95 to 98 ?

I have a P166 MMX with 64 MB memory.
Am running 95 OK, is it worthwhile upgrading to 98SE.
A mag is currently running article which suggests a full format and start again with 98, this involves a boot up from A: and a switch to CD drive for the new os.
The dos window appears OK but will not recognise the CD drive for the switch over.

 

I do not think you will see much benefit from the install - if it
ever completes. If the Win95 OS works, stay with it.
Update the OS when you can spare some cash for a HW upgrade.
An upgrade now may cause you a lot of annoyances.
Why are you thinking about changing the OS - I sometimes
wish I had the easy going, stable and quicker '95 back on this box.
Of course, software developers are gradually making both '95 and '98 "obsolete" ....
regards

 

A lot of CD-ROM's from that era could not be accessed from the startup floppy. They required drivers that were not the generic ones that the boot floppy contains. God, I can remember installing MS-DOS just to be able to access the CD so I could install 95 or 98.

There are a number of workarounds to this. The easiest is to copy the entire 98 CD to a folder on your hard drive while you still have access to it through Win95. Then, enter DOS through a boot floppy and delete all the files and folders you can (except the folder containing the CD, of course). Start the setup by running the setup.exe file inside the 98 folder you created. Win98 will install just fine from the hard drive and Win98 will no doubt find a driver for the CD-ROM during setup. But your drive must be large enough to hold all the temp files that setup creates. Setup will tell you if the drive is too small, but by then Win95 will be gone!

The FAT16 file system on the drive can be converted to FAT32 after the installation.

An alternative is to search for boot floppies that contain more than just the usual CD-ROM drivers.
http://www.buynick.com/bootdisk/
http://www.nu2.nu/bootdisk/cdrom/
http://www.pcworld.com/downloads/file_description/0,fid,7147,00.asp

As far as whether it is worth it---that depends on you. Win98 will run just fine on a 166. If you have USB ports, 98 offers support for those (as did 95b, I think). But you may want to consider a new machine.