Windows/Bios question

Just have a quick question to make sure before I go ahead and waste more money. I bought a laptop, an old Toshiba Satellite T1960 (you know the 486 50mhz, 8mb ram, 200mb hard drive). Well it was supposed to come with windows 95, when I start it up, the BIOS battery dead error comes up, I hit f1, and it loads into MS-DOS, I type in "DIR" and only 3 files are listed Fdisk, Command.com, Format.

So apparently windows is not installed, I had earlier tried to type "exit" in DOS to load into windows but that didn't work either. Now although the BIOS battery is dead, if I get my hands on a un-opened windows 95 floppy disk set, and install them, windows will run even with the BIOS battery dead correct?

As far as I know it will just be an annoyance with having to hit f1 on startup and not having the time/date saved. I just want to make sure windows will install/run without me having to replace the BIOS battery right now since its a dirt cheap old laptop that I just want to run without putting too much money into it. Thanks..

ok that is weird...a computer should not be able to run at all whithout its bios

the bios does far more than just save the time and date...in way its similar to your vegetative nervous system...the higher brain functions cannot work without sice you would be dead

all the basic hardware controllers are loaded in it

Yea its basically the core system, although I believe it can run it will just not save its settings and they have to be re-set manually each time the computer is started. I had heard once that if you plug in the pc for 24 hours and let it run, the battery could be recharged if its not completely dead yet. The problem is with the BIOS battery not the BIOS chip itself, that may make a difference.

Yea its basically the core system, although I believe it can run it will just not save its settings and they have to be re-set manually each time the computer is started. I had heard once that if you plug in the pc for 24 hours and let it run, the battery could be recharged if its not completely dead yet. The problem is with the BIOS battery not the BIOS chip itself, that may make a difference.


ok on second though you might be right...the bios is not compromised its just that all its settings are reset....doh i should have seen that

Yea, I believe it will work, I found windows 95 online on floppy disks for 19.99 and 5.00 for shipping so theres one way to find out. Thanks for helpin.

The battery does nothing more then save the changed settings which is made by the user. Basically when the battery is dead, it'll just revert back to factory default setting, but you can alter this settings when you power up your computer, and it'll keep saving it until the pc is turned off.

Because of the memory of the CMOS memory type, it requires power to keep the settings intact, otherwise it'll be lost. Volatile memory storage.

The computer will also work becuase it has the crucial Command.com and there is a few IO hidden files, just type dir/ah and it'll display your hidden files.

Unless you were provided with the installation disks of windows 95, there shouldn't be a windows 95 preinstalled in it (unless the vendor specified it will come with it, but then that's a matter which unfortunately you have to sort out with them).

You have an operating system on your pc (dos), but unfortunately its not good enough to do much, but then again, a 486 have VERY limited capabilities. Windows 95 WOULD be streching its limits quite a bit (I remembered when I installed Win95 on a 486 dx2 33).

Maybe for now put on a distro of linux (preferbly a 7.0 or less) and use that for now, would be a good learning experience.

He had said that it had windows 95 on it, however after speaking to him he admitted that he has around 25 of these laptops and he was under the impression that they all had windows since he was told that they did.

We talked a bit more and he apologized and said he has some new unopened copies of windows 95 and he would ship it out right away to me. I'm glad he decided to help me out and work with me instead of just blowing me off which he could have done, of course the proper action on my part would've been taken so this saved us both alot of trouble over such a simple problem. I thought of Linux but my friend showed me his that uses windows 95 (he's the reason I got the one that I did, his works great and this one was a excellent bargain) and it will run fine for what I need it for, I have 6 other pc's running in my home for various tasks so this ones just something to play with. Thanks for the help.

Win 95 on a 486/33 with 8 megs of ram was pretty painful. Startup took forever and it took longer for the CPU to render the web pages than to download the content.

Win 3.1 would probably run faster, and allow you to do the same things.

You could do it with linux also but it would be a pain in the ass to find old versions of all the components.