Old MS-DOS & WIN Software

[Scott Stevens]

On Tue, 13 Dec 2005 19:26:47 +0000
Jules Richardson <julesrichardsonuk at yahoo.co.uk> wrote:

> Madcrow Maxwell wrote:
> > Well, IMHO, Win95 was rather close to a real multitasking
> > system, at least for Win32 programs. Maybe not as good as
> > Linux or even NT, but it got the job done and got it done
> > significantly better than 3.x
> 
> My main problem with it was that it tended to disintegrate over
> time and  eventually would need a reinstall as functionality
> would start to break and  free disk space would mysteriously
> vanish...

There are decent mechanisms to produce frozen 'mirror image'
copies of your well-configured and working software environment,
though.  It can be as simple as installing a little 'stub' version
of Linux on the machine and using the dd command to mirror your C:
drive to an image on D:, or by using Ghost.  So you set Win95 up
just the way you like it, carefully keep program and data space
separated (not that difficult) and 'blow' the saved image back
onto your C: drive from time to time.  It's easy to create
bootable CDROM images for that purpose.

There's really no reason to ever install Windows 95 from the bare
Microsoft media more than once on any particular architecture.