Win95C Compatibility

[Hoko]

Hi, I had 3 old computers that I use for old programs and games for Win95C, Win98se, and WinXP.  I took all the hard drives out of them and got rid of the cases and other components because they got contaminated with formaldehyde which started causing problems with air quality.  I'm thinking instead of finding a computer for each operating system, to find one computer with a cpu that would be compatible with all three systems and install a hot swap tray for the hard drives.  I think I may have found one but I have a question.  I found a Dell Dimension desktop with a pentium 4 that is 1.3 ghz.  I know it will run win98se and winxp but not sure if it will run win95c correctly.  

[rloew]

Using Hot Swap Trays for this purpose creates a lot of wear and tear and is overkill.

You can usually switch Boot Drives in the BIOS.

There are also Multi-boot methods to select the Boot Drive or to boot all three OSes from a single larger Drive.
i have written tools that can do this either way.

You will need my RAM Limitation Patch to use more than 1GiB of RAM in Windows 95 and 98.
Using a Hard Disk larger than 137GB requires another Patch for Windows 95 and 98.

[Hoko]

5 hours ago, rloew said:

Using Hot Swap Trays for this purpose creates a lot of wear and tear and is overkill.

You can usually switch Boot Drives in the BIOS.

There are also Multi-boot methods to select the Boot Drive or to boot all three OSes from a single larger Drive.
i have written tools that can do this either way.

You will need my RAM Limitation Patch to use more than 1GiB of RAM in Windows 95 and 98.
Using a Hard Disk larger than 137GB requires another Patch for Windows 95 and 98.

Thank you rloew for that info.  I have some 120 gb hard drives so I won't need that patch, just running old games and such on 95 and 98.  The only thing I was wondering about was if 1.3ghz was too fast for win95 programs.   I will be doing graphic stuff with pictures and video on xp but I think it can handle that.  Not doing anything too demanding on the 9x operating systems (yet).  I'll check and see what the boot options are in the bios.  What, in particular should I be looking for?  Also, are there enough ports to connect 3 hard drives? 

Spoiler

Edited January 16, 2017 by Hoko

[rloew]

Windows 95 requires the FIX95CPU Patches to run on fast processors. It is freely available.

The best way to answer the other questions is to search for an user manual for the specific model of Computer.

The boot options may be described as Hard Disk Priority settings.

[LoneCrusader]

You can basically use any CPU for Windows 95 so long as you're using my FIX95CPU patch. I've seen no problems up to 3.73GHz. Some very old programs may have issues but I'm not aware of any specifically and there's no way to know that without trying first.

The main issues to be aware of are device compatibility (including those built on the motherboard) and of course the amount of RAM unless you have rloew's RAM patch. As a general rule any system based on an Intel 845 or earlier chipset will have drivers available for Windows 95.