• Please review our updated Terms and Rules here

Which OS should I use?

B

bettablue

Veteran Member
Joined
Feb 21, 2011
Messages
1,647
Location
Eugene, OR
I have an old Compaq computer manufactured in 1998 or 1999. It has a 233 Meg processor, 4 Gig hard drive, and 16 Megs of RAM. When I got it, my plans were to only use it for writing floppy disks for use in my IBM 5150 PC. There is the hard drive, a CD ROM, 3.5" floppy and a 5.25" DSDD 360Kb floppy drive installed. It also has a 4 port USB card installed and is currently running with DOS 6.22.

I am wondering if I should install another OS. I'm torn between Windows 3.1 or Windows 95. A friend came over last night to help me with some unrelated work, and he noticed the machine. When I asked his opinion, he mentioned that I would have more flexability if I were to install Windows 3.1 since I would still have access to DOS. Since my inentions are to only use this computer for extracting disk images and writing floppy disks, does it really matter which OS to use?

The next question here is this: What would be a good application to extract disk images with either Windows 3.1, or Win 95? I've heard a lot of people useing WinImage, but I'm not sure. Are there better, cheaper alternatives?

Which combination would you recommend?
 
Kinda depends what you're wanting to experience with the GUI. You can always boot back into legacy dos from 95 or 98 still, Win 3.x would be pretty cumbersome on that fast of hardware I would think. At least if you installed Windows 9x you could possibly explore some early Windows games that used DirectX or Direct3d although you might want to upgrade the RAM if you did 98.
 
If the CD-ROM works with a DOS driver, you can install Win 3.1 or Win 9x from the CD which will be lots faster than creating the large number of floppies needed.

More RAM would be good depending on what applications you plan on running. Panzer Commander (game designed for Pentium 133/166 and Win 95) recommends 32 MB of RAM plus a video card with 4 MB.
 
DOS lives on!! said:
Winimage and Teledisk both work with Windows 3.1. Question is wheather Windows 3.1 will support the USB card. What's the brand of it?
Click to expand...

Unfortunately, I really don't know what brand it is. I know it's only USB 1.0 and that's about it. None of the labeling is left. All I know is that it came installed in the computer when it was given to me. The card looks like some generic geriatric thing that someone just found. It does work with DOS 6.22 though. Hmm. Can I copy the driver from DOS before installing Win 3.1 or 95/98
 
Yes, I agree. Windows 98. You could always set it to dual boot, if you wanted just straight DOS for those floppy disk imaging/making programs that don't want to have a bar of Windows. Although not the subject of this article (it's actually about writing 5¼” CP/M floppy disks on a 1.2MB PC drive with Windows 98 ). It does however mention how to configure a Win 98 machine for dual booting.

Tez
 
I'm with Tezza on this... Win98 can dual-boot with pure DOS, allowing you to stay away from Win9x's "legacy DOS"... It's the way I rolled with my Pentium-era machine back in the day, and it works nicely. Make sure you've got about 64mb of RAM though, just to have some breathing room (more if your machine can go higher - as cheap as RAM is, why not?)

have fun!
 
I'm not 100% sure but another thing to consider is I don't recall Windows 95 having support for USB until version C. I don't know if I've ever seen a legit version C myself, 98 of course had native drivers for USB and 98se was much more stable than first edition of 98 but yes you'd want more RAM for a smoother ride or disable all the graphic animations, etc.
 
I've a Win95-B disc at home that has USB support on it out of the box, however IIRC, it was preliminary support as USB was in its infancy at the time. It worked well enough with most keyboards, mice, printers, etc but had some troubles with some USB NICS and cable modems (as I saw when I first hired on at the cable co I work for doing cable modem installations a decade ago). I believe that Win95-C included full USB support, similar to Win98.

That said, ISTR that a true dual-boot scenario with Win95 and DOS 6.22 couldn't occur without a 3rd party boot manager? At least that's why I went to Win98/DOS 6.22 back in the day. Either way, IMO, the performance of Win95 vs Win98 on a low-end Pentium with sufficient RAM is close enough that I'd never consider using Win95 unless I was going for "historically accurate" (or trying to match the "Windows 95" sticker on the computer's casing!)
 
Depends on whether you disable crap like Active Desktop on 98, if I recall correctly. That, and using 98lite to put back the lighter '95 Windows Explorer.
 
Maverick1978 said:
That said, ISTR that a true dual-boot scenario with Win95 and DOS 6.22 couldn't occur without a 3rd party boot manager? At least that's why I went to Win98/DOS 6.22 back in the day. Either way, IMO, the performance of Win95 vs Win98 on a low-end Pentium with sufficient RAM is close enough that I'd never consider using Win95 unless I was going for "historically accurate" (or trying to match the "Windows 95" sticker on the computer's casing!)
Click to expand...

If you upgraded from a machine that already had DOS 6.22 boot files on it, they were renamed and the Windows 95/98 F8 boot menu added a option labeled "Previous Version of MS-DOS". You could add it after the fact by editing 9x's MSDOS.SYS, but it was a PITA because 6.22's renamed IO.SYS and MSDOS.SYS needed to be on track 0 of your hard drive to boot properly from that menu. You had to SYS.COM from a MS-DOS 6.22 boot disk (backup 9x's MSDOS.SYS first!), rename the files to what the 9x boot loader looks for (I think it was changing the extension to .OLD), and then SYS.COM from a MS-DOS 7.x disk and coping your 9x backup of MSDOS.SYS to boot back to Windows 9x.
 
Thanks for all of the great responses.

I see this is turning into a much bigger issue than I first realized. No problem though. I have Win 3.1, Win 95 and Win 98 SE all on original CD. Your responses all seem to be one of which OS will support USB more than anything. I've rebuilt Win 3.1 config.sys files before, and from what I remember, it wasn't really all that difficult. And, both Win 95 and 98 are very familiar too. Each have their good and bad points.

However, it seems too, that the main purpose of this machine got lost somewhere in this thread. Remember, the only reason I got this machine is to make new floppy disks for my IBM 5150 PC using a native 360Kb DSDD 5 1/4" floppy drive. Having USB on the system would be nice, but ultimately not that important. The really important thing I need on the computer is the the ability to bring files in from my Windows 7 computer. The CD ROM will work fine for that. Believe it or not, a single CD will hold all of the 4500 plus programs I have for my IBM 5150.

Now, don't get me wrong. It really would be nice to have everything working on this old beasty, but as it stands, if it will take disk images and make floppies from them, then the computer will serve it's purpose. I'm not planning on using it as a vintage gaming machine, or even as a cheap word processor; at least not now.

It also looks like I may have to disconnect the 3.5" internal 1.44 Meg floppy drive any way for some time. The computer tries to access both floppy drives at the same time. I know the 5 1/4" drive will need to be configured as a slave, but since it doesn't have any recognizable markings on it, I will have to guess what jumpers need to be set. As near as I can tell, it seems to be a Mitsubishi, but again, there are no model numbers on it to be totally positive. It does fit the front 5 1/4" expansion bay above the CD ROM drive perfectly though. I think trial and error will be my friends on that one, along with a little time.

I think I know what I'm going to do. For now, I'll probably remove the USB card and get the floppy drive configured. I think I have some RAM to install in it too. 512 Megs will make this thing scream regardless of which OS I decide to use.

I'll post something once I get it working over the weekend.
 
I have an original Netram 233MMX system with a 16 meg Creative Banshee video card and 256 meg of SDRAM. It has a 52X CD_ROM and a burner. It runs Win98SE with the unofficial service pack 2 "roll-up". Other than the browser is slower than molasses (even with a 10/100 NIC), it works well with a USB scanner. I may elect to install a USB 2.0 card instead of the 1.1 card and a supplemental HDD controller card with a faster hard drive..
 
bettablue said:
It also looks like I may have to disconnect the 3.5" internal 1.44 Meg floppy drive any way for some time. The computer tries to access both floppy drives at the same time. I know the 5 1/4" drive will need to be configured as a slave, but since it doesn't have any recognizable markings on it, I will have to guess what jumpers need to be set.
Click to expand...
Along with setting the jumpers, have you set the correct drive types in the BIOS? A=1.44. B=360k. I've had this problem before on several different computers. Sometimes, both drives will be accessed, but the only one with a disk in it will be read from.
 
Yup, that's what I wasn't sure about either was your real purpose behind the system. So if you're really not planning on using it for current or era-appropriate stuff and it's just a man in the middle machine which ever OS you want is fine. You may want to dual boot it or just stick with 3.x (or change the win.ini to load command.com instead of win.com or whatever it was in 9x) so you don't have to reboot back into dos mode each time you want to play. That's assuming you find a 16-bit application that does what you want though. If you need 32-bit WinPE execution you'll end up wanting 98se again. However if it's just a file system then I'd probably load the lightest OS and make your boot time the quickest to get to what you want to do.

On a side note, this does bring up some possibilities you might be able to find for cheap to bypass the middle-man. Something like a Xircom parallel to ethernet card on the 5150 could allow you the option of copying a disk image to the 5150 and recreate it from the 5150 (I haven't done this so it does depend on the software being out there), or booting off an MS-DOS disk and using intersrv/interlnk and a null modem cable to mount your hard drive off a newer/older system and transfer files that way.
 
IIRC, he's looking for (or has?) an XT-IDE card for the 5150. If that's the case, then the software to make the Xircom parallel ethernet work is relatively trivial. Once the 5150's on the network, just ftp it all over using mTCP's product suite.

For a man-in-the-middle, I'd still suggest going with Win98 SE. IIRC, WinImage has a relatively late version that works well with it (I use it on a PII-300mhz which runs 98se since the day it was purchased new by my mother - works pretty well, but then again, I've maxed the ram on that board!)

If you're not going to use WinImage to write stuff (you don't have to, as I recall Dave Dunfield's program supports its formats, as does Mike Bruttman's), then any old OS should be fine. WinImage is convenient primarily for the GUI and ease-of-use.

(and solitaire while you write and read disks!)
 
I would go for Windows 95 as Windows 98 will slow it down and you should be able to get every thing working with 95 even if it means searching for a driver. the space saved with 95 over 98 will be very noticable on a 233 based compuer with a small hard drive, which you may find is limited by the computers BIOS to a small size hard drive by modern standards
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top