Stanley Daniel de Liver wrote:

New hardware won't have W98 drivers available.

As someone who has been building PC's from the motherboard up since
1987, I naturally have a stockpile of probably 4-dozen motherboards
ranging from 133mhz i486 to socket-775 boards with AGP/PCIe 3.6 ghz
pentiums.

My most-advanced win-98 system is running on an Asrock motherboard
(purchased new in 2007) with 3.6 ghz Core2 CPU, 1 gb ram, 256 mb Nvidia
6200 AGP video, with dual 1.5 tb SATA hard drives, and Creative Audigy-2
sound card. All the hardware components on the motherboard have win-98
drivers except for the on-board HD-audio sound. This is not a dual-boot
system, nor am I running win-98 in a virtual machine. This system is
booting and running win-98.

I have 6 such motherboards ready to build more systems when I need them.

I realize that the vast majority of people are handicapped in that they
don't have the intelligence or skill or experience or clue about
building their own PC, and hence they are a slave to what-ever is
available to them at the retail level - which usually means they have no
choice about which version of Windows will be forced on them when they
buy a new PC.

I also realize that the desktop PC itself is a dying segment of the
"personal computer" product space - with that space being taken over by
hand-held devices (phones, tablets, etc) and dwindling number of laptops
and netbooks.

This means you miss out modern faster gizmos. And anything 2G.
64bit W7 can handle many terabytes of memory, w98 is limited
to 2G IIRC.

Win-98 can "see" and use at most 1192 mb of ram, and it can't boot if
the system has more than 1.5 gb of physical ram.

But that's not the point.

For the vast majority of desktop-computer use-case situations, a win-98
system with 512 mb of ram can accomplish quite a bit (lots of open
windows and running programs). That's because unlike NT-based windows,
win-98 doesn't need a lot of ram to run lots of completely bloated and
unnecessary processes and services.