In a nutshell I'd say:

If you want to play games in pure DOS - choose 98SE. If you are OK with playing DOS games only from under Windows - ME is probably a slightly better option.

In the end it all depends on your sound device. Does it provide a Sound Blaster compatibility layer in its Windows drivers? Does it have DOS drivers? If it does not have DOS drivers, then running pure DOS is rather pointless.

If you do end up choosing 98SE, I would not install any service packs. The "unofficial service pack" struck me as a huge piece of unconfigurable and mostly useless bloat. Hand-pick the selected few things actually useful, like the USB drivers, maybe KernelEx, and a few others.

The newer unofficial service packs for 98SE are pretty much trash from my experience. The only ones that ever worked properly for me were the ones that only installed the official MS updates and a few other things such as NUSB. The newer ones end up jacking a bunch of stuff up and make a bunch of stuff not work properly.

Just install the drivers you need and then the official updates from the February 2004 Microsoft update CD. It is available from vogonsdrivers
http://www.vogonsdrivers.com/getfile.php?file … =873&menustate=

Then you can also install nusb (universal USB driver for Windows 9x) if you need USB storage support.

That laptop has "Hardware MIDI" according to the marketing specs.
https://usermanual.wiki/Sony/PCGF630.2672184880/html

That means it has a Yamaha YMF-7x4 (probably 744) sound chip in it. The Sony laptops with that are wired up with the PC-PCI / SB-Link so you get full DOS compatibility including genuine Yamaha OPL3.

You also have hardware MIDI in Windows

They are killer laptops for DOS/Windows 9x.

You've also got a K6-2+ 550 CPU in there. So you should also have the ability for on-the-fly CPU multiplier change, disable/enable cache, etc.
https://www.philscomputerlab.com/k6-2-2-3-resources.html

Hmm...It seems to come with an ESS Maestro 3. There seems to be unofficial DOS drivers for it http://www.dosforum.de/viewtopic.php?t=811 but they seem to be for the desktop versions; maybe that doesn't matter, I don't know. Either way, it doesn't seem to be all that capable of a sound card for DOS programs/games anyway. I'm wondering if I should just install Windows ME at this point anyway if that's the case. I just hope I can find a good use for this thing if that's the case.

Are there any recommended steps to take when reinstalling ME if that ends up being the right answer? I know disabling System Restore is something people like to do, along with other "bloat." What would be a good idea to leave out using 98Lite, for example?

Hmmm.. I wonder if they changed the specs before they actually released it.

I haven't seen any before that say "Hardware MIDI" in the marketing specs that isn't a Yamaha YMF sound chip.

However, the user manual only says "16-bit CD-quality stereo sound" on page 80
https://docs.sony.com/release/pcgf610-630.pdf

That's actually really sad.

That's a nice 98SE gaming laptop.

Well, upon opening up a few DOS programs in XP, The Savage Empire and Wolf 3D fail to find a way to play music, though sound effects work in Wolf 3D. Tyrian 2000 seems to work, but the midi music sounds awful and skips around; probably can blame software MIDI for that.

I'm going to hope that it's an XP driver issue or something and try installing some other OS on in, probably 98SE with 98lite. If I still can't get it to work on another OS with other drives, then I'll try this Yamaha Soft Synthesizer S-YXG50 2.02t-E at Vetusware.

The compatibility of NT-based OSes with DOS games has always been inferior to that of Win9x. Don't draw too many conclusions based on that.