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 online 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".

Changes

 * Redesigned the setup program, adding a grey sidebar and new billboards. Otherwise, the setup steps are mostly identical to Windows 95.
 * 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: