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Help with old compaq

If you can find either, Win95 B &C (2.1/2.5) were far less problematic than the originals (95/95A).

I think thats what cd image I have is osr2.5. If not I'll find an image of it online once I get all the parts lined up. Then decide what upgrades to do. Def putting a 4mb video card and spund card. Maybe a ram upgrade to 32mb. But since everything works out pf the case (even played arena and daggerfall to test it) upgrading not high on the list.
 
Yes that is true. Plus you get support for bigger drives, and you get FAT32. No meaningful USB though, not until Windows 2000.

Well...late win95 had usb but few computers had it except for specially built machines, usb was found on win98 pc's but usually for plug and play controllers and such, winME and 2k was when portable storage was becoming a thing. But this will be a win95 machine for light use/light gaming, as a between phase from dos to 98 era. So usb not a huge necessity on it and if I do need a USB port I thinks theres mods for it
 
I never really had stability issues with Windows 95 as long as I kept to the drivers originally supplied with it - basically, any hardware older than the OS itself. As soon as non-trivial vendor drivers (or bad software) came into play, stability suffered. This also seems to be the sentiment echoed in the oldnewthing blogs (which I can recommend, just on general principle) by Raymond Chen.

Looking at the Compaq, I'd avoid the original Windows 95, but OSR2/OSR2.5 should work fine. If you can get the memory to 32 MB or more, Windows 98SE is a good option as well, depending on what you want to do with it. On my P133 machine (socket 5, no USB), I ran Windows 95b for years because it was faster than Windows 98SE - but I did have the IE4 shell upgrade and IE5 installed, so most Win98-requiring software would work fine.

On a 486-class machine, I'd recommend the original Windows 95 with IE5 (but without the shell upgrade). It is faster, requires less disk space and allows running Windows 3.1 in DOS mode without dual boot.
 
If you do go with Win98SE then search for the unofficial Win98SE service pack! It was compiled with all the MS 98SE fixes that were not automatically installed plus some WinME updates that also work win 98SE.
 
If you do go with Win98SE then search for the unofficial Win98SE service pack! It was compiled with all the MS 98SE fixes that were not automatically installed plus some WinME updates that also work win 98SE.

Oh i know. Its awesome. I have a 98se pc already with the unoffical pack already. So much bwtter than even se used to be. But this compaq will be a win95 pc. Not rrally useful since I finsihed the win98 but now at least can say i have a pc with most of ms operating systems
 
Right, Compaqs of this era did not have a BIOS setup program in ROM like normal clones. Instead they ran a software based BIOS setup program from a hidden partition on the hard drive. This partition had to be set up and installed prior to the installation of the OS. An OS could run without this partition, but then it would be difficult or impossible to change the machine's settings. This made upgrading hard drives and deploying standardized images an extra headache.

Never made any sense why they chose to do it like that.
I also have the Compaq Prolinea 5100e. For some odd reason I can't get to the BIOS partition. I tried pressing F10 or F1, nothing. However I run PCDos2000 and Windows 3.11. I installed a second floppy drive, a 5.25" one. I had a lot of floppies and 8 of them I could still use, all 360K though the drive can format HD top 1.2 MBytes. I really would like to get hold of those disks where I can setup that BIOS again. I don't mind if I have to re-install DOS, PC or MS and Windows 3.11. Once that it done I would love to install Windows 95 again. I had been successful one with windows 98SE. The CD-Rom is attached to my printer port. I found a website with all the information needed to set up the Compaq Prolinea 5100e: https://drivers.eu/PC/Compaq/ProLinea E 5100e
 
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Welcome to the forum, @Robert Laurens Kleijn !

Often, the reason that you can’t get into the BIOS is that the small partition that Compaq stores that information in, on the hard drive, is missing. You can re-create it using The diagnostics disks for the machine, which can be found here:

ftp://ftp.hp.com/pub/softpaq/sp1501-2000/sp1699.txt
ftp://ftp.hp.com/pub/softpaq/sp1501-2000/sp1699.exe

You’ll need DOS, of some form, and a floppy drive, as the executable will write some floppy disks, when run. I attached the files here, for your convenience.

- Alex
 

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  • sp1699.zip
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Excellent. Make sure that you run the executable that is in that zip file, on the Thinkcentre. It will create a couple of floppy disks that you can use to boot the Compaq from.

- Alex
 
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