I've came up with a media centre solution for our living room. I spent ages comparing components and different prices from different suppliers and then I considered that I could use older computer parts which I have spare around the house. I ended up with the following configuration:

AMD Sempron 2600+ 1.6GHz
1GB DDR Ram (Did some googling to make this work properly)
ATI Radeon 9550 256MB
MSI K8VMM-7
120GB Maxtor Hard Drive
Freeview TV Tuner
Old Version of Mediaportal
Windows 98SE

As you could imagine Windows 98 is running very fast on this config.

I did a custom install of Windows 98 and removed all of the stuff that I didn't need. Then I installed all of the updates including IE6 and then I replace the main browser with Mozilla Firefox. I then installed various codec packs so I can watch almost anything and then I installed Mediaportal.

For security I installed Avast Anti-Virus and Sygate personal firewall. I also have Spybot S&D Which I will run once a month. After tweaking some settings and using MSConfig to remove some statup apps this computer runs very fast and efficient. I would have used OpenSUSE but the ATI Drivers aren't very good on Linux. Windows 98 does the job just as well.

Overall this solution runs well for what I was designed for and it is used for the following:

Browsing the Internet
Watching DVD's
Watching TV
Recording TV
Playing Music

Have you patched the hanging explorer bug? Explorer would hang as soon as the number of deleted file in the session reaches certain value.

thats great hearing your get good use outta win 98 and i still see lots of small stores running win95 for accounting etc.just goes 2 show its not about keeping up with the jones it about fuctionally and if a older os run a program for ya and keeps running why change it.that alot of what the 98 alive camplaine is about.keeping a perfectly good or good enuff os ticking instead of bashing its use with newer is best jargon.