GDI+ redistributable library, Remote Desktop Connection client 5.2 and the Text Services Framework. Several other components such as MSXML 3.0 SP7, Microsoft Agent 2.0, NetMeeting 3.01, MSAA 2.0, ActiveSync 3.8, WSH 5.6, Microsoft Data Access Components 2.81 SP1, WMI 1.5 and Speech API 4.0. Office XP is the last version of Microsoft Office that is compatible with Windows 98. Although Windows 98 does not fully support Unicode, certain Unicode applications can run if the Microsoft Layer for Unicode is installed. System requirements The two major versions of Windows 98 have minimum requirements needed to be run. Users can bypass processor requirement checks with the undocumented /NM setup switch. This allows installation on computers with processors as old as the Intel 80386. Limitations The original release of Windows 98 may fail to boot on computers with a processor faster than 2.1 GHz. Windows 98 is only designed to handle up to 512 MB of RAM without changes. The maximum amount of RAM the operating system is designed to use is up to 1 GB of RAM. Systems with more than 1.5 GB of RAM may continuously reboot during startup. Both Windows 98 and Windows 98 Second Edition have problems running on hard drives of capacities larger than 32 GB in systems with certain Phoenix BIOS configurations. A software update fixed this shortcoming. In addition, until the release of the Service Pack 1 update of Windows XP in 2002, all versions of Windows were unable to handle hard drives larger than 137 GB in size with the default drivers, due to the operating system lacking support for 48-bit Logical Block Addressing ATAPI disk drives. Support lifecycle All computers running Windows NT 4.0 Workstation, Windows 2000 Professional, and Windows 98 can be directly upgraded to Windows XP Professional. Support for Windows 98 under Microsoft's consumer product life cycle policy was originally planned to end on June 30, 2003, however, in December 2002, Microsoft extended the support window to January 16, 2004. This date would then be extended again to June 30, 2006 on January 13, 2004 up to a final end of support date of July 11, 2006, citing support volumes in emerging markets as the reason for the extension. Retail availability for Windows 98 ended on June 30, 2002, and later became completely unavailable from Microsoft in any form (through MSDN or otherwise) due to the terms of Java-related settlements Microsoft made