Win95 surprised me recently. We have a old PC at work dedicated to using a 25ish year old letraset machine for pounce plots on paper rolls. The software for it has been lost and is only compatible with win 9x. The Win95 machine for it had some freaking old 30-pin RAM which recently died. So yeah, no replacing that stuff and no way of installing the software onto another machine. So I found a win98 machine from like 99 and put the drive from the win95 machine in it and booted. Booted win 95 fine, installed some generic drivers for everything except USB controllers (no use for them anyway) and worked a charm. True story. Oh, and maybe MS just want 945 level graphics to finally die like it should have a LONG time ago.
Might be worth doing a P2V on that if it is vital just so you have a virtual copy of it somewhere incase it happens again. I am sure there are apps out there that can do a P2V of Win95, I have been using something called Platespin Migrate by Novell for servers and it works great.
Cheers, it's not too vital since we could do with out the use of the machine as it is rarely used these days, but I should probably look into that since there would be some occasions where it could be a pain if it were out of action. I was thinking at the time I'd just use norton ghost to duplicate the image of the drive onto the one from the win 98 machine (or another IDE drive I can find), since I'm remember doing that at one point with norton ghost in the late 90's. But of course that only protects against hard drive crashes and I'd have to find another win9x era machine to put the drive into. Of course replacing parts other than motherboard/CPU on this machine is actually feasible, unlike the win95 machine previously. I've never really looked into P2V but it may be the easier option but it's really only viable if we can do it for free. Anyhow I'll have a look into it, I'm guessing the free and win95 parts are where problems may arise.
I know that with Platespin Migrate you can get a free 30 day trial and the VM I created with it still works, infact I downloaded another free license key and used it to P2V a 10 year old W2K server someone I know was still using. One of its HDD's failed and the RAID controller refused to rebuild it and of course because they are a little shop they hadn't been paying attention to the fact that the backups hadn't been running for years. As it was an SQL server amongst other things rebuilding it and getting it working would have taken at least a day, building the ESXi server and running the P2V took me 2 hours and it was up and running. I think it costs us £150 for a proper license for Platespin per job so it isn't too expensive if you do decide to purchase it. We used it to virtualise our Exchange server, it does EVERYTHING for you including shutting down the old server and bringing the new one up when it is finished. Everything ends up exactly the same unless you choose otherwise, for example you can increase the size of drives as part of the job. Once the job was finished and the new server was up our client boxes didn't even know anything had changed. ESXi is free if you want to run VMware as a Type 1 hyper visor and the basic desktop versions are free if you want to use a type 2 on top of Windows.