Can Vista run on this hardware?

There were some USB drivers for NT 4 but they were pretty basic. MS spent years getting the universal plug and play to work with NT systems. Windows 2000 was supposed to be NT 5 and be released at the same time as Windows 98. It was so behind schedule that Windows Xp came out right after 2000 and is fairly similar, especially in the early versions. I just did a factory restore on a Pentium III Xp system and it only takes up around 100mb of ram. Windows 2000 takes around 48-64mb for the system and NT 4 around 20mb at most.

I just never had very good experiences with Windows 98. The last time I set it up, I ended up just letting it boot to an MSDOS prompt and typed Win to start the GUI, just like Windows 3.1. I still use the 32 bit MSDOS that came with it occasionally for low level disk maintenance on older systems. I can put all the imaging and partitioning software in a 100mb partition and boot it to restore a crashed Windows system. On newer systems, I use WinPE and it takes a 1gb partition--actually I could do it on a smaller partition but it makes the partition table easer to read and alter if I set up partitions on interger values.