Have you got an old Pentium 90 which was so slow running Windows 95 that you just had to buy yourself a new PC?
Alternatively do you know how cheap these old machines go for?
Either way such a machine will run Windows 3.1 in the way we always dreamed it should but of course it never did. I have an old DELL Optiplex XL 590 (Pentium 90). It has 24 Mb of RAM and runs DOS 6.22 and Windows 3.11 . I cannot remember the last time I had a GPF error, I have never had to reload the OS. A re-boot takes much less time. Of course with such old equipment, hardware failure is more likely. Especially if it was bought second hand. However the base units can be bought so cheap that they are virtually disposable. Disaster may strike and the machine may appear completely dead or you get the "Keyboard failure error. Press any key to continue." (Think about that one). Just swap the hard drive into another base unit together with any cards and top-up the RAM as you will now have more. You'll be up and running again in very little time.
While you have your PC in pieces, temporarily install your hard drive as secondary master on your newer Windows 9x/ME/2000/XP system. You may have to disconnect the CD-ROM drive for this. Then copy all the files across and burn them to a CD. Armed with this and a Windows 98 start-up disk, you could restore your system if something happened to the hard drive in the future. With your replacement base unit, you will, after all, now have a spare hard drive.
Do you remember waiting for MS Works 3.0 to start? Did you drum your fingers and say to yourself "Come on, come on." a few times when you were in a hurry? Well my old DELL opens it in about 2 seconds. You'll be pleased to know that the software works just as well as it ever did.
More to the point many older programs will either run very badly in a 32 bit environment or not at all. OK some of them can be tweaked into behaving but many cannot. They may even mess up your Windows 9x/ME/2000/XP system. So it makes sense to run then in the OS that they were designed to run in.
There are many cover disks and "bargain basement" programs going for a fraction of what they originally cost. The instructions may state that they can be run in Windows 3.1 or 95 (And therefore possibly but not necessarily in 98, ME, 2000 or XP). It will probably run better under 3.1 and not mess up your newer system if it does so.
8086 to 286
A friend of mine had an Amstrad
8086. Half a MB of RAM and a 10 MB HDD.
I upgraded it to run on DOS 6.2 and deleted all the DOS files that it did not
need. Especially those that are only needed for WINDOWS which of course would
not be required.
Some of these older machines had floppy drives that would
only recognize a 720 KB disk. If this is the case then DOS 5.0 came on 720's and
can be downloaded from one of my links. This is in fact not a bad place to start
(see DOSSHELL). Then immediately upgrade to DOS 6.0, 6.2 or 6.22 but not 6.21
which has no disk compression.
Delete the Old DOS by running DELOLDOS.EXE. Then delete
this file.
Run MEMMAKER.EXE
Then delete from the DOS Directory:-
EGA.SYS (Unless your monitor is EGA.)
CHKDSK.EXE (SCANDISK is better.)
CHKSTATE.SYS
DEBUG.EXE
DOSSWAP.EXE
HIMEM.SYS (Only 386's and above can
use higher memory.)
INTERLNK.EXE (Unless you want to
connect two PCs to each other to swap files.)
INTERSVR.EXE (As above.)
KEYBOARD.SYS
MEMMAKER.EXE (You should not need it
again once it has been run)
MEMMAKER.HLP
MEMMAKER.INF
MONOUMB.386
MSCDEX.EXE (Unless you have a CD
drive.)
MWAV.EXE (Anti-Virus. So old as to be
useless.)
MWAV.HLP
MWAV*.*
MW*.*
NETWORKS.TXT
NLSFUNC.EXE
POWER.EXE
RAMDRIVE.SYS
VFINTD.386
OK, now that the number of files has been trimmed run a disk compression
utility.
DBLSPACE (6.0 to 6.2) or DRVSPACE (6.22). It will not in spite of the name double the amount of space on your drive but it is still worth having if the the drive is small. STACKER 3 a rival product was said to be better but I have no experience of it. It was because of alleged copyright infringement that MS had to withdraw 6.2 and issue 6.21. This was just the same except that Doublespace was missing. 6.22 introduced Drivespace which looks and acts in exactly the same way but is of course incompatible. No doubt the code now left nothing for Stacker to grumble about.
If you decide on HDD compression, you can also Double/Drivespace a floppy but remember that it cannot compress already compressed files such a zips.
