Windows 95/98 On Vista Laptop?
So I had a funky little idea to put Windows 95-98 on my old Vista laptop. I tried to install it from USB and it worked just fine. Setup even detected my touchpad, but when I booted up Windows for the first time, it gives me this error:
Insufficient memory to initialize Windows.
Quit one or more memory-resident programs or remove unnecessary utilities from your config.sys and autoexec.bat files and restart your computer.
Of course, my laptop having a gigabyte of ram meant problems. I tried to edit the system.ini file to limit the maximum amount of ram, but to no avail. I’m totally fine with any legacy Windows like NT, ME, or 98. I’ll research whether or not NT or ME support 1gb of ram.
Edit: When I installed 95, I selected Portable at setup. Just in case that helps
Comments
Go to rloewelectronics.com and download the "RAM Limitation Patch". You will be able to use up to 4 GB of RAM with 9x. You may also need the 48bit LBA patch if your HDD/SSD is 128 GB or bigger.
But it is unlikely that your laptop has 9x drivers for any components of significance. You may have to go to 2000 to get a usable experience.
You should provide more details about your hardware to be certain.
Also keep in mind of your laptop's hard drive size as well, as the OS may not accept really large ones (and not to mention that it doesn't have full support for NTFS either). As what win32 said earlier, Windows 2000 is probably best suited for these specs and perhaps the hardware and drivers contained too.
Like win32 said, finding drivers would be the biggest hurdle to get over. I haven't had much luck installing 98 on anything newer than a Pentium 4 (or Pentium M). 2000 runs great on Vista-era PCs, though.
One thing to look out for is that with Windows 95 & 98 (not sure about 98 SE), processor speeds matter. If your CPU is too fast you can get "Divide by 0" errors.
There's a fix for that:
https://msfn.org/board/topic/141402-windows-95-21ghz-cpu-limit-broken
98FE has an official hotfix and the problem is fixed in 98SE.