Hi there

I recently picked up and upgraded an aptiva 2168 which was my first PC too 😀

Mine was a little different from yours. It could recognise a modern hard drive (80GB IDE) but only access a few GB of it and not the full drive. For a little while I used a DDO (dynamic drive overlay) to get around this, but in the end I fitted an ATA133 PCI card to be done with the issue.

I'd recommend this to you as well, but the problem is the card I had only had Windows 98se drivers. I tried to make it work with Windows 95, but it wouldn't have it. For me, this wasn't a problem as I can still use all the Aptiva apps and my old games with Windows 98. I guess you could even change the boot splash and startup sound if you wanted, or try and find a chipset that does support Win95

One big advantage though is speed. I benchmarked the onboard IDE vs the ATA133 PCI card and went from Linear Read and Random Read of 153.81 / 81.35 to 1610 / 322.42 using the same hard drive

The card I used was an SIIG ATA133 using the Sil 0680 chipset

The rest of my specs:
Upgraded the CPU to a K6-III 400 using the powerleap adapter - I was using a 233 MMX and performance increased but not as much as I expected. I can send you benchmarks if you're interested
128MB RAM
512KB cache
Voodoo 3 PCI
Yamaha YMF719 ISA audio card with Dreamblaster X1 wavetable
3com ISA ethernet

Thanks for the reply. That’s a nice system!I really want it to run windows 95 badly. In the bios it does seem to recognize the drive installed and says 4gb installed, but throws seek error on boot and windows fdisk just doesn’t see it. I guess my best option is to try and find a ata133 card hat works with 95. Post up the benches would love to see it.

KSHIRZA1 wrote:

Thanks for the reply. That’s a nice system!I really want it to run windows 95 badly. In the bios it does seem to recognize the drive installed and says 4gb installed, but throws seek error on boot and windows fdisk just doesn’t see it. I guess my best option is to try and find a ata133 card hat works with 95. Post up the benches would love to see it.

If you can't find an ata133 pci card with w95 drivers then an ata66 or ata100 card is enough speedwise, just make sure the card has its own BIOS with support for large HDDs.

As long as your BIOS can recognise the drive then a DDO should work. A DDO will sit between your BIOS and your operating system allowing it to access the full drive even though your BIOS can only address 4GB

I used Maxtor's Maxblast plus 2 as I had a Maxtor drive. Various different DDO software available from Phil's Computer Lab's website, here's a link to the Maxtor and Ontrack pages:
https://www.philscomputerlab.com/maxtor.html
https://www.philscomputerlab.com/ontrack-disk-manager.html

I would think that'll get you Win95 installed, but I can't speak to the Ontrack version. I believe the Maxtor version only works if you have a Maxtor or unbranded (compactflash/sd solution) drive.

However, if you can get an ATA card performance will be significantly better. I was also tied to Win95 since that's what my Aptiva came with, but apart from the splash and startup music I haven't noticed any difference using Win98 on mine, except how much faster it is now!

Good luck 😀

Just ordered this. Thoughts?

According to what I can find on Google that card uses the same chipset I have on my SIIG card, the Silicon Image 0680

I was unable to find any Win95 supporting drivers for that card so you may face the same issue, if not I'd appreciate if you could image the included drivers and upload them for us 😀

I found the earliest driver I could and tried to bodge the .inf to work with Windows 95, but didn't have any luck sadly

Nipedley wrote:

According to what I can find on Google that card uses the same chipset I have on my SIIG card, the Silicon Image 0680

I was unable to find any Win95 supporting drivers for that card so you may face the same issue, if not I'd appreciate if you could image the included drivers and upload them for us 😀

I found the earliest driver I could and tried to bodge the .inf to work with Windows 95, but didn't have any luck sadly

Hopefully comes with win 95 drivers. I simply went off of the boxes OS support, so hopefully that's the case. If it works ill upload drivers asap!

What about ethernet cards? would have to be isa since my 2 pci slots are occupied. found a couple 10mbs ISA. Is it even worth it on windows 95?

Let us know how it goes 😀 There are a bunch of Aptiva software recovery ISOs out there, I used one to reinstall the original Aptiva apps on my 2168 - let me know if you need a hand with finding any of them as I downloaded them all as well

I network all my PC's even the pure dos PC.
10mb/s transfer is still faster then copying things over via Floppy, CD, etc.