Re-installing Windows 95 on the Omnibook 800CT

Having sold off some of my clutch of Omnibooks, I decided to rebuild the 800CT that remains as a Windows machine for running old software. There are still a lot of OB fans out there so they all (two 800CT/133's and a 600C) found good homes.

For starters, I pop an 8GB Lexar Platinum CF card into a CF-to-PATA adapter to do duty as a hard drive. Even a relatively slow CF card is faster than the 2.5-inch hard drives of the time and considerably lower in power consumption. All my Omnibooks run off CF cards, even the 300 now it has a BIOS 1.01 upgrade card.

I plug in the floppy drive and CDROM drive and boot up the machine. The Omnibook gets part way through loading MSDOS and then hangs so hard that I need to prod the hard reset nubbin on the side to get a hard reboot. The restore floppy disk is an original and getting on for 20 years old so lets try creating a new one since it's probably corrupt. Same problem. Fair enough, the floppy drive is getting on for the same age so lets try another another one of those. Still crashes. It could be the cable - but I don't have a spare.

Let's try another boot disk - I have Slackware floppies from previous experiments. These appear to work fine. Curiouser and curiouser. Time to sleep on it.

Next day, I extract the CF card and make it DOS bootable in another machine. I intend to copy the contents of the Omnibook CD onto it along with the image restore software from the Omnibook boot floppy. The Omnibook floppy checks that it is running on an Omnibook and then restores from an encrypted Windows image so it has to be run on the actual machine. Clever, but a real pain right now.

Absentmindedly, I fire up the Omnibook without the CF card in and it boots just fine from the FDD. The penny drops - all my other machines had Transcend CF cards in but this one has a Lexar. I put a Transcend CF card in and everything works just fine - the Lexar's TrueIDE mode is obviously not DOS compatible (but fine with the Slackware as I found out earlier).

So, now I have a windows 95 OSR 2 newly built, what do I put on it?

First of all some further system bits:

1. erpdude8's Unofficial Windows 95 Service pack 1.05
2. WinZip 8.0 (OldApps is your friend - I can't find it on their website). Not strictly a system component but it makes installing later stuff simpler. You'll need an old licence key as well, I don't know if a new one will work.      
3. CPUIdle 5.8c to improve power usage - I should get an update but I've long since lost the download key and the new features are for things way newer than the 800CT.
4. The ACITS LPR Client - Let's you print to network attached printer like Windows XP. The link is for Columbia U since the Texas U links are broken. It's free for non-commercial use.
5. Lexmark Universal Printer Driver 1.X - I have a Lexmark Colour Laser, they provide Linux and Win 9X drivers which puts they way ahead of other providers in my books. The 9X driver is a bit generic so you have to manually configure things like duplex and colour.
6. Drivers for my Xircom CEM56-100 - Well done Intel for keeping them online.

Then onto some applications:

1. Netscape 6.23 - You can haul it off somewhere like OldApps but, thanks to AOL parentage it tries to install a load of guff as well, so go for a custom install and skip the AOL, RealPlayer and Mail. WinAmp is OK though. Also remember to remove the registration nag by deleting/renaming C:\Program Files\Netscape\Netscape 6\components\activation.dll 
2. MS Office 97 - But remember to expunge the Fast Find feature since it will clobber your battery life (remove it from the Startup folder). I imagine it will nag me to register with some now-defunct mechanism in due course.
3. Acroread 4.05 - OldApps again
4. ACDSee 2.3 - All the later versions gained a lot of extra functionality and cruft (and expense) which I really don't need - just a simple image viewer is all I want.