I think 32MB over 16MB will help. If you got the memory, why not use it? 😉

Have you tried installing W95 on the cf drive when connected to another computer (but possibly the same controller) and moving it to your 386 rig?

Doh, i should have thought of that, good idea.

Recently I assembled a 486 using some spare parts and and a case I had. It's a 486/66 with 16mb ram, and I used a 2gb CF card in the beginning, formatted at 504MB because of the HD controller limit. I had dos,win 3.11 and later I installed windows 95 also to see how it's doing on a 486 like that. It worked nice. Not as fast as a pentium, but it didn't crawl either. Later I changed the CF card with a SD, as it didn't have much difference in speed, and I really didn't need the SD card at all. So then I thougt to try the CF on my 386. It's a 386/40 with 16mb ram, and I use a 512mb CF card as a disk. I simply changed the cards, and it boots fine. It recognized the different graphics and sound cards(just those two nothing else). It's obviously a lot slower, but it works. It needs about 45" to boot, but after that it's ok. I believe that it would be better with 32mb ram. Perhaps I should try that, but I'm really bored to open the case to add some more ram just to check that... And I think it's nice to run a CF card, which is very fast compared to a HD of this era. I'm not sure if I would try that if I had a regular disk...

Markk wrote:

Recently I assembled a 486 using some spare parts and and a case I had. It's a 486/66 with 16mb ram, and I used a 2gb CF card in the beginning, formatted at 504MB because of the HD controller limit. I had dos,win 3.11 and later I installed windows 95 also to see how it's doing on a 486 like that. It worked nice. Not as fast as a pentium, but it didn't crawl either. Later I changed the CF card with a SD, as it didn't have much difference in speed, and I really didn't need the SD card at all. So then I thougt to try the CF on my 386. It's a 386/40 with 16mb ram, and I use a 512mb CF card as a disk. I simply changed the cards, and it boots fine. It recognized the different graphics and sound cards(just those two nothing else). It's obviously a lot slower, but it works. It needs about 45" to boot, but after that it's ok. I believe that it would be better with 32mb ram. Perhaps I should try that, but I'm really bored to open the case to add some more ram just to check that... And I think it's nice to run a CF card, which is very fast compared to a HD of this era. I'm not sure if I would try that if I had a regular disk...

That can be, that the Compact Flash card is faster then the harddisk..
But i didnt realised it earlier that the compact flash has limit write / read cycles.. And that cycles arent that much of an harddisk.. Harddisk has unlimited cycles. The only con is if the motor stops spinning you losing all of your data.. So i think an harddisk is safer for unlimited use..

I know that, and that's the reason why I always disable virtual memory when I use a CF card as a HD.

I used to run 98SE on a P120 with 24 MB of RAM. I can safely say that the more memory you have on a lower-end system, the less virtual memory swapping will happen overall and the faster everything will go.

95 on a system with less than 8 MB of RAM will go pretty slow, but it will work. However, a 386 DX at 33 MHz with 4 MB of RAM BARELY meets the minimum system requirements for 95, and the recommended minimum is 8 MB of RAM with a 486-class CPU. I remember using 95 on P90 computers that had only 8 MB of RAM and they went considerably slower than 98 on my P120 with 24 MB of RAM.

Unless there's any 95-specific software you want to run on this rig, you really should stick with Win3.1.

As for the CF drive thing, the size of the CF card inserted and the age of the drive itself will play a factor in whether or not the 95 installer will figure it out or not. Ultimately, you may need to disconnect the drive during the install process and reconnect it once you have 95 installed to the system's hard drive. That's just a best guess though; someone else might have a better suggestion.

Gemini000 wrote:

Unless there's any 95-specific software you want to run on this rig, you really should stick with Win3.1.

The main reason was to add basic networking so I can move files across to the 386 more easily. Floppies usually are a hassle as mostly I use a win7 box without an fdd, and I don't have things set up to keep swapping cf cards between boxes either. I did use recordable cd's previously but that's a bit wasteful too, just for shifting a few files around now and again.

As I have a 95 cd/coa going spare but I don't have wfw3.11 [I don't often see wfw3.11 on ebay either], I thought I'd just use that.

I guess there might be ways to use 3.1 or dos across a network, but I couldn't figure it out.

Gemini000 wrote:

As for the CF drive thing, the size of the CF card inserted and the age of the drive itself will play a factor in whether or not the 95 installer will figure it out or not. Ultimately, you may need to disconnect the drive during the install process and reconnect it once you have 95 installed to the system's hard drive. That's just a best guess though; someone else might have a better suggestion.

Now that is a real killer, and the kind of thing worrying me - it could mean that using the cf drive in the way I hoped is impossible 🤣 as I am running the installer from the cf drive, having copied \win95 from the cd onto it.

I have another cf drive to try but if all else fails I might just go back to using an old hard drive. I think I have a 10gb spare.

ratfink wrote:

As I have a 95 cd/coa going spare but I don't have wfw3.11 [I don't often see wfw3.11 on ebay either], I thought I'd just use that. Mind you, today I don't see any isa ethernet rj45 cards on ebay uk either 🤣

Tip - ebay search: dos windows disks
WFWG pops up nearly every week on ebay.co.uk. Expect to pay about £12. It nearly always comes with DOS 6.22. 😀

I remember about 1,5 year ago, I had been given an old AT case that had a 486dx/33 board inside with 8mb ram and a 130mb seagate hd. It had the greek version of windows 95 installed, and it was really disappointing... It took ages to load, and was really slow. I think my 386 is faster than that. The amount of RAM was very important those days. I remember a test performed by a greek magazine, that measured a 386/40 having 4mb in the beggining and later 16mb. They did the same thing using a 486dx2/66. Under windows 3.11(it was around 1994 if I remember well) the 386 with 16mb was a lot faster than the 486 with 4mb. And I remember also my own experience when I used windows 95. I had a pentium 100 with 8mb ram. It was usable, and I thought it wasn't that bad, but after a couple of years I purchased a 32mb dimm to add, and then with 40mb ram it was really a lot faster.

Markk wrote:

I remember about 1,5 year ago, I had been given an old AT case that had a 486dx/33 board inside with 8mb ram and a 130mb seagate hd. It had the greek version of windows 95 installed, and it was really disappointing... It took ages to load, and was really slow. I think my 386 is faster than that. The amount of RAM was very important those days. I remember a test performed by a greek magazine, that measured a 386/40 having 4mb in the beggining and later 16mb. They did the same thing using a 486dx2/66. Under windows 3.11(it was around 1994 if I remember well) the 386 with 16mb was a lot faster than the 486 with 4mb. And I remember also my own experience when I used windows 95. I had a pentium 100 with 8mb ram. It was usable, and I thought it wasn't that bad, but after a couple of years I purchased a 32mb dimm to add, and then with 40mb ram it was really a lot faster.

I think you meant to say a SIMM instead of a DIMM 😉
A DIMM is basically 2 SIMMs stuck on the same little PCB back to back.

retro games 100 wrote:

ratfink wrote:

As I have a 95 cd/coa going spare but I don't have wfw3.11 [I don't often see wfw3.11 on ebay either], I thought I'd just use that. Mind you, today I don't see any isa ethernet rj45 cards on ebay uk either 🤣

Tip - ebay search: dos windows disks
WFWG pops up nearly every week on ebay.co.uk. Expect to pay about £12. It nearly always comes with DOS 6.22. 😀

Now that's a good hint, never knew that. I did know that NT Server comes with Windows 95 actually and another version of NT comes with Win3x

NT never came with any other OS... it may LOOK like 95 or 3.1 but it's NOT either one of them

the Win3.x/DOS 6.x were special OEM combos that were never sold retail

Tetrium wrote:

I think you meant to say a SIMM instead of a DIMM 😉
A DIMM is basically 2 SIMMs stuck on the same little PCB back to back.

Nope, I mean dimm! I had a Soyo 5va2 which has 4 simm sockets and 1 dimm socket. I had 2x4mb edo simms and after a couple of years I bought a dimm, whose price at that time had dropped a lot, without being sure that it would work, and in the end it did. I remember a way to see if windows was running fast enough, was to open the control panel. When you had enough memory it opened almost instantly, as opposed to the 8mb ram configuration, where it loaded for some seconds.... 😀

Markk wrote:

Tetrium wrote:

I think you meant to say a SIMM instead of a DIMM 😉
A DIMM is basically 2 SIMMs stuck on the same little PCB back to back.

Nope, I mean dimm! I had a Soyo 5va2 which has 4 simm sockets and 1 dimm socket. I had 2x4mb edo simms and after a couple of years I bought a dimm, whose price at that time had dropped a lot, without being sure that it would work, and in the end it did. I remember a way to see if windows was running fast enough, was to open the control panel. When you had enough memory it opened almost instantly, as opposed to the 8mb ram configuration, where it loaded for some seconds.... 😀

Lol sorry, I assumed as you were mentioning a 486 DX2 😁

On another note, interesting to see that board works with both SIMMs and DIMMs as "supposedly" those 2 can't be mixed (even though a friend of mine had years ago done that exact thing with his old Pentium rig 😁).

I think you were able to use just one of the two simm banks when you installed a dimm. Nowadays I have two boards of that exact model (5va2), and it seems that it's very hard to find a compatible dimm. I've got only 4-5 that it would recognize, and all of them are 32mb... It just won't work with anything larger....

Markk wrote:

I think you were able to use just one of the two simm banks when you installed a dimm. Nowadays I have two boards of that exact model (5va2), and it seems that it's very hard to find a compatible dimm. I've got only 4-5 that it would recognize, and all of them are 32mb... It just won't work with anything larger....

I did some searching on the web. Apparently your soyo board is a VX board, which only work correctly with the oldest density SDRAM.
Even if a 64MB module would work in your board, it will probably only see 16MB of it.

dirkmirk is a user here and has successfully run Win 95 on his 386DX40, could try asking him. I believe he has 64MB of RAM though.

TheMAN wrote:

NT never came with any other OS... it may LOOK like 95 or 3.1 but it's NOT either one of them

the Win3.x/DOS 6.x were special OEM combos that were never sold retail

I checked my NT 4.0 Server disk and this is what I found.
On the disk theres a directory with the following files (I copied the dir to my desktop and made a quick dir > dirnt95.txt):

10-01-1997 14:00 496 DELTEMP.COM
14-06-2011 03:07 0 dirnt95.txt
10-01-1997 14:00 72.774 DOSSETUP.BIN
10-01-1997 14:00 46.656 EXTRACT.EXE
14-06-2011 03:06 47 ffdirntdisk.bat
10-01-1997 14:00 8.228 LEESMIJ.TXT
10-01-1997 14:00 443.712 MINI.CAB
10-01-1997 14:00 1.063.424 PRECOPY1.CAB
10-01-1997 14:00 747.687 PRECOPY2.CAB
10-01-1997 14:00 920 SAVE32.COM
10-01-1997 14:00 137.067 SCANDISK.EXE
10-01-1997 14:00 995 SCANDISK.PIF
10-01-1997 14:00 4.742 SCANPROG.EXE
10-01-1997 14:00 5.184 SETUP.EXE
10-01-1997 14:00 39.423 SETUP.TXT
10-01-1997 14:00 45.145 SMARTDRV.EXE
10-01-1997 14:00 1.472 SUHELPER.BIN
10-01-1997 14:00 537 WB16OFF.EXE
10-01-1997 14:00 1.284.096 WIN95_02.CAB
10-01-1997 14:00 2.048.000 WIN95_03.CAB
10-01-1997 14:00 2.048.000 WIN95_04.CAB
10-01-1997 14:00 2.048.000 WIN95_05.CAB
10-01-1997 14:00 2.048.000 WIN95_06.CAB
10-01-1997 14:00 2.048.000 WIN95_07.CAB
10-01-1997 14:00 2.048.000 WIN95_08.CAB
10-01-1997 14:00 2.048.000 WIN95_09.CAB
10-01-1997 14:00 2.048.000 WIN95_10.CAB
10-01-1997 14:00 2.048.000 WIN95_11.CAB
10-01-1997 14:00 2.048.000 WIN95_12.CAB
10-01-1997 14:00 2.048.000 WIN95_13.CAB
10-01-1997 14:00 2.048.000 WIN95_14.CAB
10-01-1997 14:00 2.048.000 WIN95_15.CAB
10-01-1997 14:00 2.048.000 WIN95_16.CAB
10-01-1997 14:00 1.621.463 WIN95_17.CAB
10-01-1997 14:00 160.496 WINSETUP.BIN
10-01-1997 14:00 14.144 XMSMMGR.EXE

If this isn't a full copy of 95...then what am I looking at here??

😀

NT Server used to come with an assortment of clients, including WFWG on NT 3.5x, Windows 95 on NT 4. NT workstation did not though. There's the confusion, I think.

The version of Windows 95 on the NT4 Server disk is essentially a retail upgrade copy, I wouldn't bother with it when OSR2 or above can be gotten pretty easily.

retro games 100 wrote:

ratfink wrote:

As I have a 95 cd/coa going spare but I don't have wfw3.11 [I don't often see wfw3.11 on ebay either], I thought I'd just use that. Mind you, today I don't see any isa ethernet rj45 cards on ebay uk either 🤣

Tip - ebay search: dos windows disks
WFWG pops up nearly every week on ebay.co.uk. Expect to pay about £12. It nearly always comes with DOS 6.22. 😀

Thanks, yes I see there's more around than I thought. Must have been a bad time when I looked before. Hopefully I will soon be getting 16mb ram, a 3c509 and a copy of wfwg3.11/dos6.22.