Windows 95 and Fast CPUs

I like running old OSes on hardware that came out several years later,
for the fun of it and the speed they reach, but it can be a real
challenge.

Some people have had trouble installing Windows 95 when the CPU is
faster than 300MHz. When the installation reboots for the first time
after copying files, it hangs with "Windows protection error". There
are patches for OSR2, 2.1 and 2.5 but none are mentioned for Windows
95 retail or Windows 95a.

However, this worked for me: when the installation reboots, I have a
boot diskette in the floppy drive, so it boots to it. On the diskette
I have the two files ESDI_506.PDR and SCSIPORT.PDR coming from a self
extracting patch, called K6UPD95A.EXE. I copy those to \Windows\System
\Iosubsys, overwriting the ones there, then reboot into the Windows
installation and it proceeds without problems.

That self extracting file seems to be getting rare on the Web, I found
it at

http://www.62nds.co.nz/software/

Someone might want to store it somewhere else.

It's meant for Windows 95a, with an AMD CPU 350MHz or faster but it
worked for me, installing Windows 95 retail on a machine with a
Pentium 4, 2.0GHz.

I understand that another limitation comes up with CPUs faster than
2.0 GHz, unfortunately I haven't found a way around that one, there is
a patch for Windows 98, also affected by this, but it won't work with
Windows 95.

Interestingly, Windows 3.x doesn't have such limitations.

Claude

wrote in message

> I like running old OSes on hardware that came out several years later,
> for the fun of it and the speed they reach, but it can be a real
> challenge.
>
> Some people have had trouble installing Windows 95 when the CPU is
> faster than 300MHz. When the installation reboots for the first time
> after copying files, it hangs with "Windows protection error". There
> are patches for OSR2, 2.1 and 2.5 but none are mentioned for Windows
> 95 retail or Windows 95a.
>
> However, this worked for me: when the installation reboots, I have a
> boot diskette in the floppy drive, so it boots to it. On the diskette
> I have the two files ESDI_506.PDR and SCSIPORT.PDR coming from a self
> extracting patch, called K6UPD95A.EXE. I copy those to \Windows\System
> \Iosubsys, overwriting the ones there, then reboot into the Windows
> installation and it proceeds without problems.
>
> That self extracting file seems to be getting rare on the Web, I found
> it at
>
> http://www.62nds.co.nz/software/
>
> Someone might want to store it somewhere else.
>
> It's meant for Windows 95a, with an AMD CPU 350MHz or faster but it
> worked for me, installing Windows 95 retail on a machine with a
> Pentium 4, 2.0GHz.
>
> I understand that another limitation comes up with CPUs faster than
> 2.0 GHz, unfortunately I haven't found a way around that one, there is
> a patch for Windows 98, also affected by this, but it won't work with
> Windows 95.
>
> Interestingly, Windows 3.x doesn't have such limitations.
>
> Claude



Yes I have used the patch to get win95 working on a faster CPU...
the only confusing thing is that the patch needs to run from Windows
so unless you can get to safe mode you need to know the "secret"
of using the command line switch to manually extract the files.


BTW, I've found win95 will work just fine in a virtual machine