I absolutely do not know where the Micro Center at Elston gets their PC How To guides.

I've found DOS For Dummies, Windows 95 For Dummies, Windows 2000 For Dummies, Mac OS X 10.4 for Dummies, and old books describing ancient versions of Red Hat Linux (before it split into Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Fedora!), among others.

Unless you've unearthed the PC that time forgot, these books can't possibly appeal to anyone.

There's this one guy I know who is still running a heavily modified Fedora Core 1, who has backported "newer" software to it (still very old because eventually the base OS components are unsupported by newer software), but he's something of an autistic savant. He runs a website using that machine as a server, about how to solve the Rubik's Cube, and has written software for a lot of operating systems including Research UNIX to that end.

Even really old GNU/Linux is pretty reliable. He still gets 1-2 year uptimes between crashes or power outages.

It was originally the reliability of GNU/Linux that got me interested in it as a teenager, because I was frustrated with how finicky Windows 98 was.

I ended up solving most of the reliability problems on my own Windows 98 box by performing major surgery to remove Internet Explorer and other junk, including its rendering engine, and then swapping the shell for the one from Windows 95 OEM Service Release 2.1. That shell was FAT32-aware but didn't have the "shell update" from Internet Explorer 4.

Oddly enough, after you do all of that, Windows 98 consumes a pretty laughable amount of RAM. Only 13 MB iirc. Also, the "system resource" heap stops leaking like crazy. To the point where the 47 day uptime crash bug actually becomes possible to hit. (So I installed that update from Microsoft.).

And why did I need IE anyway? I had Opera.

The IE-related bloat in Windows 98 was so bad that when I purged it all from my system and swapped the shell, my games ran faster. I ended up benchmarking the before and after in Need for Speed: Porsche Unleashed and noted that the average framerate was 7% higher after the process. It was like a free graphics card and RAM upgrade on top of making Windows 98 pretty reliable. Turns out that almost all of the problems of Windows 98 could be traced back to the "integration" of Microsoft's browser.

The tool was this really handy utility called Revenge of Mozilla II by Bruce Jensen. It's probably still floating around out there if you are interested in Windows 98 at all, for example, in a Virtual Machine. He also did Revenge of Mozilla II SE for Windows 98 SE and a utility called Nice Try Billy to fix an icon problem in 98 SE after removing IE and the bloated shell.

It should still be totally possible to install KernelEx and run a newer version of Firefox or Opera on Windows 98. Still very old, but probably _just_ new enough that common web sites like Wikipedia and the mobile versions of Facebook and GMail would work.