Tbh I would never recommend moving a Windows install from one PC to another, even if hardware is the same. The networking problems could be due to resource conflicts (ISA PnP is always fun, if that card even does PnP), but it could also be any number of other things messed up in the re-detection.

Does plain DOS networking (packet driver + MTCP) work with this card and board? If not, it's a hardware/resource issue. If so, hardware's fine and it's just your Windows that's borked.

I've never setup plain DOS networking, but Windows shared network drives work just fine. I can copy over the network. I'm only using TCP/IP, which is all I have on my 486 using the same network card. NETBUI needed for NexGen for some reason?

I do not believe this card supports PNP. I setup the IRQ and address using a bootable diskette utility supplied with the card.

I've never had issues cloning installations between IBM 5x86c, to Am5x86, to Cyrix 5x86, to MediaGXm. Same goes for systems between AMD K6-III to Cyrix MII, to PIII, to VIA C3. I think I've also done IBM 5x86c to AMD K6-III when APM and ACPI wasn't used.

It requires an incredible amount of time to re-setup all a system's software. I don't just leave my systems blank after installation. I have the mindset that they should be setup with time appropriate programs to have the feel of when the system was in use, so I avoid doing a fresh install unless it is absolutely necessary. I'm hoping for more troubleshooting this system before resorting to this last resort.

Anyone else with a NexGen system have trouble using IE 5.5?

EDIT: Removing and reinstalling all networking components, including NIC drivers, did not help. I tried reinstalling IE 5.5, but received a few illegal operation errors, though it did reinstall. After reinstallation of IE5.5, the problem continues. Removing the NIC doesn't help either. Perhaps some BIOS setting?

Could it be that firefox and IE 5.5 use instructions that do not exist on the Nx586.

canthearu wrote:

Could it be that firefox and IE 5.5 use instructions that do not exist on the Nx586.

That is what I was wondering. I get an illegal operation even when trying to run Pirch. So perhaps some file that is needed during internet use, e.g. SHLWAPI.DLL, requires some instruction missing on the NexGen? I'll try more games/programs later this evening.

I have to think the same as canthearu suggested that either the instruction doesn't exist that the applications are expecting and they have never been tested to run on this cpu.

The NX5x86 simply lacks the instruction set required, install windows 95 with ie 3.0 only.

The NX5x86 is only 100% 386 Combatible, thats why you can only use 386 kernels and software compiled for 386 on Linux.
486 Software may work or may not.

i hope i can find a NX5x86 some day for myself as play ground 😀

Isn't a 386DX the minimum requirement for Windows 95 though? Maybe something in the later revisions causes problems (OSR 2 and OSR 2.5)? Or it could be one of the updates I installed for Windows or Office. I'll also try downgrading the IE revision as you suggested.

I have a test drive I use for my 386's with Win 3.11 installed. It has IE 5 on it. I'll give that a try out. I'll also try to install NT4. The NT4 partition didn't even begin to boot.

In the end, I'll probably need to do a clean install of Win95c, and one by one, try to determine all software that is incompatible.

Windows 95 on a 386 is gonna be slowwwwwwwwwww.

I was able to run IE 5.0 in Win 3.11 on the NexGen, so I'm guessing the issue is related to some Win95-specific software incompatibilities with NexGen. Finding all the afflicted software will be a long process as some DLL's may have worked their way into the OS.

SHLWAPI.DLL has something to do with the HTML rendering engine for IE. It comes with IE. Before reinstalling Windows, why not try reverting to an older IE? Maybe you could even swap out the DLL, although I'm not sure if IE itself would run with a mismatched DLL. Considering that the error occurred at the same address both times, it might not be too hard to track down the offending instruction and patch it out as well...

I found some useful help on the CPU-World thread. There are two guys there with NexGen systems running. In short, there is a BIOS setting, which is normally recommended to disable, called "Alternate Instructions", set to enabled, which solves a lot of the problems. IDON.com, a utility from the NexGen utilities disk, also helps for some situations. Place this in your autoexec.bat file. There is also a Windows utility called WINID20.exe which will solve issues as well. IE 5.5 now works, as does Pirch32, and Xchat. Windows Explorer doesn't seem so stable though, so I might need to find a particular combination of these 3 fixes.