upgrade Win98 to SE

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One computer of mine has win98 and the other has win98 SE.

I want both to have SE. I put my SE disk in the win98 machine but it won’t upgrade because it is not an upgrade disk.

Does anyone know which download from MS I can use to upgrade my win98 machine to SE? Does such a download exisit? Inquiring minds want to know!

Thanks!

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Hi Rick,

Given the nature of Windows 98 you should be able to boot with a startup floppy and install right over your existing Windows 98 installation. To get SE out of what you have, really, you need to upgrade Internet Explorer to version 5 or later, and apply all the security fixes. There is a Windows 98 Service Pack that you can order from the Mothership, ummm, I mean Microsoft. The version number of your operating system will not change to “SE” but you will essentially be using it.

is there a particular reaon that you want to go to 98SE over the original version? My view is that the addition of IE5 made it better, since it was finally a stable browser at that point….but there really wasn’t anything compelling about 98SE either.

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Mark,

Good question. Why upgrade? My problem with Win98 FE is twofold. First, the system keeps hanging up at shutdown. Second, I wrote in an earlier post about problems experienced with Wmexe freezing. Someone kindly reported that this was related to memory manager affairs and refered me to Win98 SE fixes. So, those are the reasons for wanting to upgrade to SE.

For those others of you reading this an wondering why I don’t upgrade to Windows X[xtra]P[rofit]; it’s because I have too much money invested in software and books to have to toss 50% of it out because they are incompatible with XP. Besides, I know how to use win98 and I’m quite comfortable with it.

As to installing my SE on top of FE, when I tried to do that I got an error message saying that I already have a version of win98 on the machine and the disk I was using was therefore incompatible. so, I thought it there was some way to download fixes and patches to my SE to make it into a SE, then I would be able to download the System Hang Fix for win98 SE from the mothership site.

I’m already using IE6.x, find it it OK, but I thought ver 5 and ver 4 were OK too. MS is adding more features than I have any interest in using or learning how to use. Bells and whistles are fine but, hey! How much time past 24 hours in a day can you spend on the computer or using the net?

So, the final comment is: my main reason in wanted to get SE on my machine is so taht I can download the SE system hang fix.

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Hello Rick,

The Windows 98SE Shutdown fix is designed to fix problems specific to that version of Windows. The patch was released to address the issues that arose after 98SE’s release, and these were problems that had not been seen with the first issue of 98. If you are having shutdown problems now, upgrading to 98SE for that particular patch is not an ideal solution.

Although this is a longer solution, you would probably be better off backing up your important data and then starting with a clean installation of Windows. The alternative is to try and track down what is causing the shutdown hangs, and there are many possible culprits.

As a starter, try disabling Fast Shutdown through the MSCONFIG applet. Click on Start –> Run and type in MSCONFIG, then press enter. On the first tab, there is a button marked “Advanced” – in there is the option to disable Fast Shutdown. This “feature” works by pulling the plug on applications and drivers, and in 98SE is disabled by default since it worked so well.

98SE is a better version of the same OS – but as I stated before, if you have IE5 or later and all the security fixes, you’ve got most of what 98SE already is. If you want to install it I would strongly recommend doing it clean; you will not regret it.

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Try booting to DOS prompt and rename Win.com to Win.xxx or just rename it to something different. Run the setup again and it should work. Set it to install on the c:windows directory when asked to pick up windows and other application’s previous settings.

Just don’t know how downgrading from IE6 to IE5 would affect your reinstallation to get Win98SE.

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