"J. P. Gilliver (John)" wrote:

There are many used IBM desktop computers ... that came off-lease
that are being sold in discount electronics and surplus stores for
about $100

Indeed. (Is that really 98 Guy writing that?!?)

I've bought a few such computers (for certain family members) and
replaced their 40 or 80 gb IDE drives and CD-rom drives with 500 gb SATA
and DVD-RW drives (yes - those computers have unused SATA connectors on
their motherboards. And I've installed XP-sp3 (system builder version)
on them.

But I bring up these cheap (yet some-what modern) computers as an option
for those still running 98 on pathetically old hardware, with the intent
that they wipe the hard drive and install win-98 on them.

Because (as I've said countless times) there's no reason why people have
to keep using 10-year-old computers to run win-98 when they can get a
5-year-old computer for about $100.

The IBM computers in question date from a time-frame where most or all
of the system's hardware components have win-98 drivers available (on
the net if you search for them).