Originally got my windows 95 computer in 1996, and last week it finally was put out to pasture. Started with 64 megs of RAM, CD ROM drive and 4 gig drive split into 2x 2gig partitions. The clock was 300mhz. It was upgraded various times, ending with 256megs of ram, CD writer, CD ROM, 2x 40 gig hard drives (one split into a 10 gig/30gig partitions), and a clock of 500 mhz. The OS was so stable I could leave it running for weeks at a time. With this computer, for the first time I could: Copy CDs Rip and save music to CD Play Doom (and various other games) at full speed Play neogeo games in MAME (even if at 20fps). For several years it worked perfectly. But slowly things started going wrong. Firstly, one day while I was out, the cpu fan failed, causing the CPU to overheat and destroy both itself and the motherboard. That's why I ended up with a faster clock speed and CPU. I also purchased a board that sounded a loud beeper if a fan failure occurs. This board would go off for no reason at odd times, a cursory examination revealed that it was full of dry joints, a few minutes work with a soldering iron fixed that. The next problem started a while later, and occurred when the heat built up inside the case, the computer would freeze. Easily fixed: leave the case off. Then, after another while, another problem came along; it became more and more difficult to get the computer to boot up. Either a blue screen would appear, requiring a reboot, or the video screen would turn into quarters, also requiring a reboot. It could take up to 5 attempts before it would start properly. After that, it would work well until the eventual freeze-up days later. At last, a bunch of surplus computers became available at my work, so I loaded up the car, and started work on transferring things across. The functions of the computer were: 1. MAME and other arcade emulators 2. MAME testing of new compiles 3. Games such as Doom 4. CD ripping, burning, editing etc 5. Storage of various programs and data awaiting archive onto CD The MAME/arcade had already been transferred to my new computer that I got at Christmas, leaving the last 3 to be dealt with. The first thing to do was to create a new computer fitted with Ghost, to allow transfer of images between the various hard drives. A Compaq C600 with CD ROM and CD burner was chosen for the task. The OS was Windows 2000 Professional. One of the 40gig drives from the win95 machine was used to hold the ghost images. It didn't take long to get this working as intended. Another C600, with the same hardware and OS, was chosen to do the music/CD tasks. It only needed the addition of Roxio 5 Platinum. The original drive was only 10 gigs, which is clearly not enough. The image was saved by using ghost. Then, the Windows 95 C drive was also saved. Then, ghost was used to place the W2k OS on the win95 C drive (certainly the easiest way to convert a FAT32 system to NTFS and already fully working!). The other partition of the win95 drive already had all the music. It was a simple matter to replace the original 10gig drive with the 10+30 win95 drive, and the music machine was ready to use. The last thing was to transfer the games to another computer. At first, yet another C600 was tried, running windows 98, but about half the games would completely crash the computer. I deduced this was due to the onboard sound card. I would have liked to use the AWE64 out of the win95 pc, but the C600 has no ISA slots. What to do? I decided to use a Compaq C500 instead, as it has 2 ISA slots. The hard drive was simply moved over, but the different hardware caused a fatal blue screen at startup. Even reinstalling windows didn't fix this. Oh well, rename the Windows folder, and make a new install, which worked. After downloading a few drivers off the net, we had a fully functioning system. Then just a matter of changing some of the shortcuts for the games, adding a DOS mouse driver for Lemmings, and at last the job was done. Phew! At last the win95 pc could be retired gracefully - even if a few parts were missing!