Built a DOS 6.22/W3.11 pc out of a PIII 550 today...

[Shuriken]

Oh... the memories....

Windows 3.11 loads in about 2 seconds on this PIII 550. Dug out all the old DOS games, DoomCAD, etc..... trip down memory lane...

AND, ...... I can access my thumb drives through DOS also... now that's cool....

[Yahman]

I still have that software myself, it's stuffed in a box somewhere around here. I also still have an 8086 pc with the huge amount of 1 meg of memory fully loaded. It still works too.

Larry

[xswilly]

how do you access your thumb drives thru dos
you must have a dos usb driver??

[Shuriken]

how do you access your thumb drives thru dos
you must have a dos usb driver??

Yes. I scoured the internet and found one that worked for my hardware. Real simple. Only 2 config.sys files. The drivers work for USB hard drives also. You just have to remember the FAT file system limits. My thumb drive works well because I formatted it as FAT at 512mb. My other FAT32 2gb thumb drive obviously won't work.

http://www.microsoft.com/technet/pro....mspx?mfr=true

[pinkelephant]

last summer I had a floppy disk bon-fire fueled by a trash can full of pre-windows 95 books and an overflowing can of floppys that wound up being too heavy to move. (and some of the floppys were the actually from when floppys were still floppy). I keep two 500mhz, win 98 systems around for doom and a flying game I can't recall the name of right now. oh yeah. Terminal Velocity. That's the only memory trip I care to take.
I made a DOOM CD with a batch file that can start 200 levels of doom with 44 variables (skill level, respawn ect..) per level. took me so long to burn out on doom, when I finally looked up, I was divorced. but that is another story for another day. (as my brother had fun telling me. nobody ever marries a second redhead. he rides a beamer now. He put 6100 miles on his new bike in the first six weeks http://ziggyland.com ).

woops, see how those of us that are old enough to feel comfortable messing around in FDISK can wander a off-subject a little. (say that sentence three times fast, I had to fix it 3 times slow.)

I better quit while I'm behind.
beer and keyboards. just say ....
nevermind.

[Ivan]

The good news is you can download Daggerfall for free from the elder scrolls website. I still think Daggerfall was better than Morrowind or Oblivion. Also, I have Xcom somewhere if you want it. Oh yeah, Privateer too. I lost my copy of duke nukem, the original side scroller. I think it took off with my copy of FS3.

[Silent]

I've been running windows 3.1 on my CNC server at work for over 15 years now. Same software, and the same computer for over 15 years too

[mn2346]

I have a 486 @ 55MHz and 16MB of memory serving as firewall right next to me...
and two spares on the shelf when this goes bust. This is running from floppy and customised Linux system.

Couple of alternatives to DOS
Freedos
http://www.freedos.org/
is a MS-DOS compatible system where most of the old SW should be able to be installed.

ReactOS
http://www.reactos.org/en/index.html
Aim is to make a roughly Windows XP level system with MS-Windows compatibility, very much Beta/Alpha at this point...

[Crazcnuk]

My laptop is a PIII but it's running Windows XP, or Windows ME ( Ihave 2 hard drives, each fully loaded and set up for the different OS). I use it monthly for various things.

In my line of work we still use floppy drives, go figure.

For online gaming, if you can use it with your particular game, Windows '95 is supposed to be really fast, as it doesn't have anywhere near the overhead of XP or Vista.

For anyone who cares, I think you can still download Windows7 RC-1 and try it out for free. I have it running on several machines.