Hackaday

A developer successfully installed Windows 98 SE on a 2020 ThinkPad P14s Gen 1 laptop, booting it alongside Windows 11 and Linux. The project required enabling UEFI-CSM mode for legacy BIOS compatibility, adding a USB 2.0 expansion card via Thunderbolt dock to work around lack of xHCI support, applying memory patches to exceed the 512 MB RAM limit, and using various workarounds including CREGFIX for UEFI-CSM bugs and SoftGPU for basic graphics. The setup demonstrates x86 backward compatibility but highlights challenges like lack of modern drivers, BIOS-based disk access instead of NVMe, and ACPI incompatibilities.

Windows 98 On A 2020 ThinkPad P14s Gen 1 Laptop