Windows 98 Gets a Second Life on a 2020 ThinkPad With UEFI-CSM and Adapters
A 2020 ThinkPad P14s Gen 1 can run Windows 98 SE alongside Windows 11 and Linux from the same NVMe drive by booting in UEFI-CSM mode and using a USB‑2.0 expansion chain via Thunderbolt to compensate for Win98’s drivers. The setup requires disabling Secure Boot, enabling CSM, and using workarounds like the CREGFIX DOS driver and Rudolph Loew RAM patch to bypass 512 MB RAM limits; ACPI is faked with a S3 power state, and graphics are limited to basic VESA due to lack of Win98 drivers. Disk access goes through BIOS rather than NVMe, but overall the experiment demonstrates surprising backward compatibility on modern hardware.