Welcome to Just Ask Matt! - The IT industry’s answer to the help column, only slightly more medicated. Today, Ben writes:

Does Windows 98 have a “system restore” capability and, if so, how do I get there?

Yes and no, Ben. Yes in the sense there is a way to restore your system’s registry with either a ‘repair’ or, if need be, a complete restoration which will reset your computer’s registry to its defaults. See, instead of a nice GUI interface in which you can restore things back to where they were like you have in XP, Windows ‘98 offers this to you from a command line.

Understand that you should be sure to back up your registry BEFORE trying this. If you want to give this registry repair a shot, there are some things that you ought to know.

1) This is going to do nothing to help if you’re combating a problem with spyware or a virus.

2) There is a very big difference between repair and restore with the command that I am about to explain to you.

The command is called scanreg and it is accessible through your DOS command line interface. Now first you need to be familiar with getting into the command line. Go to the Start menu as if you were going to turn off your computer, and select restart in MSDOS. Once it reboots and you end up in DOS, it is at this point that you need to follow the instructions outlined here.

Assuming this is a problem that restoring the registry can help with, you should be home free. Remember, I would try repair… but be wary of restore. Good luck!

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