And that's another thing, have you noticed that in films and on TV computers never crash at random? The daft things are always falling over, especially when you install new software.

Of course there is a way to ensure that installing new software does not cause your machine to sulk. Install old software. :-)

Now you may think I'm joking, but in fact that is an old trick that I first learned 14 years ago when I worked on mainframes. The idea is that you never install the latest version of anything, be it an operating system, or a word processor, or a hardware upgrade. You always run two versions behind. That way someone else found the bugs and the problems, and the obscure set of circumstances that caused the silly thing to fall over.

I still follow that philosophy today as far as I can. Which explains why I have only just installed Windows 95 on my machine.

I first came across Windows 95 when it was still in Beta testing. I was asked to evaluated it for a company to see if they should upgrade their PCs. I got hold of a 486 PC, which in those days was not a bad machine, and installed Windows 95. It promptly decided that the PC had only one hard disk and that when I told it otherwise I was lying. The trouble was the first hard disk was only 80 Mb which was enough for Windows 95 but not enough for any applications as well. Still it was enough to give me a feel for Windows 95 and a rough idea of what it would do.

A few weeks later I was able to swap the PC for a newer one, with one, much larger hard disk. Great I thought, now I can really test Windows 95.

Wrong!

This time it refused to have anything to do with the diskette drive. Now I must admit that the diskette drive was a bit flaky, but at least under Dos 6/Windows 3.11 it would work most of the time. Under Windows 95, forget it.

Eventually I got a third machine and this time Windows 95 actually worked :-)

I wrote my report and, as I expect you have already guessed, recommended staying with Dos 6/Windows 3.11 for the time being. To be honest there were a lot of reasons for that recommendation, not just technical ones.

The a few months ago the company decided to review the situation and again I was asked to provide the technical evaluation of Windows 95, along with various other 32 bit operating systems. This was rather fortunate since I was considering installing Windows 95 on my own machine.

This time the review machine was a nice Compaq 586 with a 500 Mb hard disk and 16 Mb of Ram. Not exactly state of the art but a nice machine none the less. I got hold of the latest version of Windows 95 and installed it.

I started the setup program from the CD and it quickly found that I already had Windows 3.11 on the machine. I was recommended to run the setup program from Windows rather than from Dos so I duly stooped the setup program and started Windows 3.11.

I then started the Set program from File/Run. It refused to run because Scan Disk had found a problem. "Strange" I thought "It didn't find anything a few minutes ago." Any way the recommended procedure was to stop windows and run scan disk to fix the problems. I did this, only to be told by Scan Disk that there were no problems. Ho Hum, back to windows and the Setup program. "Sorry ScanDisk says there is a problem with your hard disk."

No matter what I did, the setup program refused to run from Windows 3.11 because Scan Disk reported a problem. In the end I ran the setup program from Dos and just ignored it when it suggested I ran it from Windows.

This time it installed without problems. The hard disk was there. The diskette drive was there. The keyboard and mouse were all there. All my windows programs and groups were there. Unfortunately, the video driver was not :-(

Now this was not to bad since the standard VGA driver did work. Mind you each time I started Windows 95 it insisted that I had installed new hardware and insisted on detecting it, and getting it wrong. "Never mind," I thought "just login to the network, start Netscape, and get the latest drivers from Compaq's web site."

Guess what?

...that's right, I couldn't login to the network.

I was connecting to a Novell 4 network so the Microsoft network client should have allowed me to connect with out any problems, it always had before. I could not work out why it wouldn't this time but, since we were going to be using the Novell client, I did not try very hard. The trouble was that although I had downloaded the Novell client from the web before starting it was stored on the network.

"OK find another machine and copy the client on to diskettes and then install it on the Windows 95 machine."

Yep, that's exactly what I did.

After that I had to get TCP/IP going, which was fun. I was then able to start up Netscape and connect to Compaq's site get the latest graphics drivers and install them.

At last Windows 95 was up and running.

All in all the whole process was relatively painless. My biggest problem was not having the latest versions of all the necessary drivers all ready before starting, and, believe it or not, that was actually deliberate. I was interested in just how easy it would be for someone unprepared to install Windows 95, so I just took the CD out of the box and ran set up.

Armed with that experience I was now ready to try installing Windows 95 on my home machine. This would be slightly more tricky since I would not have access to a second machine to down load stuff and if I got it wrong my kids would kill me. :-)

The first thing I did, therefore was to document all the bits and pieces in my PC. I was particularly interested in things which required a driver, like the SCSI card, the graphics card and the CD Rom. Armed with that information I downloaded the latest drivers for all the devices.

The next thing was a complete back up. Then I back up all the data. And then I copied the files I needed to boot up the system, including the CD Rom and SCSI drivers to drive H: the first SCSI hard disk.

The third thing was to install my new hard disk. Those of you who read the last issue will remember that my drive C: had failed and as a temporary measure I had removed it promoted by second disk to C: and installed a SCSI hard disk. I now had a nice new 2.7 Gb hard disk to install Windows 95 on to. Installing the new hard disk was simple since it was to be the master. I just needed to set the second disk back to being a slave and then connect the cables to the new hard disk. I then booted up with a clean copy of Dos 6 and ran Fdisk to partition the new disk. I've talked about this before so I wont go into it now, except to say that I partitioned the new disk in to three. The last step was to format the new partitions so I duly formatted drive c: with the /s parameter to bung the system on it, and drives d: and e: with out the /s parameter.

Finally I put the SCSI drivers on the new drive C:, rebooted and copied the CD Rom driver and all the other files needed to start the system onto the new drive C:.

I was now ready to install Windows 95.

Or so I thought. Unfortunately I had made a rather silly mistake when installing the new hard disk. If you want to see if you can spot the mistake, it is mentioned above. If you can't be bothered then read on.

Since I had some programs that required Dos I decided to install Dos 6 before putting Windows 95 on. I popped the diskette in the drive and ran the set up program. It promptly stopped cos one of the partitions on my hard disk was not formatted. I checked drives C:, D: and E:, and they were all formatted.

"Strange," I thought. The next step was to run a diagnostic tool that was on my old drive c: and would now be drive F:. So I changed to drive F: and was told that it was an invalid media type. This message can be caused by putting a 1.4 Mb diskette in a 720 Kb diskette drive, not a likely cause here. Another possible reason is that the boot sector is corrupted. So out with Norton's and have a look. Nothing. The partition was not formatted.

At this point I realised what I had done. Cursed very loudly and made a cup of coffee.

I've mention it before but in the early days Dos was limited to 32 Mb hard disks. In order to overcome this you could partition hard disks in to two, the Primary partition and the Secondary. Secondary partitions can be further sub-divided into additional partitions. Primary partitions are always accessed first. So if you have a single hard disk the Primary Partition will always be drive C:. The first secondary partition will be D:, the next E: and so on.

But, if you have two disks the Primary Partition on the master drive will be C:. The Primary Partition on the slave drive will be D:. The first secondary partition on the master will be drive E:, the second will be F: and so on. The secondary partitions on the slave drive will come after the ones on the master drive.

So I had managed to format my old drive C:, which was now drive D: and not drive F: as I had expected. :-(

Thank goodness I had taken backups.

The simplest solution was to format drive F: and restore the new D: from backup.

I then installed Dos 6 with out problems.

Then came the moment of truth. Would Windows 95 install without problems.

Yes.

It went in and even found my old windows installation on drive I: and offered to install into the same directory. I declined since I intend to re-install all the applications anyway.

So, was it worth it?

Well, to be honest the answer has to be both yes and no. For me Windows 95 does not offer anything that Dos 6 did not, and in some cases Dos 6 did it better. But a lot of new software, especially games, is for Windows 95 only, so from that point of view upgrading to Windows 95 is not only worth it but necessary. The thing is that by waiting until now to install it I have, I hope, managed to avoid all the problems. But I'll let you know if that is in fact the case.

Dave Wadler for Game Over!