Windows 95 whinger. Good day. I have been given an old Dell Latitude XPI Laptop & want to set it up for my kids Schoolwork & minimal Inernet access. Problem is – it doesn’t have a CD Rom to enable me to do a normal install off CD. Ages ago, I had the (full) 13/14 Win95 floppy disk set however – a few of the disks became faulty & they were all chucked. HOW can I install a ‘basic’ operating system on this machine without a CD Rom? Can I download anything off the Internet to help? My ‘home’ PC is a P111 500, 40g HD, DVD/CDRRW , Broadband 600k access etc. Is there possibly a way of using my normal PC to do it? Thanx. Graham.

Hi Graham, Yes you can use the other PC to perform this. You just need to copy the Win98 or Win95 directory from the CD to the hard drive using the other computer. Put the hard drive back into the original and run setup from the hard drive. Here is a link that will help you. It say's for Win98 but will work with Win95 also. COPY WINDOWS TO THE HARD DRIVE Mesich

Ooops. Just read it was a laptop. You could still do it that way but will need to buy a converter cable. Here is a link to one. You can probably find it local for about $10.00-$15.00 U.S. Laptop to Desktop Hard Drive Adapter Mesich

Thanks Mesich. I hadn't considered doing a one-2-one with a converter cable/HD move. I'll try & find out what is available in the form of cables etc. over here in the UK & give it a shot. Thanx. Graham.

You are welcome. Take care, Mesich

I've just had a similar problem, for a work around here is what I did: 1- Download rar32 (archive program for DOS and OS2) 2- Put rar32 on a floppy and load it onto the laptop 3- copy the win95 directory from the CD rom to a good computer 4- use winrar to compress the win95 directory into pieces that will fit onto a floppy, make sure you select 'make archive solid' 5- you will end up with 22 pieces, put them on floppies and copy them into a directory on your laptop 5- run rar32 on the laptop and uncompress the archive (I was kinda messy here, put all the pieces into a tmp folder on the laptop and had rar32 in a rar directory. Used the following command to uncompress the archive (ran rar32 from the rar folder):rar32 e c:\tmp\win95.rar 6- go to the directory where you have uncompressed the win95 files and run setup.exe. You could do the same for win98, but it would take longer (more floppies). Hope that helped. M Bergen rar32 e