The instructions for this item (as well as Customer Service) say that you can use this drive with Win98 First Edition if you download the correct driver from their website.They *don't* tell you that under Win 98, the driver will *still* give an error message saying that you have the wrong operating system. Customer service says that to open a file in Win 98, you need to right click the drive in "My Computer" and click "open" in the pop-up menu (because double clicking on this drive in "My computer" causes an error in Win98.)Furthermore, the password protection is NOT availabe to you under Win 98.I questionned customer service on these things and they said that this is just the way the drive operates in Win 98.I don't know how it operates in Win XP, but take their claims that it works with Win 98, First Edition with a very, very large grain of salt (don't let that grain of salt drop on your foot, you might hurt yourself.)