We are not ignoring you!!!!!

[Murf]

Just wanted to tell the few posters left in the "95" forum, we are not ignoring you. I drop by once in awhile, well at least once a night, and between A31Chris, JAL, jerry4dos, Calpitor and two who occasional drop by, Vernon Frazee and Eeyore, the forum is in good hands.

Obviously Win "95" is quickly dying, but the owners will continue to keep this forum open for now at least. I have suggested it be combined with Win "98", but as long as there is interest in "95" it will stay open.

Thanks folks for watching out and keeping "95" alive.

[jenae]

Hi Murf, well it is disturbing to see you so lonely and rejected in the Geriatrics forum , and what may I ask is young Calpitor doing there, no doubt the medication needs revision. I have a file of nasty 95 problems that I could reactivate, just to liven the place up. No I am a big fan of 95, will always be the Bill Gates signature dish to me.

[Murf]

Calpitor must really be bored. Actually spending more time in "98" and Hardware, and mod two "Other" forums (W2K and W98) on the "Other" network as they say.

I can honestly say I do not miss "95", running XP Pro now. It was a great operating system, can remember the excitement when I upgraded from 3.1 to 95, it was a "Whole NEW World", well time past and now it's an old world. Someday we will be saying that of XP...

Fortuanately as a MS MVP get to try out all their new gadgets "Free", just got their new O/S called LongHorn, haven't loaded it yet. Longhorn is the codename for the next-generation version of Microsoft's flagship Windows operating system. It's also the company's most ambitious project since the first Windows NT release.

[J A L]

Thanks Murf!

I think the only thing that holds 95 back from being great is USB support. The vendors who make hardware could write usb drivers for 95 but elect not to do so. USB is such a great interface and without the driver support many pieces of hardware are left for Windows 98 and above. Windows 98 relys on more ram to run properly than windows 95 needs. So the use of notebooks and windows 95 is still alive. Many notebooks now can be picked up at state and local business auctions cheap. The reason they are cheap is because of outdated hardware. You can still surf the web on windows 95, get email, run office programs....etc...

By no means do you need to fill the landfills with notebooks that work just fine but don't have the resources to run Windows 2000 or Windows XP. If you ask me I would rather have a 35 dollar notebook than a 400 dollar PDA. You can do way more with a notebook and the screen is much bigger! I have even installed dvd drives in pentium 1 notebooks with the margi dvd pcmcia decoder cards and watched dvd's on a pentium 1 Notebook. Margi says you need only a pentium 100 processor but I have found a pentium 150 MMX or better works best! Of course this all works with Windows 95 and Windows 98!! For the home user Win 3.1 and dos now are pretty much dead. But Windows 95 still rocks in my humble opinion and still has a niche in notebooks that cities and states are now surplusing! I don't post here much as there really is only a few times a year I install 95 now. But it sure is nice to have People post here that know what they are doing. There are many tricks and software resources for Windows 95 that are free as well.

Thanks murf for the support here on Win 95 forum! I will try to help here as much as possible as I really do like Windows 95B. I was on the internet in 95 as a brand new computer user and grew up on 95. Those were hard learning years for me as there were very few households that even had a computer back then.

For tech help back then you pretty much had to use Hyperterminal and bulitan boards. Not many even know what that was now. Bulitan boards were limmited to local people only and therefore the information was not wide spread and pleantiful. VDR and sites like VDR were unavailable. I remember getting excited when hardware vendors were posting drivers on websites. That was in 97. There pretty much was no viruses and no trojans. The only ad stuff was with AOL and such. I remember my dad was on AOL and I remember having to call them for tech support on software that wasn't theirs but wouldn't work with AOL, but would work just fine on my computer with regualr dial up. The problem was with a winsock error that was native to AOL. So AOL's software prevented the software I was trying to get working through AOL from working. The fix was to delete the Winsock file from the software and copy the Winsock file from AOL to the software I was installing. Then everything worked fine. The reason I bring this up is because I had to wait 3 hours on hold to talk to a AOL representative only to be transfered three times to different people untill I finally got to talk to a tech. Now we just post here on VDR and get a answer sometimes even faster than telephone tech support!

I never belonged to AOL, Prodigy, or Compuserve. I had a isp back then that had great people and horrible equiptment. But it still was better than AOL! LOL

I have tried linux on some notebooks but have found they don't run so well on laptops with little ram. For instance Mandrake 9.2 needs 64 megs of ram. Win 95 needs just 16 megs of ram with IE 5.5. It does however run better with 24 megs of ram.

Many pentium 1 notebooks use proprietary ram that is no longer made. So this leaves Windows 95 or searching ebay and such for more ram so you can install win 98. Linux uses lots of ram but can work with slow processors. Win 95 can work with slow processors and less ram. So for many Win 95 is the only option for hardware they already own. AS long as 98 is supported by microsoft which is now expected to last untill June of 2005, I would say 95 will still be viable as a usable OS. The deal here is the internet use. IE 5.5 is fully usable on the internet without getting errors for java and such. As long as this remains true windows 95 can still be used. The progression of the internet will eventually kill off 95 though as further development of software just isn't happening with windows 95. But for now... 95 is still a goodie! Mozilla needs a good amount of ram to run too now. Acrobat reader now needs 64 megs of ram to run their latest reader. Slowly Win 95 is going to the way side as well as 98. I will miss both those operating systems when they fianlly die! But for now... I will help with whatever I can to promote them staying alive!

Now parents... Give your child in grade school a leg up with a old Notebook that they can learn from that doesn't cost too much! Imagine your child learning windows on a 35 dollar notebook that if they drop it or get it stolen it didn't cost too much, but is much better for their intellectual mental developemnent than say a barbie doll or some other toy that costs $35.00 or more. Spend time with your child showing them how it works. Personally I could relate to them better with a computer than say with a barbie doll!

[Calpitor]

I knew my ears were burning for a reason. It's always nice to see people are talking about you in a nice way.

Apart from not having USB support, system configuration utility and a few other do-dads that you have to correct through the registry I have to admit I liked 95 over 98.

[Nix]

I used to run Win95 on a DX466 with a 200Mb HD and 24Mb of ram - beautiful.

[A31Chris]

Originally posted by Calpitor
I knew my ears were burning for a reason. It's always nice to see people are talking about you in a nice way.

Apart from not having USB support, system configuration utility and a few other do-dads that you have to correct through the registry I have to admit I liked 95 over 98.

Can you expound upon what other doodads that you have to correct through the registry?

I'll bet there is a way to get USB support much better on 95 than it is. Probably involves rewriting the USB patches for the later 95's. I'll bet M$ did a piss-poor job on purpose knowing that the future was in USB and wanted to give people a reason to upgrade. Would require a bit of knowledge of programming I'm sure, but I'll bet it can be done.

[Calpitor]

Originally posted by A31Chris
Can you expound upon what other doodads that you have to correct through the registry?

Things like resetting codecs back to defaults, expanding the transmit and receive windows for the modem to name a couple

I'll bet there is a way to get USB support much better on 95 than it is. Probably involves rewriting the USB patches for the later 95's. Would require a bit of knowledge of programming I'm sure, but I'll bet it can be done.

Windows 95 OSR 2.1 and OSR 2.5 provide basic USB support that was developed as the technology was first emerging. Based on today's more mature USB technology, there are a number of limitations with USB support in Windows 95 OSR 2.1 and Windows 95 OSR 2.5. Note that the original or first version of Windows 95 including the update and version A, is NOT capable of USB connectivity. There is NO update for these versions of Win95 that can provide USB support. So you see in actuality you would have to hack and rewrite Windows to achieve what you are looking to accomplish.

I'll bet M$ did a piss-poor job on purpose knowing that the future was in USB and wanted to give people a reason to upgrade.

Actually when M$ was coding the original Windows 95, Intel was still at the drawing board working on the USB brain child and Apple had (?) or was about to release the IEEE 1394 (FireWire) high-speed connection so all bets weren't in at that point as to which was going to be more popular or faster. It took USB 2.0 to become the unequivocal winner in speed at least for a while.

Your argument would be the same as to say XP is nothing more than a way to get people to buy Longhorn as XP doesn't natively support PCI Express.

[Vernon Frazee]

Calpitor> Apart from not having ... system configuration utility ...

If you mean msconfig.exe, the one from my Windows 98SE setup worked fine on my Windows 95 OSR2 setup.

[A31Chris]

Your argument would be the same as to say XP is nothing more than a way to get people to buy Longhorn as XP doesn't natively support PCI Express.

Well, not really. My argument would be that in the future M$ would never really try to produce an upgrade or patch to FULLY support technology that was coming out when the OS was in its infancy, along with the technology in question. They would hem'n haw and probably say, like they did with 95, 'well, you'd need to redo the heart of 95 to support USB'. They may not be lying. But then again they may be.

I've heard really bad things about what M$ has done, especially to smaller competing companies, and to tell you the truth, I don't put anything past them.

[Calpitor]

Originally posted by A31Chris
I've heard really bad things about what M$ has done, especially to smaller competing companies, and to tell you the truth, I don't put anything past them.

There might be something to that. I've been hearing some very disgusting and dishonorable things about Paul Martin and the Liberal government..... doesn't make them true; only means we're in the throes of an election but I wouldn't put it past them either but to accuse the P.M. of murder? That sounded like it came out the Nat'l Enquirer not the Globe and Mail. (Canada's version of the N.Y. Times)

[104456]

What about us still using Windows 3x ?
[boy these pages look funny in IE3]

[Murf]

Interesting reading, you can actually have Windows 3.1 look like Windows 95, right click menu and all. A small proigram I once used, gave Win 3.x a Start button, menu task bar and a right click option. Now they have a version to make it look like XP:

Calmira

[jerry4dos]

I have suggested it be combined with Win "98", but as long as there is interest in "95" it will stay open.

I vote AGAINST combining 95 with 98 (am I allowed to vote?). The main reason I come here (and not one/some of the other "combined" forums) is that there is a separate niche for Win95.

I know I'm a dinosaur, but I like being one. (Did you know that "dinosaur" means "big lizard" in Greek?)

Jerry

[Tsume]

The main reason I come here (and not one/some of the other "combined" forums) is that there is a separate niche for Win95.

I feel the same way, and I dearly hope that after Win98 becomes obsolete that I will still be able to get support for my pc problems.

I have a win95 notebook. It's 11 years old, I believe it is a Compaq LTE Elite. Come to think of it, I need some help with it.

Later,
Tsume