Will drivers for other OSes work on 95/98?

ShadowProphet

I need drivers on my Toshiba Satellite for Windows 95/98 (I will be using this laptop as experimental, installing the two a lot), but on the support page for my model, the 1800-S256, the drivers listed for those OSes are only BIOS revisions. There are drivers for other OSes, like 2000, XP, and 98 Second Edition. Can I use the drivers for any of these on 95/98?

KCompRoom2000

You might be able to use Windows 98 Second Edition drivers on Windows 98 First Edition, But the chances for 98 drivers working on 95 are lower than that, You can look up the drivers for the hardware for Windows 95 if you plan on installing that.

Doqtor Kirby

You can try to force the 98SE drivers to load but expect oodles of problems (but there might not be any) and the NT drivers will not work at all.

SomeGuy

In general, no, you can not use drivers for a newer OS under an older one. Once in a while there are exceptions, usually drivers that were developed for both OSes that dropped official support.

For some devices, you can try searching for generic drivers or other OEM's drivers based on the chipset.

But laptops are notorious for only supporting specific OSes. You might get lucky, but I wouldn't count on it.

Also, you can often trick 98SE/ME drivers in to installing under 95/98FE but they will either fail to load or crash, and be prepared to uninstall files manually or re-install Windows. If you later find an older or different driver that would work, it likely won't install over the "newer" one.

TCPMeta

If anything you'll have to rewrite the INF file to the drivers so Win95 can understand. Nine times out of ten when they list Win98 SE for a OS for a driver it will also work in FE.

stitch

A 98 SE or Win2k driver might work as that is a WDM driver. Windows 95 is strictly limited to VxD drivers and this will *not* work on it at all.

nikkigreg1974

Here the web address for your Toshiba Satellite http://support.toshiba.com/support/mode ... ext=134513 It has drivers for windows 95 and 98 for your laptop. I hope if this is what you where looking for.

Duff

nikkigreg1974 wrote:

Here the web address for your Toshiba Satellite http://support.toshiba.com/support/mode ... ext=134513 It has drivers for windows 95 and 98 for your laptop. I hope if this is what you where looking for.

Unfortunately as he mentioned if you select "Windows 95" you'll notice the only thing available is a "TBIOS Utility" and no drivers.

TCPMeta

Wonder if you can just use the PCI/VEN look up for the hardware and just search around. Don't know about Toshiba but HP/Compaq used a lot of the same hardware for their laptops so if one system "wasn't compatible" you could just find another laptop's support page that had the same hardware but was in fact compatible with said OS.

If I get some free time i'll look into it.