Uploaded December 2012 | Updated September 2026, 2 weeks ago
What happens when you upgrade to Windows XP on a Windows 98 machine but you put Windows XP on a separate partition from 98? You can dual boot between both operating systems! Not what I was intending, but still neat. I found that I can still access the Windows 98 partition from Windows XP, so I decided to see just how many programs could run in the Windows XP environment. To my surprise, most of them worked! This is to be expected, though. Windows XP is meant to be backwards-compatible with most Windows and MS-DOS applications. A few wouldn't start (as seen in the video), but for the most part everything worked fine. I also found Microsoft Program Manager in the Windows 98 files (Remember that from Windows 3.0/3.1/NT Workstation?). It does not function as a Windows shell anymore, but can still be used to execute programs and convert Program Manager files over to Windows Explorer files. After doing research, I found that this version of Program Manager is included in Windows 95 all the way up to Service Pack 2 of Windows XP. It is reduced to a converter in Service Pack 3, and it is not included at all on Windows Vista, 7, or 8. Overall, this is very interesting to find these leftover system files!
What happens when you upgrade to Windows XP on a Windows 98 machine but you put Windows XP on a separate partition from 98? You can dual boot between both operating systems! Not what I was intending, but still neat. I found that I can still access the Windows 98 partition from Windows XP, so I decided to see just how many programs could run in the Windows XP environment. To my surprise, most of them worked! This is to be expected, though. Windows XP is meant to be backwards-compatible with most Windows and MS-DOS applications. A few wouldn't start (as seen in the video), but for the most part everything worked fine. I also found Microsoft Program Manager in the Windows 98 files (Remember that from Windows 3.0/3.1/NT Workstation?). It does not function as a Windows shell anymore, but can still be used to execute programs and convert Program Manager files over to Windows Explorer files. After doing research, I found that this version of Program Manager is included in Windows 95 all the way up to Service Pack 2 of Windows XP. It is reduced to a converter in Service Pack 3, and it is not included at all on Windows Vista, 7, or 8. Overall, this is very interesting to find these leftover system files!
