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install and run Windows 3.1 on a system now running Win95?

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install and run Windows 3.1 on a system now running Win95?

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If you installed Win95 in a separate directory (You smart person you), you can do a very cute trick: Hit Start/Shut Down… and “Restart computer in MS-DOS Mode”. This will take you straight to a DOS prompt. From here, change to your Win 3.1 directory and just type win. This little trick works because Win95 DOS (DOS 7.0) already loaded the necessary himem.sys XMS driver, which is all Win 3.1 really needs to load. Performance will be poor, because there’s no disk caching active at this time, and no fancy network stuff will probably work either, because you aren’t using Win 3.1’s version of IFSHLP. To get these working, check out the tricks used to run MS-DOS games and prepare special PIF files for, what MS calls, “Single mode MS-DOS”. Be sure to include the Win 3.1 versions of ifshlp.sys, mscdex, and net start, and Win95 versions of other base drivers such as emm386. Also include lock c: to let 32-bit disk and file access work.

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