But this is why you're gonna love this software, you non-accountants. It's built for freelancers and small business owners who don't have time to waste on invoicing, accounting, and payment processing. In fact, FreshBooks users can save up to 11 hours a week by streamlining and automating pesky admin tasks like time tracking, following up on invoices, expense tracking with features like new digital bills and receipt scanner. Over 24 million people have used FreshBooks and love it for its intuitive dashboard and reports. It's easy to see at a glance exactly where your business stands. And it's even easier to turn everything over to your actual accountant come tax season. 94% of FreshBooks users say it's super easy to get up and running. And with award-winning support, you're never alone. Try FreshBooks for free for 30 days, no credit card required by going to freshbooks.com slash Linus and get started today. Why not? What are you gonna do with 11 hours extra every week? I know what I'm gonna do. If you liked this fun archeological 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.