Stocking a Windows 98 PC the Way It Looked in 1999

A Windows 98 machine with nothing on it is just a slow computer. What makes it feel like 1999 is everything that used to be on it: the media player with the skin, the chat client beeping in the tray, Office in its gray-and-blue prime, and a screensaver that kicks in the second you stop touching the mouse.

This is the list I keep for stocking one. It covers roughly 1998 to 2001, the stretch between DOS and Windows XP when PC gaming was having a very good few years.

The software that made it feel like 1999

Job	What to install	Why it's on the list
Music	Winamp 2.x	The skins, the visualizer and the llama.
Media	RealPlayer, Windows Media Player 6.4, QuickTime 4	Every site used a different one, so you had all three.
Web	Netscape Navigator 4.x and Internet Explorer 5 / 5.5	Both, for the browser wars. Even offline, they look right.
Chat	ICQ, AOL Instant Messenger, mIRC	Mostly for the sounds and the away messages.
Office	Microsoft Office 97 or 2000	Word and Excel the way they looked for years.
Images	Paint Shop Pro 7	Before Photoshop was on every machine.
Archives	WinZip, WinRAR	WinRAR's trial never quite ending is part of the experience.
Safety	Norton AntiVirus	The yellow and black.
PDFs	Acrobat Reader 4.0	Early PDFs looked like this.
Games plumbing	DirectX 7 or 8	Most of the games below need one of them.
Extras	Plus! 98	Desktop themes and screensavers.

Flash Player belongs on the list too, for the animations that were half the web back then. Add Norton Utilities and RegClean if you want the full ritual of defragmenting and "cleaning the registry" every Sunday.

Heads up

Don't put a 1999 browser on the modern internet and expect it to work. Almost nothing loads over today's HTTPS, and old browsers have holes nobody's patching. They're here for the look. Keep the machine off the network, or on a network where it can't reach much.

The games shelf

The ten that come first:

Game	Year	What it is
Half-Life	1998	The shooter that told its story without cutscenes
StarCraft	1998	Real-time strategy that's still played seriously
Age of Empires II	1999	The other RTS everyone had
RollerCoaster Tycoon	1999	Theme park management
Quake III Arena	1999	Pure multiplayer shooting
Unreal Tournament	1999	The other arena shooter, the one with the bots
The Sims	2000	Life simulation
Diablo II	2000	One more run, forever
Deus Ex	2000	Cyberpunk RPG, still a benchmark for choices that matter
Command & Conquer: Red Alert 2	2000	Allies versus Soviets, with the cutscenes

Then the rest of the shelf, by mood:

• Strategy and city builders: Civilization II, SimCity 3000, Caesar III, Pharaoh, Alpha Centauri.
• Adventure and RPG: Baldur's Gate I and II, Planescape: Torment, Myst and Riven, the Gabriel Knight series, The Curse of Monkey Island.
• Racing and sports: Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit, NASCAR Racing 4, FIFA 99 through 2001, Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 1 and 2.

The strategy list is the deep end. You could fill the whole hard drive with city builders from this era and never run out.

The screensavers and the sounds

This is the part people forget, and it's most of the feeling.

On screen:

• The 3D Pipes screensaver
• Flying Toasters from After Dark
• A Matrix code screensaver, because 1999
• Starfield, simple and hypnotic
• An 800x600 wallpaper of space or a mountain lake

Through the speakers:

• The Windows 98 startup sound
• ICQ's "uh oh"
• AOL's "You've got mail"
• MIDI files playing from some game's intro
• An audio CD spinning in the drive while you work

And keep the Windows Classic look: gray buttons, blue title bars, a Programs folder in the Start menu that's three levels deep, a system tray with a volume icon, a clock and an antivirus shield, and a desktop covered in shortcuts. That's accurate. Nobody had a clean desktop in 1999.

Try this

Set the screensaver delay to a minute or two. Walking back into a room full of flying toasters is the whole point.

The diagnostic kit to keep beside it

Old machines fail in old ways, so I keep a kit of period tools on floppies and a CD:

Tool	What it checks
MemTest86	RAM, from its own boot disk
ScanDisk	The hard drive's file system and surface
Norton Disk Doctor	The drive, more thoroughly
CheckIt	A general system diagnostic
PC-Check	Hardware tests

For newer help on old hardware, the FreeDOS project and JEMM, a modern replacement for EMM386, are both worth having. They're maintained, which almost nothing else in this post is.

The same kit works on the machine a generation back. I used a lot of the same thinking getting Windows 3.1 onto a Gateway 486, and the one after this era is an Optiplex GX280 turned into an XP gaming box. If you're collecting installers and disc images to feed a machine like this, the naming rules in how I file a classic Mac archive work just as well for Windows software.