Solved How 2Install Win95 on computer equipped with an LED monitor

Derek October 22, 2015 at 13:44:53

Have you tried it with much less RAM (512M for example)? 2G of RAM would have been totally unheard of in those days but as there is no message to say it is too much the nearest message is "too little". This, or something similar, is much more likely than display driver. There might be some problem with that later but it would not stop Windows loading. Always pop back and let us know the outcome - thanks

ijack October 22, 2015 at 13:49:48

Yes, it's the RAM not the monitor. http://blogs.msdn.com/b/oldnewthing... Depending upon the graphics card you may have very limited choice over the resolution available as it will probably have to use a generic SVGA driver. But, again, this is nothing to do with the monitor. Reasonably modern computers (i.e. up to about 10 years old) aren't really happy running these obsolete operating systems.

Derek October 22, 2015 at 14:18:28

Despite the article in #2 if you wanted to Win98 to run properly with over 512M of RAM you had to get up to fiddles in the system.ini file. I doubt W95 was better. Always pop back and let us know the outcome - thanks

LMiller7 October 22, 2015 at 14:35:59

✔ Best Answer

512 MB RAM was huge in 1995, far beyond what most computers of the day could accommodate. Windows 95 was said by some to be a memory hog because it required 4 MB RAM, more than many computers of the day could provide. I believe there is a workaround that allows a Windows 95 computer to boot with but not use more than 512 MB RAM but I don't know what it is. But it is likely that any computer modern enough to handle 2 GB RAM is going to have more problems with Windows 95 than just too much RAM. message edited by LMiller7

Derek October 22, 2015 at 14:47:50

If you can get it to Windows with less RAM we can provide the system.ini [VCACHE]fiddle. Always pop back and let us know the outcome - thanks

T-R-A October 22, 2015 at 15:35:01

Yep, as mentioned, 2GB is too much RAM for Win95 to handle without tweaking. At the time of Win95's release, 8 to 16MB was a common thing on most machines which ran it and it actually seemed to run slower on some systems with more than 32MB. Systems with more than that were generally intended to run a version of WinNT (3.5x-4.0). "Channeling the spirit of jboy..." message edited by T-R-A

melee5 October 22, 2015 at 18:55:29

You will also have problems with your LED drivers in that none were written for 95, so you will have to settle on 'best match' default there when the time comes. Unless of course I'm wrong, in which case never mind. But you have assumed wrong - this is too much RAM issue and 9x can't handle it out of the box. There is a patch that will allow up to 4 gigs to work with 9x but you have to buy it. $25 IIRC, I'm using it with 2 gigs on XP/98 dual boot Dell and it works perfect No other issues either. No messing with .ini files that may or may not appear to work fine but actually don't, and never really did, it only appeared to work for a while at best, BSOD in your future here with ini tweaking in my experience with one gig ram. http://rloew.x10host.com/ Less costly solution is to revert back to 512 Meg of ram and use it that way. For a while? At least until you can get 9x installed? And then think about larger ram issue and paid for solution. No mention of hard drive size or type (sata/pata) which may be a big foul up too. Nice thing about those borderline XP capable boxes is that up to 5 years after they came out, LBA addressing was added to the BIOS which allows 9x to address terabyte drives, along with new toys such as USB drive booting capabilities. So if it were me, I would head to the maker's site and download the last BIOS update for it and get those goodies on there while the getting is good. http://www.msfn.org/board/topic/118... To fix, you need this installed first https://support.microsoft.com/en-us... Get the patch here http://www.msfn.org/board/topic/118... patching instructions here http://www.msfn.org/board/topic/118... 137gig fix is also free but your BIOS needs to use LBA addressing too http://www.msfn.org/board/topic/129... Lee

DAVEINCAPS October 22, 2015 at 19:05:08

You don't install dos prior to installing 95. 95 will be a clean install unless it's an upgrade and in that case you need to supply the windows 3.x disks for verification. What size hard drive are you using? The first version of 95 as well as the upgrade disks and also dos 6.22 were only fat16 capable and had a maximum partition size of 2 gig. That's in addition to the need for much less ram and possibly unavailable drivers.

Derek October 23, 2015 at 07:30:23

melee5 I don't think it is quite right to say that ini file changes didn't work for long. Although it was necessary to reduce RAM to get W95/98 to boot up, you could, for example, limit the [VCACHE] to the equivalent of 512M or less and had no problems thereafter. This was done many times on this forum (although maybe not with Gigs of RAM) with no come backs. Maybe DAVEINCAPS can also input on this. Always pop back and let us know the outcome - thanks

DAVEINCAPS October 23, 2015 at 20:45:39

I uploaded this to driverguide a few years ago. http://download.driverguide.com/dri... It's some screenshots of modification to 98 for large amounts of ram. Someone had posted them on a site and I saved the jpegs. The original site is no longer there. I assume the procedure would be the same for 95. Modifying the startup files is often more art than science and others have posted that other but similar methods are better. You're getting the insufficient or 'out of memory' errors because the memory addresses are overwhelmed by the gobs of memory you have installed. 95 sees that the same as if you had too little ram.

Thank you all for your help. Once I got over the shock of learning there could possibly ever be "too much ram" the rest was simple. I finally made a correct assumption (that Win 98 might be able to handle 1 GB of ram) and re-tried installing it since that was my original target. The installation went flawlessly and I am happily installing all of my old favorite programs. It was kinda fun (if humbling) to learn how much I've forgotten about the good old days of writing config.sys and autoexec.bat files. LOL What an experience! My 800 GB hard disk seems to have overwhelmed Windows Explore's ability to judge how much free space is left. It says 79.9 GB, but even if it's right, that's more than enough since this is primarily a play toy. Thanks again for all your help. This is definitely my go-to source for the future. message edited by tbarry24

Derek October 24, 2015 at 14:22:32

If you run into any instability problems with W98, VCACHE might need modifying in the System.ini file (in C:\windows). Just open it in NotePad. See "1GB RAM & VCACHE" here: http://www.thpc.info/ram/vcache98.html I would recommend the 70% of RAM setting at the end of that section. Maxfilecache is in bytes (1M=1024 Bytes). The setting in System.ini will look like this: [VCACHE] maxfilecache=367000 In any event ensure the setting is no higher than 512M (ie. 524288). Pop back if you have any problems. Always pop back and let us know the outcome - thanks message edited by Derek

DAVEINCAPS October 24, 2015 at 15:42:44

If you used 98's Fdisk to partition it, it won't show the correct size for partitions larger than about 64 gig. There was a patch for that or you can use ME's version of fdisk. Also you don't want partitions larger than about 120 gig as you're entering 48-bit LBA territory there and some of 98's utilities like scandisk and defrag won't run right.

melee5 October 25, 2015 at 04:39:49

Thanks Derek for the input. I watched with jealousy ALL the tips and guides concerning large ram issues with 98 when they happened while I was stuck at 64 megs. And when I finally got 1 gig going I was quite pleased to see them working just as the OP is right now. But in a week he'll possibly have a BSOD and wonder why as I did. And then again, and then again. Explorer windows that don't open and never do, other odd behavior that just baffles, drivers that won't install, etc. I seriously tried everything and could not escape BSOD at weekly intervals, but I also was building a dual boot with XP and wanted to use the maximum 2 gig that this machine could use for the XP side. 98 could not be convinced to work with 2 gig no matter what was done when. It's not a matter of tweaking broken code - it's broken code that is the problem. Bought the patch and no BSOD ever with zero tweaking of anything. Just installing the patch at first re-boot. That's enough of a difference to know that even though it looks like it works, it really doesn't. I have to relay it as it is known to me. An occasional BSOD isn't the end of world, if anyone is fine with that on their machine then so am I. I'm quite sure your mileage will vary a great deal here - not everybody is trying this on a Dell for example which may be the only reason I used to get BSOD in the first place. In any event I couldn't run 2 gigs at all but now I can and the XP side of the machine likes that part. The ini tricks and settings are always worth a try, just don't be surprised by BSOD and/or odd behavior at rare times. These will be your only symptoms things are not quite right with that truly broken code. Lee

Only problems I have now are getting drivers loaded. Apparently I need one for my video card, and one of the games is missing a dll file. I have the files, but I can't get them loaded just yet. Until I get out and get some dvds or cds, I only have flash drives to move them with, and guess what doesn't know what to do with a flash drive? I thought I had it out smarted. I was going to use my cell phone to move the files, but Win98 is clueless about that too. Too bad I had decided I wasn't going to keep that machine on the network and tossed the old card. Not the first time I've gotten hasty and paid for it. For now, I'm playing anything that can be used with 4 colors. It will take a while for me to be ready to roll on anything that might cause stability issues to arise.

melee5 October 31, 2015 at 17:48:58

I actually got my vintage 97 box to work with USB drives for a while at least and pretty good too until it all went sideways on me. The secret is a USB 2.0 card with 98 drivers, get that installed and then apply nusb 3.6 from here. http://www.msfn.org/board/topic/436... Like magic it works. Then I think I tried a bad drive that didn't work on XP in the first place and haven't been able to recover my use of good drives now. Uninstall, remove from device mangler, reboot, start over still doesn't go. If I get the chance to do that again on a fresh install there I'll remember to grab a Total Uninstall capture of files changed between card installation and running nusb 3.6 so I can see exactly what nusb 3.6 did and perhaps be able to do something to restore that working point without too much trouble. Nothing like a network to push files back and forth on that's for sure. As to stability at least in my case it wasn't about the task being tackled as if that aspect wasn't important at all. When it failed for me it was at any point doing pretty much anything, so on mine you should have seen something go wrong already. Congratulations you do not have a Dell. There IS hope. :) Lee message edited by melee5