Hi folks.

I recently acquired a laptop off my Uncle, which I intend to turn into a DOS/early Windows gaming machine. Its specs are as follows:

Bus Architecture - USB/PCMCIA
Hard Drive Bus - Ultra ATA/100
CPU - 2.5GHz Intel Mobile Celeron

400MHz FSB, Intel 845GV + ICH4 Chipset

Through trial and error I managed to install Win95 on it, but every time the laptop attempts to boot into the OS I get the following message:

"Windows protection error. You need to restart Windows".

So in short, I cannot launch Win95. What I can do, however, is break in with Safe Mode.

I have done quite some research on this error message and although most answers all point to a hardware fault of some caliber (which I doubt
), the most likely problem is that Win95 cannot be fully installed on systems with a CPU clock higher than 350mhz - something I have only just found out.

AMD issued a downloadable fix for this problem, that apparently works for any CPU, AMD or not. I downloaded the fix and copied across all the necessary files to the respective folders in Windows\System as instructed, but the problem still persists.

I understand that underclocking the CPU is an option, but I am new to this area of tinkering. The notebook's BIOS makes no mention of CPU settings, either, so I'm a little stumped as to what to do next.

Any suggestions?

Thanks in advance for any help.

- Jonathan.

Hello and Welcome to the Forum Storey!

Thanks for putting that so clearly!

I will mark this as open to encourage the clever ones amongst us to come take a look.

Thanks for your patience

Agreeing with Sir Trews - very well put. But why Win 95?.

Go for Ubuntu:

Ubuntu Home Page | Ubuntu

Ah yeah, I've had the very same problem with installing windows 98 SE on a fast pc. This OS also has a limitation that you cannot use any processer with a certain speed or higher.

The reason is, that during the development of the OS, they didn't think you could have that fast cpu's, or when that would be the case, people would use a newer Windows version/patch anyway.

Remember, Win95 was released when the first pentium came out. In your case, I would really recommend to try Windows 98 SE. It will work, and probably is alot more stable. It has the same architecture of Win95 so the same games will run that run also on Win95.

Downclocking your bios will most likelly work, but I cannot assist you in this, simply because the chances are big that its not possible at all. Having software overclock settings didn't appeared to be happening back then. People overclocked their pc's by setting jumpers on the mobherboard instead.