I have quite a few motherboards and laptops that I have tried to install win 98se, but the installation had failed due to
locking up. I had read that this was often because of ACPI hardware conflicts and so had given up quite quickly.

Then a few week ago I was revisiting one of these motherboards on which the SATA setting in the bios was set to AHCI.
(I had always used IDE/Compatibility mode) and the previous broken 98SE installation picked up from where it had left
off due to a lockup, and eventualy completed the installation.

Later when I tried the same method on my the other 98se locked up PCs many of them also finished the installations, and from there I
could experiment with AHCI drivers and Intel video via PluMGMK's vbesvga.drv etc.

I assume the lockups were caused by 98 accessing the SATA controller incorrectly, and that setting the SATA controller to AHCI, forced
98 to use bios calls only.

It now seems to me that many of my old laptops that were unusable due to Intel GPUs and or SATA lockups are now very usable.