System Optimisation

There’s a few things you’ll want to do after a fresh install of Windows 98 that I sometimes forget, so this is more of a reminder for myself so I’m not wondering why something doesn’t feel as fast as it should.

Conservative Swapfile

Most people shove as much memory as they can into a “modern” Windows 98 machine, If you have 128MB or more plus an SSD I’d highly recommend adding this setting to your System.ini file:

[386Enh]
ConservativeSwapfileUsage = 1

After adding it just reboot and it will take effect.

It’ll prevent Windows from making unnecessary writes to your SSD and also just make it feel faster in general.

Enable DMA for hard drives

After you install the chipset drivers for your motherboard, check that DMA has been enabled on your hard drive(s). Speeds up transfers considerably and reduces multitasking lag when doing heavy I/O.

Just press Winkey+Pause to open the System Properties and go to Device Manager. Find your hard drive, right click and go to properties.

Then just tick DMA, press OK, and reboot.

Hard drive access will be noticeably faster now!

Better audio quality

Open the Control Panel, go to Multimedia, then go to the Advanced Options for playback. Personally I prefer the “Best” sample rate conversion quality setting here. The performance impact is negligible.