Question how do I repurposed a windows 98 laptop?

While we can't get into any detail here there are ways to circumvent the login if you want to keep using it as win98.

Freedos is great and free, and since a win98 system will most likely have a soundblaster compatible card, you will be able to use it to play old dos games natively.

recallbox is a mini lilux distro geared toward retro gaming it can run on old hardware and has a nice frontend, best thing about it it used ntfs partitions so you can easily swap files around.