I do get round to things, it just takes a while (eleven years) to build up the enthusiasm but I've been watching retro computer stuff on YT lately.
Why did I think this needed a setup disk? I read it somewhere, I'm sure. Booted it the other day after having to move stuff about for a gas pipe installation and into BIOS, HDD recognised although MB needs a battery.
I tried a few boot disks but they didn't fully load and seemed to stop at the same point each time. I took the floppy drive apart and removed the stepper motor that drives the head to clean and grease the helical drive and runners. Put it back together and the boot disk loaded so I partitioned the 213MB WD Caviar HDD and formatted it. The noise of the thing is ridiculous!
Burnt a Windows 95 4.00.950. Found an IDE CD ROM and plugged that in while I was waiting for the CD. The IDE cable looks quite short between connectors as it has to jump over the floppy drive.
Found a suitable vintage 3COM EtherLink III ISA network card and installed it. I'm sure I had more than the three ISA network cards I found in this room...
Started Setup (after wondering why D: didn't exist then seeing that it was R:...). The network card was detected, that's convenient.
Remember the excitement?
Took a few goes to get the mouse working as it had defaulted to disabled in the BIOS. I installed TCP/IP and set the networking up and could view network shares on an XP machine but as Windows 7 and Server 2008 asked for a password mine happened to be too long for Windows 95 to accept.
I'm surprised web browsing worked at all and I knew HTTPS would have been out of the question so I'll have to install a more suitable browser but I think we should start a thread to see who can browse DW on the oldest hardware.
Nearly browsing on a 486DX2 66MHz with 8MB RAM from 1995 according to stickers inside...
I might have a better graphics card somewhere and I've recently seen some RAM which might fit.