Windows 98 build 1351

Windows 98 build 1351 is a Developer Release build and the earliest available build of Windows 98, which was originally shared on 31 December 1996 by warez scene group GLoW, who described it as "the December release", and that "it [wasn't] Beta 1 because IE 4 [wasn't] ready". It was included on the warez CD "Dragon 5" who claimed that "people say it's 75% faster than Windows 95" and the warez CD author "thinks it's much faster".

Setup
The setup of this build has gained a massive visual redesign. It no longer has aspects of dark blue, instead it uses grey and teal as colors.

A sidebar has been added to setup, showing the steps of setup. In this build, it only has basic functionality, as later builds introduce more steps, a time indicator, as well the Microsoft logo at the bottom of the sidebar.

Setup also makes usage of new billboards during the file copy phase. The images use teal as background as well as black for the symbols. The text has been changed to tell the user the improvements of Memphis compared to Windows 95.

Setup now automatically restarts the computer 15 seconds after the restart dialog appeared, the user however has the ability to restart earlier by clicking the  button.

During restart, the first boot screen is identical to Windows 95, except that the Windows 95 reference has been changed to mention Memphis.

After restart, setup is checking at first for Plug-and-Play compatible hardware, then also for non-PnP-hardware. And that is why setup needs to restart the computer another time before the system can be configured.

Changes

 * Microsoft Plus! theming components such as 256 colour icons are now installed by default.
 * A desktop watermark was included for the first time outside Check Debug builds.

ACPI
ACPI support is in very early development and crashes easily. ACPI must be disabled or setup will crash during the hardware portion with a red screen of death (used in early builds for ACPI errors).

Network Setup
This build allows the user to specify the network setup during the initial phase of setup before copying files. If this occurs, the network adapters will be duplicated after the hardware detection phase.

BSOD during Windows Help configuration
Sometimes setup crashes with a blue screen of death when configuring Windows Help. Should this occur, the user will need to retry the installation again.

Sounds
This build does not have a startup sound set by default. Trying to set it leads to an error which claims that the sound file is missing, however, it is still present in.

File differences
The following files have been introduced or removed compared to the RTM build of Windows 95 OSR2: