Tips for a Successful Installation of Windows 95

#12 of a series of notes on how to do things on the UNM / EPS network by Jim Connolly
(Revision date: 31-Oct-97)

When doing upgrades from Windows 3.1x, the Windows 95 installation program is generally pretty good about recognizing hardware which has been set up already. It is notably weak about properly configuring a few things, particularly monitors. You may find yourself manually choosing a monitor type which matches yours better than its guess.

Here's a few things you should do before running the Win95 setup.exe:

1. Gather information about your computer, and write it down. If all goes well, Win95 setup will successfully identify everything, and you won't need to know any of this, but keep it in a drawer somewhere because you might need it someday. If it doesn't go well, you'll be glad you took the trouble to write it down, because you can correct if it "autodetects" incorrectly. Things to know are:

• What kind of Monitor do you have? Look on the back. Many manufacturers of "clone" machines put their own name on the front but the monitor really is made by someone else.
• What kind of Network Interface Card do you have in your system? If you don't know run the Windows 3.1x network setup and find out. If there are IRQ or DMA channel configuration settings, write them down (whether you know what they mean or not).
• What is the IP address of your computer (and all of the appropriate network address information for the UNM and EPS network)? To lookup this stuff run "Network Setup" in Win 3.11 and look in the TCP/IP protocol setup information.
• What kind of Video Card do you have? Most systems tell you this on the opening screen when you boot your computer.
• If you have a sound card, know the manufacturer and model number.
• What is the make and model of your hard drive. For IDE drives, you can enter the BIOS-level setup (how to do this is usually displayed right after the video information on bootup), find and write down the drive parameters. Be careful not to make any changes! If you have a SCSI hard drive, know what type of SCSI controller you have installed.
• If you have unusual peripherals (i.e., scanners, tape backup, etc.) know the manufacturer's name and the model number.

1. Change your system to not load any programs automatically. Remove all icons from your "Startup" program group in Program Manager (but don't delete the group). Using a text editor (like notepad) edit the win.ini file and put a semicolon in front of the lines which say load= and run= and replace them with load= and run= lines which are blank. Disable fancy screen savers like After Dark, etc. If you are using something besides Program Manager for your Windows shell (i.e., Norton Desktop, Dashboard, etc.) change back to Program Manager as your shell while doing the upgrade. In Win95 you may usually run these programs as programs, but not as the Windows shell.
2. Using a text editor, check the line in your config.sys file which contains "himem.sys" and if you find the word "highscan" in the line, remove it.
3. If you like the Windows Write program for any reason, make a directory named "saveit " and copy write.exe and write.hlp from your Windows directory into the "saveit" directory so you can copy it back after installation. Win95 setup will overwrite it and replace it with WordPad without even asking.
4. When running setup, I suggest doing a custom setup. The default installation leaves out some important items which you will want installed. Some items (i.e., Multimedia, modem-related stuff like Fax and Communication) depend on whether your computer has the appropriate hardware or not. Make sure the following items are installed:
   • In Accessories: For sure: Clipboard Viewer, Document Templates, Net Watcher, QuickView, System monitor, System Resource Meter, WinPopup, Wordpad. Optional (if you want them): Calculator, Character Map, Paint, Screen savers. If you have tons of disk space you can load the Win95 tour, but this can also be run from the CD.
   • In Disk Tools: Backup (I can't believe this isn't loaded by default!)
   • In Microsoft Exchange: Install both tools.
   • In Microsoft Network: Load if you wish, but it is not necessary.
5. Have sufficient open disk space available on your system. Win95 copies installation files to your hard drive, does the installation, and then removes the installation files when it is done. It will tell you how much space it needs when you start the installation. Most systems will need about 50 MB available for an "upgrade" installation.
6. Have a floppy disk ready of the type which goes in the A: drive of your computer (i.e., the one you can boot DOS from). This is used to make an emergency recovery disk which allows you to restore your system to its pre-Win95 state if the installation fails. With the prepared disk, this is virtually foolproof. Without it, if Win95 won't start recovery is virtually impossible.
7. Allow plenty of time to do the installation. Read the installation instructions in the book -- they are very short. Installations from CD ROM take about 45 minutes or so. Installations from disks can take up to twice that, and you will do a lot of disk swapping.
8. Your CD-ROM and Disk packages contain a serial number which must be entered on installation. Keep your original disks or CD in a safe place and do not lose this number. If you ever need to reinstall the operating system, you can't do it without the serial number.
9. Some utilities are only available on the CD ROM. For those installing from disks, I plan to make some of these available on our server. They are all available free for downloading from Microsoft at http://www.microsoft/com on the Web and ftp.microsoft.com via FTP.

I have found Win95 to be a significant improvement over Window for Workgroups. It crashes less and will often terminate errant programs without taking everything else with it. Its memory management has virtually eliminated "Out of Memory" errors, and accessing network drives and printers is much simpler.