One of the earliest Windows 95 builds

Install

An existing Windows 3.1 installation is required to launch setup, and this release can be considered an upgrade of sorts. However very little gets transferred over, likening it to a fresh install

Results of the hardware detection, our SoundBlaster 16 is not detected, and neither is our network card.

A crash towards the end of the setup, this left the VM unbootable and we had to reboot into MS-DOS to launch the Chicago installer again. Providing you told setup to install in a different folder (Chicago instead of WINDOWS) then you can easily boot back in Windows 3.x

Installing again fixed it, no hardware change was done. Could just be a random bug in the install?

Upon first boot, Windows ‘explorer’ will convert your program manager groups to the ones that Chicago will use.

You will see that what we know as Windows Explorer will be known as File Cabinet.

The File Cabinet looks a lot like My Computer from the final builds of Windows 95.

The Main program group, it seems there are still elements of the old Program Manager present.

Windows Metrics, also known as just Metrics lets you adjust various user interface components, and lets you save and apply certain themes. There are currently no themes included by default.

Disk drive information for both floppy drives and hard disk drives, looks a lot better and more detailed than the final release.

System Information, shows build version and the amount of memory installed. Resourceses refers to the Windows GDI.

What looks to be device manager, a lot of things here are incomplete and show up as blank dialog boxes.

A heavily dithered graphic.

Right-clicking and bringing up the properties pane.

The full file browser, known as the file cabinet. An issue I found was this build does not show more than five drives, which is possible if you attach multiple SCSI drives. Since the floppy drives are useless in this build you might as well get rid of them.

Viewing and modifying the screensaver. All of these came from Windows 3.1

Modifying the desktop background

A list of games, and a look at Minesweeper game that comes included

The task pane, also you can customise the size of the taskbar. This seems like a docking area where icons can pinned for quick access, instead of displaying the active windows like Windows does today. Instead the tasks window serves this purpose.

Software Compatability

Seems to be a very mixed bag in terms of what works and what fails to run. The full Win32 API has not been implemented so 32bit applications will not work and existing Windows applications seem to have a mixed compatability with some programs refusing to run or crashing.

Microsoft BOB

Installs but does not run. Instead a Dr Watson error comes up

Microsoft Office

Microsoft Office 4.3 installs and runs without issues

Netscape

This is odd, it installed but then claims not to find the exe file when we try to open?

Opera

Opera browser, installs fine (in another language for some reason, despite English being selected)

Internet Explorer

Internet Explorer 3 had a 16bit release for Windows 3.1 which should work on Chicago build 58 but it’s unable to run

Simpsons Cartoon Studio

The application tried to run in full screen, but the task bar on the bottom remains visible. Alos the Office toolbar (From the Office 4.3 install) remains visible. Another thing to note was the game failed to start using the shortcut provided by the installer, and only worked instead by navigating to the CD-ROM drive and launching the CD-ROM executable from there.

Adobe Reader

Installs and works fine, but it looks like a few graphics are missing from the installer and are replaced instead by a white box. This could be a driver or emulation issue with the Cirrus Logic video card used.