Windows 3.11 not cooperating!

By OmniouS
in Microsoft (Windows)

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Apprentice

OmniouS

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Hey guys,

A friend of mine has gone away for the weekend and I thought it would be funny to see his reaction when he comes back to find Windows 3.11 on his machine.

I haven't touched any of his original data as i'm not that mean. I have inserted a tiny thumb drive at the back of his machine and it boots to it by default without me having to edit the hard drive boot order in the CMOS.

MSDOS 6.22 installed no worries (this is where I got slightly distracted by Jill of the Jungle)

Windows 3.11 went all the way through setup without any apparrent issues but hangs on the splash screen whenever I attempt to start it. I took the stick out of his machine and put it into mine and the same thing happens.

His machine is a stock Athlon 64 3000+ with 1GB RAM. Mine is a [email protected] with 4GB RAM.

I have done a bit of googling and tried a couple of things but have come up with nothing so far. I thought perhaps there was a problem addressing the huge amount of RAM but that may not be the case as I installed everything exactly as I had done on the thumb drive in a VMWare virtual machine with 1.5GB RAM and it runs no worries.

Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated

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https://www.neowin.net/forum/topic/757792-windows-311-not-cooperating/
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Grand Master

Solid Knight

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Windows 3.11 was not designed to run on modern hardware. It has no idea what to do with your hardware which is probably why it freezes upon loading.

If you have an RTM version of XP or Windows 2000 you can always copy progman.exe (Program Manager in Windows 3.1) and set it as a start up item.

Apprentice

OmniouS

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You do realize April 1 was last week right?

Yeah :p I didnt really think of doing anything untill he said that he was going away for the weekend

Windows 3.11 was not designed to run on modern hardware. It has no idea what to do with your hardware which is probably why it freezes upon loading.

If you have an RTM version of XP or Windows 2000 you can always copy progman.exe (Program Manager in Windows 3.1) and set it as a start up item.

OK ill give this a go

Grand Master

Solid Knight

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Instead of going through all the trouble for windows 3.11 why not replace explorer with program manager. I think xp still has it in the windows or windows system32

It does but I think it got removed after SP2 thus you need to grab it off an RTM disc or Windows 2000 PC.

Grand Master

devHead

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Yeah thanks, I got the files off an RTM disc and set the Windows shell to progman.exe

I'm still interested to see if there is a way to get 3.11 running :p

There is no way to install a 16-bit operating system on a computer with those specs. Good grief, Windows 98 would even wig out with that much RAM. Aside from the fact that you have a 64-bit processor. You can install a 16-bit OS on that. Didn't you ever run Win311? It needed like 4 MB of RAM; with 8 it would scream.

Grand Master

leesmithg

Posted
Posted

I have Microsoft Windows v1.0, but trying to install anything less than 2000 on more than 1gb of r.a.m. is queer to say the least.

I remember that 98 users needed a fix for more than 512mb of r.a.m., however, most motherboards then didn't go above 196mb of r.a.m. allowed.

Just stick a windows 3.11 print on the desktop and check 'auto-hide taskbar'.

If you wish to rekindle April 1st again.

Proficient

Unknown_97784568745

Posted
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Probably something to do with the instruction sets on the CPU. I know 3.11 worked with most X86 processors, but I have never tried it on the 64 bit models.

64bit CPUs are just 32bit CPUs with an x86_64 extension. They can run anything that a 286 could run.

There is no way to install a 16-bit operating system on a computer with those specs. Good grief, Windows 98 would even wig out with that much RAM. Aside from the fact that you have a 64-bit processor. You can install a 16-bit OS on that. Didn't you ever run Win311? It needed like 4 MB of RAM; with 8 it would scream.

You've got a couple of things confused here.

You can't run 16bit software on 64bit Windows, that has nothing to do with the CPU and everything with Windows.

A 16bit OS can run perfectly on a 64bit CPU.

Grand Master

Fred Derf Veteran

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64bit CPUs are just 32bit CPUs with an x86_64 extension. They can run anything that a 286 could run.

Except that they can't. Try to install Windows NT 4.0 on a new computer.

It may not be the CPU exactly but something on newer computers confuses older OSes.

Grand Master

Solid Knight

Posted
Posted
Except that they can't. Try to install Windows NT 4.0 on a new computer.

It may not be the CPU exactly but something on newer computers confuses older OSes.

It has more to do with all the other components than the CPU. The CPU can run a 16-bit OS but the OS will freak out on the rest of your hardware. You have more RAM than it can possibly handle. More HDD space than it can handle. Your GPU, SPU, and SATA controllers are completely foreign devices. You have no driver support for these devices at all either. The only real issue with the CPU is some applications can't handle the clock-speed (An easy example of this is Gorillas or Worms in QBASIC where you have to modify the game to get it to run at normal speeds).

The CPU's instruction set is the same as far as I know (I do know that some rarely used instructions were cut at some point). The 16-bit registers are still there as well.

Grand Master

devHead

Posted
Posted
64bit CPUs are just 32bit CPUs with an x86_64 extension. They can run anything that a 286 could run.

You've got a couple of things confused here.

You can't run 16bit software on 64bit Windows, that has nothing to do with the CPU and everything with Windows.

A 16bit OS can run perfectly on a 64bit CPU.

Perfectly? I think you're amiss. It clearly isn't running perfectly. Nor can it.

Grand Master

majortom1981

Posted
Posted
Except that they can't. Try to install Windows NT 4.0 on a new computer.

It may not be the CPU exactly but something on newer computers confuses older OSes.

Thats why you have to enable that os install bios setting. In a lot of bios's there is an os install seeting for older os system installs.

Apprentice

OmniouS

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Did you get this to work? I'm interested in your friends reaction. happy0025.gif

Hahaha yeah since I couldn't get Windows 3.11 to work, I installed MSDOS 7.1 instead which has an awesome boot screen. It would then load up Jill of the Jungle automatically :p

He got back and nobody mentioned anything about his computer and we were all getting impatient, waiting for him to turn it on. When he finally did, his reaction to the new boot screen was hilarious. Totally worth it.

"What the @%", "You F$%# %^&*#", "#$^ you" etc etc.

He is 'reasonable' with computers and proceeded to find out what was done to his machine and if he could revert it back to how it was.

He checked all inside the case etc to see if we had swapped a drive out to a similar model but found that everything was normal. He didn't check the back of the case at all, otherwise he would have noticed the 10cm flashing blue LED thumb drive sticking out.The awesome thing about it was that the USB drive didnt show up at all during the POST but his hard drives did so he thought that we had erased his Windows and Linux partitions. He didn't check the boot order :)

He has basic command line knowledge and ran fdisk which displayed a single 2GB partition. Its a good thing that fdisk doesnt display basic information on the hard drive so it didnt spoil the fun.

At this point it would have been mean to continue so we turned the computer off, pulled out the USB drive and restarted the machine. Everything loaded up as normal and after some more cussing and laughs everyone was on good terms again.

Now its his turn to get us back..

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