[Vince4Amy]

In addition to my OpenSUSE 10.3 boxes, I run one more machine using Windows 95. I've set this up as a media centre, it plays all of my audio from my server and I have recently bought a TV Card and installed it. The machine is really fast to use, even though I have updated it and changed a lot of the configuration. It's primary media player is VLC Media player so it supports the latest formats. The primary browser on this machine is Opera.

I have recently installed AMSN Messenger, which I also have on My OpenSUSE boxes just to prove to people you don't need the latest versions of MSN Messenger/Windows Live Messenger to voice clips and some of the other features.

The System spec is as follows:

Windows 95B with USB Support Installed
1GHz Pentium III
512Mb RAM
16Mb Shared Graphics
40GB Hard Disk Drive
Integrated AC97 Sound Card

[BenoitRen]

Neat. I thought Windows 95 was limited to 256 MB of RAM.

AMSN Messenger, eh? Sounds interesting. I'll look it up.

[BenoitRen]

Oh, now I know which program you meant. aMSN Messenger. I used it before, but eventually dumped it because it takes a while to start, and it's sluggish. On my system, of course. Seems to work better on GNU/Linux in any case.

[FoxHound]

I must say, with the PC specs you have I am a little bit surprised you haven't switched to a more entertainment oriented OS like Windows XP. Its not that 95 is bad but because there isn't a lot of support for it anymore. There are more application choices in XP.

[Mijzelf]

FoxHound, on Nov 25 2007, 05:37 PM, said:

I must say, with the PC specs you have I am a little bit surprised you haven't switched to a more entertainment oriented OS like Windows XP. Its not that 95 is bad but because there isn't a lot of support for it anymore. There are more application choices in XP.

On the other hand, when all applications you need are available for W95, why use XP? Seeing the specs I suppose this machine will boot from BIOS exit to GUI in 3 seconds. XP will do it in maybe 30 seconds?

[BenoitRen]

I wonder if it does. When I got my super PC and installed Win98 SE, I expected it to boot really fast. Well, it does, but not as fast as I'd hoped. 22 seconds boot time.

[Mijzelf]

Really? Did you check bootlog to see what caused that time?

[Controller]

20 secs... seems you should use a fixed IP address?

BTW, got a similar PC here as work PC, and with it's Win98/95 mixture, it beats XP/Vista on any 2-3GHz machine (someone recently was fascinated especially how fast a Win9x machine can shut down . Especially the Explorer/shell of Win95 is ligthning fast, so Win95 lacks USB and support.

[Vince4Amy]

There's no point of upgrading the Operating System. Windows 95 runs all of the applications I need it to and at a fast speed, much faster than my OpenSUSE machines would have. If I was going to upgrade it then I would put OpenSUSE on it, but there's simply no point it does what I intended it to do:

Play Music
Play Videos
Play DVD's
Watch TV
Browse The Internet

This machine was built from spare parts that come from scrapped machines that customers no longer needed. Windows 95 was £5 from a local computer store.

This post has been edited by Vince4Amy: 28 November 2007 - 04:12 AM

[Milos M.]

Bravo Vince4Amy
You have got yourself media centre for 5 pounds.

[eidenk]

Yeah it is nice. Ideal hardware specs for a 95 system IMO.

[Vince4Amy]

Yes it certainly runs well, who needs a more up to date operating system when this one fills it's purpose.