The only reason anybody would actually want to use Windows 95 these days is for one thing: Games. There are tons of old MS-DOS games out there (many of which are found at www.dosgames.com), and the way to run those games best are in their native environment. While it’s true you could run DOSbox, it’s just not the same. Furthermore in DOSbox you can’t get support for older gaming hardware on modern PCs.

On your vintage Windows 95 gaming box, you may want to actually use it to browse web sites, compose a few documents and have basic chat functionality. It is possible to do this if you know what software to use. See video below and be sure to check out the notes below the video for download links.

Where to get Internet Explorer 5.5 SP2: http://browsers.evolt.org/?ie/win32/5.5-sp2

Web browser used: K-Meleon.

Chat client used: Miranda (Windows 95/98/ME version).

Where to get Microsoft Rich Editor v3.0 installer so Miranda will work: http://www.nakware.com/shownak/support/index.htm

Word processor used: AbiWord. You can specifically download v2.4.6 of AbiWord from here.

Special note for Virtualbox users: If you’ve tried to get Windows 95 to work in Virtualbox, you know that Virtualbox Additions does not work and you’re stuck with a 640×480 resolution. There is a video driver that will fix this, and is located here: http://bearwindows.boot-land.net/vbe9x.htm#2 Download the “pre-beta 2008.10.21″ version, and install the driver located in the “UNI” directory from that ZIP (ignore the other two). This will allow Windows 95 to have proper full-color resolution in a Virtualbox session.

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