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Cheers from IgorsLab?


ragnargd

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Laughable at. :buehehe: However the "you'll keep getting windows 95 updates" bit reminds me of an old mishap that I find hard to laugh at even now.

Back at my beginnings as a Win9x user I was installing Win95 and later on 98SE quite often on the old 486 IBM ValuePoint, either due to hardware change, various viruses or whatever other reasons. At some point - I believe it was with Win95 but I'm not 100% sure anymore after 20+ years - during one of the installations I actually paid attention to the various screens advertising the "mighty features" that version had over "previous" version. Wish I hadn't. One of those screens mentioned Plug 'n play and I clearly remember it saying one could even plug in a card while Windows was running. A very unfortunate choice of words. Although I did have enough experience with hardware, and something at the back of my mind kept saying I shouldn't take that statement literally, some devil kept whispering in my ear I should try it. So when the OS installation finished I simply took my ESS1869 ISA soundcard and plugged it in with the computer on and Windows running - exactly as advertised. Needless to say the OS got screwed up and that wonderful card got instantly fried. Could never find another one like that (it had a built-in IDE controller that was crucial for adding a HDD larger than the max 528MB accepted by the BIOS considering the mobo only had one IDE channel occupied by main HDD and a CD-ROM, and it was correctly detected as Sound Blaster Pro by all of the games I was testing back then).

So yeah, the 9x team back then had quite a lot of vision but they also made mistakes, some of them with tragic consequences for poor users. I suppose whoever tested Windows 11 upgrade on a Win95 system in the picture above would not wait for any Windows 95 updates anymore... :rolleyes:

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It was an OEM setup I believe, most likely a Win95 2.0 or 2.1 - definitely not a 2.5 because it didn't have USB support.

All my HDDs - internal and external - are so packed right now that I couldn't find any spare space for a VM if I wanted to. Not even sure if the disc would still be viable either, after all that time and all installations back then.

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I find that a little more likely.

A little Googling indicates that USB 1.0 was released in Jan 1996 and Win95 was released in August 1995.

So the only thing that you could really plug into Win95 was parallel and serial port and the old ps/2 mice and keyboards.

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PS/2 "hotplug" generally depends on the BIOS, or perhaps an even lower level thing than that. Most computers did not support that, and most still dont. The OS cannot change that. while serial and parallel usually can be plugged/unplugged from a "hot" system, The "certain devices" are probably more referring to PCMCIA cards (PC Cards) and docking stations.

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Agreed.

My point was more along the lines of what peripherals could be plugged in, I wasn't referring to "hot" or "not".

But I will add this, having been around computers since the Commodore 64, I have never met anybody that thought they could pop the side of the tower and just start unplugging stuff and plugging it back in WHILE THE POWER WAS ON.

Forget about whether the OS was running or not, who pops the side off the tower and starts unplugging stuff with the power on?

For my next trick, I'm going to swap out the master cylinder for my anti-lock brakes while I am driving down the road at 100mph  :buehehe:

Edited by ArcticFoxie
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8 hours ago, UCyborg said:

It only says "You can even insert and remove certain devices while Windows 95 is running.".

Yeah, that may well be the case. However, considering not everybody is a native English speaker a "device" can be anything in one's mind - including an ISA/PCI/VESA/etc card. As mentioned above there weren't many other types of devices that could safely be plugged in/out at the time so one could easily get confused.

2 minutes ago, ArcticFoxie said:

I have never met anybody that thought they could pop the side of the tower and just start unplugging stuff and plugging it back in WHILE THE POWER WAS ON.

Well, you have now. Nice to meet you. :lol: BTW it wasn't a tower but a desktop, very easy to open: just press a button, slide the cover to the back for about 10 cm and pull it up. :D Here's a picture:

6382-KV0.JPG

As for hot plugging keyboard/mouse I remember the mouse could be a problem - as in not (re)detected - but keyboard would usually be (re)detected except for the speed setting that would be (re)set to default. There used to be a key repetition delay option in certain boards' BIOS that could be set to a lower value and it would work fine at power up or reset/reboot, but if keyboard - either AT or PS/2 - was plugged out and back in while the computer was running the value would be reset to the default high so keypress repeating became very slow.

Edited by Drugwash
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5 minutes ago, Drugwash said:

However, considering not everybody is a native English speaker a "device" can be anything in one's mind - including an ISA/PCI/VESA/etc card.

Good point.

I guess I assumed that Win95 had language options and you installed in your own language, but I really don't remember what the Win95 install looked like.

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There used to be a few variations of Win95 including a pan-european one but never one for my specific language (Romanian). Either way the installer itself would have most likely still been in English (I may be wrong on that though).
One could still set a few limited things like keyboard layout to their native language with the English version but I remember I had to copy over all fonts from the pan-european version in order to actually get the special characters in my language (şţâăî ŞŢÂĂÎ) to display properly.

Thinking about it, the wording "while Windows is running" does sound peculiar. Windows can be running only while the computer is running. The correct wording shoud've been "while/after Windows is [already] installed" or something similar but I guess they never thought someone like me could actually plug in a card. Man, was I stupid! :lol:

Edited by Drugwash
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3 hours ago, Drugwash said:

Either way the installer itself would have most likely still been in English (I may be wrong on that though).

I haven't got my hands on any other but the English and Slovenian versions, but if we base assumptions on the latter, localized versions were quite thoroughly translated, including the installer.


Regarding devices, Plug & Play means you don't have to mess with IRQ, DMA settings and such before the device is functional. Hot plugging is being able to plug/unplug it safely while computer is running and have the device normally functional. 2 different things. If it's hot-pluggable, it's probably PnP as well.

3 hours ago, Drugwash said:

Man, was I stupid! :lol:

So was I, used to be a genius at breaking computers back then, though on the software side.


BTW, to anyone, you don't want to hotplug PS/2 stuff. While today's motherboards have it more robust, you're still risking damage as it simply wasn't made for that and if you do, electricity surge will do its thing.

Edited by UCyborg
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17 hours ago, Drugwash said:

I simply took my ESS1869 ISA soundcard and plugged it in with the computer on and Windows running

I am sorry to hear that card blew up on you. We tend to remember the bad things better than the good I think. I have plugged in several PCI cards straight after power-up ( though I do not recommend it ) out of desperation to try and get get them working. It worked once but no luck after that; no damaging consequences. The pins would have to line up perfect so none made shorts or are in the wrong position. I know of one person who said that they got a motherboard going by placing in the BIOS chip after power-up.

Edited by Goodmaneuver
machine was not running
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30 minutes ago, UCyborg said:

Regarding devices, Plug & Play means you don't have to mess with IRQ, DMA settings and such before the device is functional. Hot plugging is being able to plug/unplug it safely while computer is running and have the device normally functional. 2 different things. If it's hot-pluggable, it's probably PnP as well.

One can see all this "plug" stuff can be quite confusing for someone who doesn't master English perfectly or is somewhat tired and/or distracted at the moment. Technical terms can be tricky sometimes. Well, lesson learned - the hard way. :)
 

15 minutes ago, Goodmaneuver said:

I am sorry to hear that card blew up on you. We tend to remember the bad things better than the good I think. I have plugged in several PCI cards while the machine was running ( though I do not recommend it ) out of desperation to try and get them working. It worked once but no luck after that; no damaging consequences. The pins would have to line up perfect so none made shorts or are in the wrong position.

Maybe PCI behaves differently than ISA, maybe that particular machine had some quirks, maybe it was bad luck on my side - who knows. I remember there was a weird sound, like whistling or something, for a second or two then silence. That sound card never worked again but the machine did, and I still have it stashed in a cabinet. Fired it up a couple years ago just for kicks, it was still working. I think it has another sound card, an ESS1868 I believe, but couldn't find one with an IDE controller so can't attach a secondary HDD.

24 minutes ago, Goodmaneuver said:

I know of one person who said that they got a motherboard going by placing in the BIOS chip after power-up.

That I don't know, not sure if it would work but it just may. I know I did BIOS hot swapping a couple times in order to rewrite the chips that wouldn't start other boards, but that's a slightly different story.

50 minutes ago, UCyborg said:

BTW, to anyone, you don't want to hotplug PS/2 stuff. While today's motherboards have it more robust, you're still risking damage as it simply wasn't made for that and if you do, electricity surge will do its thing.

That would be correct according to Wikipedia, however in practice I personally never had any such problems. There may be issues for the OS when replacing previously connected device with a different one, mostly regarding mice, but a keyboard should not create problems other than the slower repeat rate as mentioned above. The current drawn by either device is usually low considering a PS/2 port can only provide 275mA. Certain boards provide protection - at least theoretically - through fuses, as I noticed few times while working with hardware.

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I have to emphasize that the devices would not have been installed by the BIOS just yet when I plugged in the cards as it was straight after powering on. I had to think a bit more on what I did way back then and then correct my post. I have some ISA sound cards with IDE. From memory it was either the sound card IDE or the main board IDE but I am not 100% about that. I think I could not get both to work at the same time? Another idea is to use an IDE to SATA plug in card. It implements vs 6 in firmware so that large drives can be used on the old machines. There are 2 designs; one plugs into the main board IDE socket and the other design plugs into the SATA drive. I have talked about it here https://msfn.org/board/topic/180571-hd-ac97-audio-beyond-the-137gb128gib-barrier/?do=findComment&comment=1175057

 

34 minutes ago, Drugwash said:

I know I did BIOS hot swapping a couple times in order to rewrite the chips that wouldn't start other boards, but that's a slightly different story.

That is a brilliant idea if it worked and you had no PROM burner.

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