This was a little project of mine - to see how much I could abuse a Windows installation by installing multiple versions of Windows on top of each other. Don't worry - I didn't do this on my actual PC. I used Microsoft Virtual PC 2007 Beta 32-bit and Virtual PC 2004 to do this. I started out with a virtual PC with a very humble spec running Windows for WorkGroups 3.11. This PC had 8MB of RAM and a 4GB hard disk with a 2GB FAT16 partition. I upgraded the RAM to 32MB and tried installing Windows 95 OSR2. Unfortunately VPC 2007 wouldn't let me upgrade to Windows 95 OSR2 so I had to clean install it - shame really but I eventually decided to chuck VPC2007 Beta in favour of Virtual PC 2004 SP1. Once I did this, Windows 95 installed without any problems. I then proceeded to install Microsoft Office Standard 4.2 on it. (Yes, that's right - the 16-bit version that came on 25 floppy disks. I had previously burned them onto a CD image beforehand.) Once installed, I then installed Microsoft Office Professional for Windows 95 over it, after which I installed Windows 98 SE over Windows 95B. It was a full version so I had to drop down to DOS, delete WIN.COM and WINVER.EXE, install some Real-mode CD-ROM drivers and install Windows 98 from there. Once started, I had to reinstall a few drivers as I had changed the PC's architecture from VPC 2007 to VPC 2004. While I was at it, I installed the Virtual PC Additions so that I could move my cursor between the host and guest operating systems. Once I had done enough messing about trying and failing to get the Internet to work (yes I had set the network card to use NAT Shared Networking and yes I had configured the browser to use the Hull University Proxy server) I proceeded to install Microsoft Office 97 over the top of Office 95, and immediately afterwards, I installed Microsoft Office 2000 Professional with FrontPage over Microsoft Office 97 professional. I also installed Microsoft PhotoDraw 1.0. I then upgraded the PC to Windows ME. On the second reboot during Setup, I powered the PC down and upgraded the RAM to 128MB. Once Windows ME was installed, I just messed about with Microsoft Word for a bit, then I proceeded to install Microsoft Windows XP Professional RTM. This took a very long time, and when it was finally installed, because Windows 95 likes to install the Novell NetWare network client by default, as well as the Microsoft Networking client, Windows XP wouldn't use the Welcome Screen-based login, in fact on the first bootup, it asked me to specify the NwtWare server that it should use. I went into the Networking options and uninstalled the Novell NetWare client. I then had to uninstall and reinstall Microsoft Virtual PC Additions so that they would work with Windows XP. I found that when I double-clicked on Internet Explorer, it worked straight away.
So why have I done all this?
In the name of Science!
Computer Science that is
Or the fact that I was just trying to detract my attention from working - oh and the fact that I love experimenting with these things.
I wonder if I should up the RAM to 512MB and install Windows Vista ..........
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