291–300 of 332 posts
Nice, but I'd rather have Windows 95 Mobile. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D0DDQumaaCg
That's barely different from ‘Pocket PC’ aka ‘Windows Mobile’ of the mid-2000s. Just more concrete-gray here.
Pretty. :) Gives me PTSD-like flashbacks to the time when I was tasked with installing Windows 95 on 50+ computers on the local school. For the young(er), Windows was on 14-ish 3.5" floppy disks, and I had to do some heavy calculation and logistics copying those discs while installing the OS to make my effort as efficient as possible. IIRC, I managed to keep the installing cyclus going on 28 computers at a time, and…
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Pretty sure it stopped being helpful with Windows 2000.
Reinstalling Windows XP SP 2 on my computer growing up was one of the first things that got interested in what was going on at the operating system level. I found Windows XP Inside Out around the house, read it over so many times, and eventually re-installed it on my computer for fun. I was floored to realize how much faster things were. No wait time for a Windows Explorer window to open. Everything was snappy, even…
The very first time I reinstalled WinXP was shortly after I got my first computer of my own for my 12th birthday. I was tinkering with some of the files, and discovered that I could open .cur cursor files in MS Paint. I edited one of the cursor files, saved it as a bmp and renamed the file to .cur under the assumption that this would work. Set my custom cur file as cursor and logged out. When I tried to log back in I couldn’t. Whoops. Freaked out for a second thinking I had broken everything. Remembered that there was a red floppy disk with an ambulance on it that came with the computer. Rebooted the machine with the red floppy disk and reinstalled Windows. Lost my files but had nothing valuable at the time anyways. Have lost more valuable data since then. And expect to lose more data in the future still :p
Pretty. :) Gives me PTSD-like flashbacks to the time when I was tasked with installing Windows 95 on 50+ computers on the local school. For the young(er), Windows was on 14-ish 3.5" floppy disks, and I had to do some heavy calculation and logistics copying those discs while installing the OS to make my effort as efficient as possible. IIRC, I managed to keep the installing cyclus going on 28 computers at a time, and…
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The Windows 10 ISO is ~3.5 GB in size, and a standard 3.5 in. floppy could hold 1.44 MB. So you'd actually need almost 2500 floppies.
For the sake of science: Microsoft historically used the 21 512 byte sector, 80 track, double-sided DMF format for 3 1/2" Windows installation media, yielding 1,720,320 bytes per floppy. Assuming this format, floppy requirements for the four Windows 10 21H1 variants currently on MSDN are x64 Consumer (Home/Pro): 3,398 floppies x64 Business (Enterprise/Education): 3,323 floppies x86 Consumer: 2,416 floppies x86 Busine…
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Protip: Windows 95 (and 98) installs much faster hdd-to-hdd if you start smartdrv.exe in your config.sys/autoexec.bat even with minimal write cache.
Smartdrv.exe was a vital utility on DOS systems. You had to unload it to play some games, though, otherwise they wouldn't fit into memory (DOOM on 4 MB systems, Duke Nukem on 8 MB systems). God, I am old.
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Back in those days re-formatting and re-installing Windows was a very common thing because usually the system would get into some kind of bad state after several months of usage (or at least mine did). I believe I only had a Windows 98 'Upgrade' CD, which could not be used to install on a bare system. This meant I had to first install a previous copy Windows, which in my case was Windows 95 on floppy disks (and I fee…
Windows 95/98 definitely decayed over time. Especially after installing stuff like AOL and RealPlayer, your system was like a disgusting cesspool of random trash. I distinctly remember nuking the entire thing would noticeably increase my frame rate in stuff like Homeworld lol
Pretty. :) Gives me PTSD-like flashbacks to the time when I was tasked with installing Windows 95 on 50+ computers on the local school. For the young(er), Windows was on 14-ish 3.5" floppy disks, and I had to do some heavy calculation and logistics copying those discs while installing the OS to make my effort as efficient as possible. IIRC, I managed to keep the installing cyclus going on 28 computers at a time, and…
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I bet a sealed 38 floppy edition of Windows 98, in mint condition, would go for a million USD.
I wonder if you could build a modern-ish browser on Windows 98 and use it as a minimalist daily driver? Give me a modern browser, bash shell (perhaps an old version of cygwin?), and a decent text editor and I probably could for the most part. I'd have to really get in the '90s spirit and break out the cassette deck though because running an obese Electron app like Tidal would probably be difficult. I guess you're lim…
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You can install Windows 95 from the package manager (runs in dosbox), and both minesweeper and freecell are present.
Minesweeper and freecell are basic system functionality. Putting these available only via a store^W package manager makes as much sense as replacing the UI with a flat interface suited for tablets and phones. Actually I didn't notice the package manager. It's a bit slow to install, and after installing I get ZIP file error when trying to run dosbox. There are a billion minesweeper clones that likely are trivial to in…
The fact that you can run an actual copy of Windows 95 inside it and run Minesweeper there is way more impressive to me (and it worked fine for me, for what it's worth).