Posted on 11/19/2021 7:25:49 AM PST by fireman15
Windows 95 brought together the features of MSDOS and Microsoft Windows products into one operating system. The user-interface upgrade at the time blew the competition away.
The 32bit operating system paved the way for Microsoft’s firmer grip on the PC/Desktop market. Robust sales and reception laid the groundwork for the company’s future OS installments.
Relish the nostalgia and run Windows 95 on PC without having to install it on your partition. There are few ways to do that, some involve online on your browser, and others rely on your PC’s emulation capabilities.
Best Windows 95 Emulator Windows 93 Winodws 95 via DOSbox PCJs – Windows 95 Windows 95 on PC
(Excerpt) Read more at emulatorclub.com ...
I also had a Dell laptop with Windows Vista that had few problems at all.
Weird...
Emulate?
I have a Thinkpad 240 with Win95 I kept it because at the time I was running Autocad 11 the last DOS version on it. It still all works, have not used it much in the past 10 years.
I also have a Thinkpad 240 with Win98 on it.
Those were very good laptops. And physically small.
Mostly for nostalgia... But, how can you appreciate where we are now if you do not have a real understanding of where we have been? But your attitude is typical of our throw away society. I personally enjoy working with old things. I have been restoring a house built in 1900 for years and am working on restoring a very rare 1942 Cadillac. They made them only until February of 1942 before switching toward production.
But there are major differences between Windows 95 and Windows XP that are important for certain hardware and software. Windows 95 ran on top of DOS 7. It was a hybrid 16/32 bit OS that used 16-bit DOS 7 as a bootloader for a 32-bit operating environment. It could use 16 bit device drivers.
Windows XP comes in 32 bit and 64 bit flavors. It is not actually built on top of DOS. A lot of but not all of Windows 95 and DOS applications will run on it in compatibility mode, but of course most Windows 95 hardware will not.
I actually do not completely understand the complaints about Windows 95 but I was a computer enthusiast from an earlier time period. Many others first real exposure to computers was with Windows 95 and there was a bit of a learning curve and “plug and play” was a new concept at that time. Microsoft's first attempts were obviously plagued with a few issues.
Many older laptops were Win7 upgraded to Win10, and where the original RAM installed was only 2gb. Upgrading this to 4gb or 8gb, plus replacing the spinning hard-drive with an SSD will likely may this laptop at least tolerable, if not enjoyable to use again.
When you switch from a newer computer to an older computer they do feel sluggish. But Windows 10 and a bunch of crapware will slow an older computer to a crawl. Since it is a laptop that came with Windows 7... it has an OEM license. There are ways to reinstall Windows 7. The first step would be to find as much information and drivers from the manufacturer's website along with the latest bios update. I assume that you do not have the original recovery DVD that came with most Windows 7 laptops but you might be able to order one from eBay if the manufacturer no longer carries it or find an ISO file. Even if you can't find any of that with enough determination you can should be able to get Windows 7 reinstalled and activated using the OEM info contained in the BIOS.
If you send me the specs I will try to do a little research on it... My guess is that the old dog could run smooth again with a clean install and then being careful what you install on it. Whether it is worth it or not for you is the question. There is a good chance that you could buy a much more powerful laptop used or new for a couple hundred dollars.
Good point. I do have couple of smaller ssd drives. I’ll plop on in and see if that helps. Might be able to revert it back to windows 7 too, thanks, i forgot about about them doing that. Ill,I’ll, that before I switch out the HD. I’ll have to check how much ram there is
Thanks, yeah, but this laptop has something wrong with it.
I do have an iso of windows 7, so all set there. I do wanna keep it as a gaming computer offline, and record keeping- also as a backup for photos- so not worried about installing older versions of windows o. It, but gotta determine what is causing it to be so slow first though. A relative owned it, and she was elderly and definitely not tech savvy. I e scanned for viruses, Uninstaller most of the crapware, cle a Ned ot down to a base install almost, but it didn’t help the issue, and the fact that Linux is even super slow on it might indicate ram or HD issue
Thanks for the offer, but I can try a few things first, like changing out had to an ssd, checking ram and increasing if needed.
I probably should just buy a cheap one to replace it, but I like th3 challenge. I’d also like to 3xperiment with like windows 98 se on it at some point, but might do that in a vm.
No doubt... Chances are something is sucking up all of its RAM and it is running on “virtual memory” on your hard drive. Press CNTR ALT Delete, open your task manager and then take a look at which processes are using all your resources. There is a good chance that will give you some idea of what is going wrong. There is a 90% chance that you have some sort of software issue or a woefully low amount of RAM which is something that slows Windows 10 to a crawl.
Thanks, i will do that- It’s weird though that it does it in linux when i boot to that though too= I gotta fire it up here shortly to check it out
(You aren’t expected to understand this) LOL.
My most hated and useless DOS error was ‘file exists, or file not found.’
# “WHY IN THE NAME OF GOD AND ALL THAT IS HOLY WOULD ANYONE DO SUCH AN EVIL THING AS RUNNING WINDOWS 95 IN EMULATION?”
Might be necessary to use with old controllers for machinery. I’ve seen that done.
I’ve been using UltraVNC to ‘log’ into the Win95 box (from Xp) for the last 4 or 5 years; makes it SO much more convenient accessing that old hardware ...
Heh, I know...I have done it myself on occasion! At that point, it really does begin to feel a little Rube-Goldbergian...
Win95 came out and a friend of mine...who taught me all about Windows 3.0...showed me Win95.
I asked him...so...is DOS 5.0 the OS? Where's the OS?
He looked at me over his glasses and said, "Windows 95 IS the OS.
Thank heaven for Classic Shell.
Classic Shell ... that’s it!! I couldn’t recall the name of that little (free) program that saved me so many precious hours learning to navigate the new appearance, features and other “improvements” that came with Windows 8, then 10. Cheers!
It is possible that both your installation of Windows 10 and your Linux build are tying up all of your resources while they try to update themselves. This of course is far more probable with Windows 10 and it can be maddening. You might try powering up the laptop, right click on the desktop and select display settings. Then on the left pane select power and sleep. Then change the sleep setting so that it will never sleep when it is plugged in. Close the window then type windows update in the search box and type windows update settings. Then click the check for updates button. If it hasn’t taken any updates recently it might take hours for it to take them all along with several restarts.
[[Then change the sleep setting so that it will never sleep when it is plugged in.]]
Yup- had that setting- I’m not sure what I’m gonna do with thiscomputer- I might just take the drive out of it and use it as a backup drive as it’s a 300 gig SSD- and get a cheap faster laptop for other stuff- the laptop is an AMD- and it’s 1 gigahertz- does that sound right? I’m not familiar with AMD
That doesn't really sound right. Maybe you are reporting back the base speed being reported from the my computer properties page? There may be some cheap multi-core AMD low TDP laptop processor that I am not familiar with. I bought a laptop for my dad about ten years ago that may be similar.
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