Finally got rid of windows 95

[Robert]

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!

[Agozer]

Somewhat on topic, I retired my old Windows 95 machine almost exactly 2 years ago. It was a Fujitsu Siemens with these specs.

 

* Pentium 200Mhz with MMX technology (all the rage backj in 1996 when I got it)

* 32 MB EDO RAM

* ATI Rage 3D video card

* Sound Blaster Vibra 16X sound card

* Speakers with good output but no way of adjusting the sound volume

* Windows 95 OSR2 OEM

 

It was marketed as one of the first multimedia PCs, which a cutting edge 3D graphics card. Well, I learned the hard way to never trust sales hype or prebuilt computer packages.

 

First off, I had speakers that had no knobs for adjusting sound. This lead to extreme problems with some games that would automatically max all sound levels from the sound control panel when run ---> my ears were practically bleeding after that and I had to quickly unplug the speakers to avoid going permanently deaf.

 

The computer originally had a 3GB hard drive that simply stopped working one morning. I got a new one under warranty but it was a 10GB drive becuse 3GB drives were no longer made. I also bough one of the first HP CD-Writer drives to help with my ever-increasing storage space problem. No buffers or anything fancy like that. Burning CDs was like playing russian roulette sometimes.

 

Perhaps one of the biggest problems in that computer was that the cutting edge ATI Rage 3D wasn't so cutting edge after all. To be honest, it was a piece of crap, a complete travesty in terms of hardware and almost useless.

 

I never got any 3D accelerated games to work with it (actually, save one, and even then the game had texture errors). I took it to the store and they said that the card had so little VRAM (1MB, and presumably there was some sort of an upgrade chip that would raise the VRAM to 2MB. Cutting edge my ass) that no 3D accelerated game would work with it. So I promptly ordered the folks at the store to go though all the available graphics cards (we're talking about Riva TNT 2, Voodoo 3 line of cards here) to replace the ATI. None of them worked.

 

It seems that my computer had such a strange hardware setup, not to mention a weird dislike for any DirectX above DirectX5 that the upgrades were impossible to do on any level. So everytime a games would update DirectX without asking me, I ended up formatting my whole drive and reinstalling everything.

 

As a desperate last option, I bought an old Voodoo 1 card from a friend of mine (one of the first 3D graphics accelerator cards on the market ever) and it worked. Yeah, Glide and early DX5 implementations of Direct3D were my only rendering options.

 

Later I installed Windows 98 to solve some new hardware conflicts. The computer now sits unused in the adjacent room, and I'm not sure what to do with it.

 

[/end rant]

[Robert]

Good story!

 

My computer had DirectX 8.0 which is the latest version that works on win95.

 

The video card was a Trident T9710 with a whole 4mb of RAM that mounted into the AGP slot. Despite the modest specs, it ran every weird resolution that MAME could come up with, and it made nice pictures in the 3D games running under Zinc (even at 2fps). Video quality was never a concern.

[ken_cinder]

Windows 2000 huh? Hope you don't connect that thing to the internet.

Since those leaked pieces of source hit the net, new Win2k installations have been a pain in the butt.

I couldn't get a streamlined SP4 up and running without being overrun with spyware, malware and trojans, even with NAV and AdAware installed and updated via a proxy. Running through a proxy to get Windows Updates proved damn near impossible for some reason.

Finally gave up and installed XP on this 600 I have, and stripped it to the bones as best I could. Now I scrapped XP for Linux.

[Robert]

I cannot understand why you have so many problems. I am using win2k on my internet pc and have done so for nearly 2 years without any issues at all.

[ken_cinder]

Sure, and it's up to date. A fresh install, and you're hammered from the second you connect to the internet unless you run from behind a proxy. 2 years ago, the pieces of source for portions of Win2k weren't leaked.......