Project Dell Dimension XPS H266 has started!

Hello all. A few weeks ago i got a old Dell Dimension XPS H266 tower PC that had the RAM go bad in it and it had no hard drive and i thought to myself this would make a great PC for old PC games that only run on DOS/Win95 so i set about first finding some RAM for it which was easier said than done and then set about finding a hard drive, not that easy either.

As this is a fairly old computer it uses 72 pin SIMM EDO modules either 16MB or 32MB in size and can take up to a maximum of 128MB of RAM. Doesn't sound like much does it? It's surprising how quick it actually is. More on that later though. So i searched the internet for days trying to find the right type of RAM and finally i found some. As usual eBay came to the rescue. I found a couple of sticks each 32MB in size. That would give me 64MB of RAM to play with. not bad.

So i got them, took the old out and put in the new and they worked! One down one to go. Next up was the hard drive and it was a bit easier to find the right one. Again as this PC is fairly old it uses the ATA IDE interface for hard drives and optical drives. eBay came good again and i found a 8.4GB Western Digital  hard drive that looked like it should work so i got that, whacked it in, turned the computer on and it was being recognised by the BIOS. Two out of two and everything was going well.

With this computer i also got Windows 95 OSR 2.1 (I think) so as Win95 can run both DOS and Windows programs i set about installing win95 on this computer. Installing Win95 was a fairly painless process and soon i was booted into Win95. I then started to update it. First i installed the latest version of DirectX that is compatible with Win95 which is DirectX 8, Then i installed the latest version of Internet Explorer that is compatible with Win95 which is IE6, I got the two USB ports working and installed the drivers for all the hardware. So i now have relatively up to date installation of Win95.

And thats the end of this blog post, Next time the story continues as i install more hardware and see what this thing is really capable of. I'll also post detailed information about the hardware and a few pictures of it.

Se you next time.