Recently at work a co-worker mentioned Windows 95. This co-worker was born in the early 2000s and never experienced the 90s. They like Retro things, like this keyboard they ordered online that looks like an old typewriter. I told them I had a few old CRT monitors at home and asked if they would want one. They got excited, so that night I went home and tested out the monitors I had. 2 Dell monitors that came with Dimension 2400s were my first attempt.
The monitors had been sitting under our carport (if you don’t know what that is, it’s like a garage without a garage door basically). They had gotten dusty and at a time face planted on concrete! I took one apart to clean out the dust, washed off the plastic casing, powered it on and it was a fuzz ball! 😧 I scrapped that one and tried the next, cleaned it up the same, powered it on, and while it did come on, it had the worse display of markings from being face down on concrete. It also had a few crackly spark sounds coming from it while it was running.
I felt that all was lost, I had told my co-worker that I could give them an old CRT monitor. Then I remembered the old Compaq monitor that was given to me, and AND! it’s tower WITH!!! keyboard, mouse, and speakers. An entire Compaq Presario 5300 US! I had no idea if it worked, but thought this would be better for them to live the Retro (our nostalgia). I packed it up in my car to take it to them the next time we worked together. That day, I wanted to test it, so on my break I brought the computer into the workplace. I plugged everything in and started it right up. No hard drive was in it… I knew I couldn’t just give them this computer with no hard drive. I told them I’d take it home and get it running, I had to!
First step was installing a new CMOS 2032 battery so BIOS could be brought back from Alzheimer’s mode. Finding a hard drive in my junk pile of old computer stuff from 30+ years was difficult. I ended up robbing one out of another old computer I had that I was experimenting with Windows 7 on, a nice 40GB drive. I read that the Compaq originally came with Windows XP, so I thought, sure. Well, finding out that the cd-rom drive was faulty, and the floppy disk drive too. A can of air fixed the floppy drive! Woe is this PC. After 7 cd-rom attempts later, I finally found one that worked, and so I began! It had been a long long time since I had installed XP and I forgot how long it took! My Gawd we have it so much better these days! 39 minutes, it’s always 39 minutes! Even after 39 minutes, it’s still 10 more minutes! After I got it installed, my dumb self remembered, Windows 95….I should have installed Windows 95.
I remembered years ago it was possible to install multiple OS’s onto a hard drive, most of the time it was easy, but for me it was always hard. I’m a backwards, frontwards, leftwards, rightwards, upwards, downwards, and multi-dimensional-wards thinker. Surely I could install Windows 95 after having installed Windows XP. I knew it could happen, I remember doing it once before with Windows 98 and Windows 2000 on a PC. I decided to take on a little helper known as Google Gemini, to ask it it’s opinion. It flat out told me it would be best to wipe the drive and install Windows 95 first. I told it, nah I could do this! It said that it was possible but not a practical way to do it correctly. I attempted it anyway with shrinking partitions, adjusting things here and there. I kept failing and failing, knowing I could do this. Google Gemini kept telling me to just wipe the drive every time I’d suggest something I was going to try. I finally gave up and wiped it, ONLY to find out the reason it didn’t work to begin with! My dumb ass forgot all about the different versions of Windows 95, 95a and 95b! Gawd it had been so long! I was trying to use a Windows 95a floppy to install a Windows 95b OS, or was it the other way around? Ugh, I can’t remember right now… Needless to say instead of saying things needlessly, I eventually got it installed. Then came Windows XP…..again….
I had given Windows 95 4GB of disk space to live on, and out of a 40GB drive, that was plenty. It would leave enough room for Windows XP for sure. 39 minutes + 10 minutes +some more minutes later….. TADA Dual Boot Windows XP and Windows 95! The rest is easy right? RIGHT?????
Drivers can sometimes be a pain in the ass. Especially when you need them for Windows 95 and you have no idea what hardware you have. Onboard VIDEO, AUDIO, at least were found, most other stuff unknown to even Windows XP. The PCI card in the system wasn’t factory, it was random, but it was also just a basic modem, so no real need to get it working. I finally found a manual to the motherboard the Compaq came with, and was on my way to solving the drivers issue. No ethernet adapter either, couldn’t have that…What if my co-worker wanted to get on the network… Well, it’s not a good idea either these days since XP and 95 aren’t really secure for it….RIGHT? I couldn’t help it, I needed XP to at least get updated. How do you update Windows XP when the update system is gone now? Well, legacyupdate.net of course! Dangerous to have Windows XP online at all? Maybe…. But what else do you do to get it fully updated? I installed a few programs, MS Office that originally came on the Compaq.
Windows 95, drivers time! Let me tell you, this was a pain in the ass! I used XP to tell me what kind of drivers it was using so I could cross reference it with old ones that 95 could possibly have. NIGHTMARE ALLEY! Narrowing down a driver that actually worked kicked my ass! Finding audio drivers, kicked my ass. Etc.. Kicked my ass! BUT!!! I finally got all the necessary drivers working (without white dialoging/blue screening). On to installing games for Windows 95!
You can’t have Windows 95 and not have old games from Windows 3.1 as well. I mean, 3.1 basically still lives in 95 (shout out to Progman)! AND you can’t have an old OS without having the original DOOM! Well…..the DOOM 95 version at least. I could have installed the DOS one but, nah. The old copies of DOOM I had, I was surprised the floppies still worked! But I also had a CD-ROM version too. But there was a problem! The onboard audio didn’t support MIDI synthesizing. DOOM NEEDS THIS! I panicked, I didn’t do all of this to install DOOM to not have the music playing! I asked Google Gemini for advice and that little bastard is awesome! It told me about the Yamaha Synthesizer that I could install to virtually have MIDI capability. BUT! It lagged the hell out of the game with the versions I tried to install. I felt defeated… HOWEVER! Sitting in an old computer amongst the other junk was a Soundblaster 16 pci card! These things were piratically made for DOOM!
There we go, Soundblaster 16 all installed and ready… Let’s turn on the PC and head into Windows 95 to install it. It boots up, finds the card! But… it had a resource conflict with the onboard audio…. My ass knew that that’s some bullshit! I went into the bios to see where I could turn off the onboard audio. There wasn’t a place for it, well sort of, but not really. I attempted it, reboot the system, still a conflict. Booted into Windows XP, a conflict there. UGH…. I swear on other computers that I’ve installed sound cards in, you could disable the onboard audio or work around it changing up the IRQ’s and whatnot. Not this time though it seems. 😕 I eventually had to remove the card and was back to square one.
After hours of trials and failures, I finally was able to give DOOM it’s music, with no lag! I had to get the right Yamaha Synthesizer! What to do next? Well install more games obviously! What’s a fun game from the 90s? SimCity 2000, installed that guy, installed Windows Entertainment Packs 1-4 (not the best of). Installed misc software to finish up everything. I then packed the computer up into my car to take it to work. My co-worker was going to be working that day and I wanted it to be a surprise. They took it home, cleaned it up, but have yet to turn it on.
BUT something in me shifted. I felt alive again. I actually had fun getting that old computer up and running for someone who wanted to experience Windows from the 90s! It gave me that itch, that need, the urge to want to fix up other old computers I had… Perhaps to donate it to a good cause some day? I have an old Dell Dimension 4100 just sitting around, it seems to have a bad power supply. I asked Google Gemini what the odds were of the system working if I even replaced this 25+ year old PSU. It told me 95%. I asked it if I should, it virtually said “Why the hell not?” That if I found joy in repairing the Compaq, why not just do it!