installing NIC card and windows 95

[Aggiedad]

Hi all,
My son and I traded computers. He gave me his Pentium 2 with windows 95 and I gave him one of mine (pentium 3 windows 98). On his computer with the 95 windows I installed a D Link ethernet card so I can network if with my newest computer with windows ME. Of course the windows 95 detected the new hardware and asked for the driver which I provided (cd-rom that came with the NIC). But then during this installation process, it asked for win 95 disk 18! All I have is the win 95 cd-rom. It won't accept it. I'm stuck! Please help.
What do I do now? Is it even possible to network the ME and 95? If I upgrade my 95, will I have problems with the other hardware I have in my old computer now?
Has anyone ever upgraded OS? Do I uninstall and get win 2000?
thanks

[fail66]

when it asks for the Win 95 disk 18, just point it to c:\windows and try it, if that doesn't work, then try c:\windows\system.

[Aggiedad]

I pointed it to c:\windows and it didn't take it either. I'll try c:\windows\system and let you know.
thanks

[Storm90]

You could upgrade it to Win 98 if you already have the win 98 cd and bootup disk. Just use the fdisk why and reformat and reinstall windows. This would make it more compatibel with Win Me. Plus it should work fine with the hard ware in your computer if you have the drives for the cards such as video and sound. If Not win 98 might already have them. ;) The proublem with 95 and nics some need the Interface drives .Which is win 95 18, If it isnot win 95B

[ 04-23-2001: Message edited by: Storm90 ]

[YeOldeStonecat]

If it's an OEM computer, you'll find the "*.cab" files in C:\Windows\Options\Cabs.

If it's a homebuilt, if you're lucky, the person who made it put cab files on your hard drive somewhere, perhaps C:\Win95, or C:\WinCD.

What the computer is looking for is the "cab" files, which are the compressed OS files on the cd. This is the Win95 folder on the windows installation cd for Windows 95, the Win98 folder for Windows 98, or the i386 folder for Windows NT/2k.

I always copy that directory to the hard drive, and run setup from there. Windows always remembers where it was born from, if you run setup from the hard drive that first time you "unhatch it", you'll never see it ask for your Windows cd.

So what you should do is check out system properties on your Win95 box, see which version it is. And compare it to your Windows 95 cd disk. I'm gonna bet your computer not Windows 95B or later, since the cabs are kept in disk labels. If your Windows 95 CD days USB support, it's most likely 95B or later. You want to stay away from copying files from different versions.

First, when it asks for these files, enter C:\Windows, C:\Windows\System, and C:\Windows\Options\Cabs as your path. You may have to alternate between the three of them. If nothing at all, then try to get the same version CD, and enter X:\Win95 as the path, with X being the letter of your CD drive.

[eddiec]

Just a thought about 95; ISA works better than PCI so hopefully that's what you're using. BTW, 95 doesn't like USB adapters regardless of what the CD says.

[g-c0de]

isa only has an 8MHz bus clock with a 16-bit bus width and an 8Mbps thoretical Maximum Transfer Rate, while a pci has a 33Mhz Bus signal clock with a 32-bit bus width and a 132Mbps theoretical Maximum Transfer Rate. Well probably on an old pentium II system PCI maybe incompatible with older system, than again isa transfers in 2 cycles and pci transfers in 1 cycle, so they both would have equivalent functionality, isa maybe hard to configure because of the dipswitches and jumpers that you have to configure. so if you are a "newbie" in hardware go with pci

[ 04-28-2001: Message edited by: G-C0DE ]

[Aggiedad]

Thanks to all of you. I have successfully installed my NIC card, have the networking going great and both comps accessing the net via a Lynksis router! thanks for all your help.