One thing that helps this is that most of that really buggy hardware has fallen into the wastebin of history and everything attached to a "modern" W98 machine s

One thing that helps this is that most of that really buggy hardware has fallen into the wastebin of history and everything attached to a "modern" W98 machine should be plug and play compatible. PCI solved most of these issues. ISA cards gave Windows 98 and especially 95 a bad rap. Well, that and early USB controllers and devices. There was a whole lot of brand new driver code being tested in production back then.