You could split the difference and safely use 256 MB, which would be more than enough for old Windows 95 applications.Ĭontinue through the wizard until you’re prompted to create your virtual hard disk.

VirtualBox recommends 64 MB, while official Microsoft blog The Old New Thing claims that Windows 95 won’t boot if it has more than around 480 MB of memory. If you name it “Windows 95”, VirtualBox will automatically choose the correct Windows version.Ĭhoose how much RAM you want to expose to your virtual machine. Once you have VirtualBox installed, click the “New” button to create a new virtual machine.Įnter whatever name you like and select “Windows 95” from the Version box. You can do it in other virtual machine programs like VMware, but the process of configuring the virtual machine software will be a little different. We’ll be doing this in VirtualBox, which is completely free to use and available on Windows, macOS, and Linux. RELATED: Beginner Geek: How to Create and Use Virtual Machines Windows 95b (also known as Windows 95 OSR2) was only available to OEMs (Original Equipment Manufacturers), so any Windows 95 disc you have lying around will either by the original Windows 95 release (also known as Windows 95 RTM) or the Windows 95a release (also known as Windows 95 OSR1), which came with Service Pack 1 installed. You will probably just need to download the “Windows95a.img” file. Once you’ve got your Windows 95 ISO file, you can download a boot diskette image from AllBootDisks.

So start digging through those old drawers of yours. While ISO files of Windows 95 are available online, bear in mind that Windows 95 is still under Microsoft copyright, and can’t be legally downloaded from the web. If you have an old Windows 95 CD lying around, you can insert it into your PC and create an ISO file from it. You must first boot into an MS-DOS environment from a Windows 95 boot disk, which would have been a floppy disk at the time, to get the installation started. Unlike modern operating systems, the Windows 95 installation disc isn’t bootable.

You’ll need two things for this: A Windows 95 ISO file and a Windows 95 boot disk image.

Install windows 95 vmware