A second requirement is hard drive space. As you should already be aware, Windows 98 does not install from floppy diskettes (well, I suppose you could use floppies, but why?) and wants space to install a multitude of drivers, help files, system files, fonts, and so on (I won’t waste space with the entire list).
To give you an idea of the requirements, running a quick assessment on the files and subdirectories on my own system, I found a total of more than 356MB under the Windows 98 directory. Granted, that count includes DLLs (dynamic link libraries) and other files that were not part of the Windows 98 installation itself but were added by other applications, and it also includes a host of files of questionable origin (which means that I’m not sure where they came from or why). But the main point is that this adds up to a third of a gigabyte just in the Windows directory!
Multigigabyte drives are nothing unusual today, and they’re even relatively inexpensive (of course, they need to be easy to find and afford, considering the general bloat both in operating systems and applications). So, plan accordingly and figure on allocating at least a 0.5GB drive or partition just for the Windows 98 system itself.
TIP
Don’t rush to throw that old drive away just because you’ve bought a newer, higher-capacity drive. Most IDE drives can be ganged as master/slave pairs, even if they’re from different manufacturers. SCSI drives are even easier to gang together, with as many as six drives supported by a single SCSI controller.
Remember, however, that the suggested 512KB is a minimum. If you install all of your applications to the system-suggested default drive, which will be the same drive where Windows 98 is located, a 0.5GB partition can be exhausted very quickly. If this happens to your system, you can use a utility (such as PowerQuest’s Partition Magic) to resize your partitions and/or drives.
In a pinch, you may want to use a disk-compression utility to increase the capacity of your existing hard drive. Before installing any compression utility, however, check that it is not only compatible with Windows 98, but that it is also compatible with any other operating systems you may be running (if you are operating a multi-boot system).