Windows 95 and digital cameras

[BillyP]

I'm running Win 95. My question is, will a digital camera work with Win 95? Every camera I've looked at recommends 98 or newer. I have the necessary USB ports, Pentium II and 64 megs of RAM. I really don't want to upgrade the operating system. I'm tired of giving Bill my money.

Thanks
Billy

 

[MikePA]

It may work if you've installed the USB support in Win95. However, many software packages actually check to see what operating system you're running and if it's not the one they recommend they quit. If this is the case with the camera software, you'll be out of luck.

 

[BillyP]

Mike,

It's a Dell and came with the USBs, so I guess it has USB support installed? If the camera software won't work, it there another choice?

Billy

 

[MikePA]

Billy, usually when you connect the camera to the USB port, it appears like another hard drive, so you could simply use Windows Explorer and 'drag and drop' the pictures from the camera to your hard drive.

 

[MossRoad]

We have lots of windows 95 PCs that came with USB ports, but the USB support was not installed. Like Mike said, if you plug the camera in, it should show up as another hard drive if the USB support is working.

<A target="_blank" HREF=http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;258773>Click here to read </A> an article at the Microsoft support pages on how to enable USB support on 95, 98 and ME editions of windows!

Hope this helps /w3tcompact/icons/smile.gif

 

[JohnMiller3]

It must be Win95C to support USB and then it's hit and miss...

Also like Mike said... most software will stop dead in its tracks upon installation when it "sees" Win95 system...

Maybe now's a good time to upgrade the op system to Win98 or W2K... best results is to do a raw install instead of "upgrade"... system will remain more stable...

(installing W2K will net you a 25-30% throughput increase in speed... you'd think you turbo'd it...)

Good luck... /w3tcompact/icons/smile.gif

 

[BillyP]

It does have USB support installed. I know that doesn't mean it'll work. But if it doesn't, can't I just use a card reader?

Billy

 

[MossRoad]

Have you tried it without doing anything yet? Plug that sucker in and see if it shows up as an extra hard drive.

 

[MikePA]

<font color=blue>But if it doesn't, can't I just use a card reader?</font color=blue>
Most card readers are USB. You might be able to find a card reader that will connect to a serial or parallel port, but it would be so slow it wouldn't be worth it.

As others have recommended, just plug the camera in and see what happens. If it's the case that you haven't bought the camera yet, buy any inexpensive USB product, like a mouse, and plug it in to see if the system recognizes it.

 

[Steveng]

Billy,

Regarding the card reader: there are some parallel card readers that will do the job, slower then USB, but if you work with a PII and 64MB of RAM, I guess you're not one of the guys where speed matters a lot... One warning though: In our company we used some (+/- 50) Parallel SanDisk card readers on Dell systems and W98, and had some severe problems: sometimes the mouse and keyboard stopped responding, explorer locked up,... never had this problem with IBM or Unisys systems. We never found the cause of these problems. The solutions we chose was...buy USB card readers.
I've installed USB devices on some W95 systems and they all work fine, but finding and installing patches may take some time...

Good luck

Steven