kasper21 wrote:

Hi guys, did anyone experience frequent freezes / crashes on Windows 95 while gaming?

All the time. Windows 98SE fixed quite a bit of that in my case.

realnc wrote:

kasper21 wrote:

Hi guys, did anyone experience frequent freezes / crashes on Windows 95 while gaming?

All the time. Windows 98SE fixed quite a bit of that in my case.

I will setup WIN98 on another machine also, this one is just for WIN95 at the moment. So it's just a faulty OS ? no way to stabilize it ?

realnc wrote:

kasper21 wrote:

Hi guys, did anyone experience frequent freezes / crashes on Windows 95 while gaming?

All the time. Windows 98SE fixed quite a bit of that in my case.

Yup. My experience was about the same. The one and only time I saw Win95 being stable was on my father's 386DX40 (Win95 RTM). 😀

Also..

kasper21 wrote:

- CPU: Pentium MMX 166mhz

If my memory serves me well, Win95 had no special support for MMX yet. Sure, it "just works" there and games can make use of MMX, but..
Windows 98(SE) was the first release to truely support MMX or was MMX-aware, at least. Both the kernal(s) and DirectX 6.1 could make use of MMX features.
If I remember correctly, DirectX 6.1 even accelerated Direct3D via MMX, so a 3D graphics card was considered unnecessary (for a short amount of time)..
Anyway, that being said, DirectX 6.x could technically also be installed on Win95.. So perhaps the difference in practice is not that much. 😉

Jo22 wrote:

Yup. My experience was about the same. The one and only time I saw Win95 being stable was on my father's 386DX40 (Win95 RTM). :) […]
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realnc wrote:

kasper21 wrote:

Hi guys, did anyone experience frequent freezes / crashes on Windows 95 while gaming?

All the time. Windows 98SE fixed quite a bit of that in my case.

Yup. My experience was about the same. The one and only time I saw Win95 being stable was on my father's 386DX40 (Win95 RTM). 😀

Also..

kasper21 wrote:

- CPU: Pentium MMX 166mhz

If my memory serves me well, Win95 had no special support for MMX yet. Sure, it "just works" there and games can make use of MMX, but..
Windows 98(SE) was the first release to truely support MMX or was MMX-aware, at least. Both the kernal(s) and DirectX 6.1 could make use of MMX features.
If I remember correctly, DirectX 6.1 even accelerated Direct3D via MMX, so a 3D graphics card was considered unnecessary (for a short amount of time)..
Anyway, that being said, DirectX 6.x could technically also be installed on Win95.. So perhaps the difference in practice is not that much. 😉

I have DirectX 8 running on it. Should I try to downgrade to 6.1 ? would it make any visible difference? I am not after stellar performance, I just want more stability, to be able to play games for hours without freezing..
I also use various old graphics software on it, they seem to do ok for now.

Why do you want to keep W95 on it? I thought W98SE is fully compatible with all W95 games.

realnc wrote:

Why do you want to keep W95 on it? I thought W98SE is fully compatible with all W95 games.

For using some older software that was intended for Win 3.1 / 95 .
Also for variety purposes and experimentation. I have multiple PCs with different operating systems each.

I was just trying Jazz Jackrabbit 2 and on Level1 i got Blue screen " DISK WRITE ERROR" - Unable to write to disk in drive C: ... is this a HDD issue or the same problematic Windows95?

kasper21 wrote:

I was just trying Jazz Jackrabbit 2 and on Level1 i got Blue screen " DISK WRITE ERROR" - Unable to write to disk in drive C: ... is this a HDD issue or the same problematic Windows95?

Do a virus check.

Caluser2000 wrote:

kasper21 wrote:

I was just trying Jazz Jackrabbit 2 and on Level1 i got Blue screen " DISK WRITE ERROR" - Unable to write to disk in drive C: ... is this a HDD issue or the same problematic Windows95?

Do a virus check.

really? viruses already? i just put the system up and running for a few days, no network connection on it and just installed ISO images of some programs.
The games we're also copied from another modern PC and no warnings on Win10, files seemed clean.
I hope that's not the case though...

also, sometimes during defrag or scandisk I get notified that the process started over because of "a new write to the hard drive" so something is writing to it from time to time resetting those processes and maybe also causing the games to freeze? would that be a possible cause? some background process?

I really hope to find a solution, if possible, otherwise how did people even game on Win95 back then? 3 out of 5 games seem to crash on me..
I remember my first Win95 PC from 24 years ago and I know the occasional Blue Screen would sometimes come up but the games ran pretty smoothly, I remember gaming for hours without any problems and with much lower specs back then (still a socket 7 though)

Make sure that your CPU fan is working and your CPU heatsink is installed straight with a tiny drop of fresh thermal paste between the CPU and the heatsink. Try MemTest86. If MemTest86 doesn't identify a RAM problem, then try a different video card. If a different video card doesn't fix the problem, then clone the hard drive and run from the clone. If the problem persists, then install Windows 98. If Windows 98 doesn't fix it, then try using a known good power supply. If you still have problems after that, then take the motherboard out and screw it to the wall of your retro computing area as art.

STX wrote:

Make sure that your CPU fan is working and your CPU heatsink is installed straight with a tiny drop of fresh thermal paste between the CPU and the heatsink. Try MemTest86. If MemTest86 doesn't identify a RAM problem, then try a different video card. If a different video card doesn't fix the problem, then clone the hard drive and run from the clone. If the problem persists, then install Windows 98. If Windows 98 doesn't fix it, then try using a known good power supply. If you still have problems after that, then take the motherboard out and screw it to the wall of your retro computing area as art.

CPU fan is working fine, gets kind of warm but it's in the normal range I guess, I thought termal paste was not a necessity for these older CPUs <200mhz, but I will check that also.
I also did try using 2 video cards, before the S3 Virge/DX, it had a Cirrus Logic 1MB, and still problematic with both...

kasper21 wrote:

...I thought termal paste was not a neccessity for these older CPUs <200mhz....

Yeah, you're right. I've been using nothing older than a Pentium III CPU for a decade, so I forgot that Pentium 1 CPUs didn't use thermal paste. 😊 You could add thermal paste for good measure though!

Every MMX cpu I've come across has had thermal paste on it.

When I was a kid, my family's PC had a 100 MHz Pentium 1 CPU. There wasn't thermal paste between its CPU and heatsink. (That system crashed regularly.)

Ok, so I put in another HDD (also a Quantum) and made a clean install on it along with all the drivers and programs. Added thermal paste also on the CPU.
Unfortunately I am still getting some errors and the USB file transfers are... terrible... It freezes the system 8 out of 10 times now...

In games, I tried a random one (Hercules) and after some time I got " A Fatal Exception 0E has occurred at 0028:xxxxx in VXD IOS(04): " ... after a lot of digging online I found something related to the SB16 audio driver.. not sure if it's the same issue but it's worth a try.. i took out the ISA sound card I had and will check and see if the games still freeze alot..

Try MemTest86+:
https://www.memtest.org/download/5.01/memtest … 5.01.floppy.zip

The only reason to install Win95 is Brian Eno's intro sound. Can't think of any other reason - but this one is quite compelling.

What I may advice is quite tedious: set up you Windows 95 to boot into it's pure DOS mode (i.e. set BOOTGUI=0 in msdos.sys) and set up autoexec and himem routines, like you would in pure MS-DOS. If your DOS games go on crashing - it is hardware problem (DMA conflicts, bad memory, PSU voltage fluctuations, or motherboard capacitors gone dry).

The other way to test Win95 - Is running it with minimum hardware. If you strip your rig to a single RAM module, videocard and Mouse/keyboard (without sound) - and it stops crashing - it means you have dead or conflicting hardware.

Or you may try Win98SE to try and replicate your issues on this bugfixed OS.