Windows 98 USB Driver Information - How to find one for your USB device?

1. Windows 98 USB Drivers - Introduction

In this article I try to provide some insights on why we struggle to find Windows 98 USB Drivers for many USB devices. At the same time I also tried to provide various links to available free and non-free drivers for Windows 98 based devices.

See if the links in the Article related resources section can solve your problems, or you can read through the main article below.

First and most important one has to know about Windows 98 USB Driver support is, the evolution of the windows product line.
i.e Windows 95 > Windows 98 > Second Edition > Windows ME > XP.

If you see the time lines of USB Specification versions and Windows Operating Systems version, by the time Windows 98(NOT Windows 98 SE) came into existence only USB 1.1 Specification is available. And not many USB devices are available in the market. The USB Host Protocol Stack implementation is still going on in both hardware (host controllers development) as well as in software (USB Stacks).

So, when Windows 98 is released it came with limited support for USB devices. The only devices that started working on USB are Mouse and Keyboard. No Pen Drives, No Cameras, No iPods, No Mobile phones could connect to the PC over USB.
Also, Windows 98 being a new face-lift OS from the time Windows 95 is released, it could support USB devices from few vendors (device manufacturers) only.

The Windows 98 SE (Second Edition) is released, the number of USB devices that are supported increased dramatically. We can say proper USB support is available starting from Windows 98 SE only. What it means is, Windows 98 SE essentially came with more USB Device Drivers.

Also note that Windows NT, which also came into existence along with Windows 98, does not have USB support at all. And there many software suites like Jungo's WinDriver/KernelDriver are designed to specifically solve this problem.

2. Windows 98 USB Driver for you MSD (Mass Storage Drives)
The scarcity of support in Windows 98 for many vendors lead to unavailability of Windows 98 specific usb device drivers for devices like iPODs, USB Pen Drives, Game Consoles etc...

How most vendors tackled this situation is they started providing download packages of Windows 98 driver for their devices on their web sites and re-distribution packages. Most of the times you need provide your product details in a search box in the vendor's website.

For example if you have ScanDisk USB Thumb Drive, goto ScanDisk's website, in the support section enter the Device details, they show you available list of driver downloads. If the drivers are not available here or they don't give Windows 98 USB Driver support, then you can goto the generic driver download web sites and search for closest match.

There are many general websites which claim to scan your computer provide you with appropriate drivers. Some websites provide free downloads of Windows 98 USB Driver software.

And you can do search for Windows 98 USB Drivers at Microsoft Download Center too.

3.Generic Windows 98 USB Driver packages

Apart from the USB Device specific drivers, there are generic usb drivers also available. I have provided few links in the resource section which give more details on from where these Generic Windows 98 USB Driver packages can be downloaded.

4.Notes for developers/programmers

Every Windows OS will come with it's Driver Development Kit(DDK). If you want to develop a Windows 98 USB Driver you should learn the Windows 98 DDK first and start doing the development. Windows XP, 2000, 2003, Vista are having Layered USB Driver Architecture, where as a developer you don't need to learn DDK and do low level programming on the OS. These OSes are providing a generic user level USB driver that any one can use easily.