Adding USB to a Win95 portable

I have an old Micron Transport XPE notebook that I might give to a friend (on a severe budget) so that he can work with his digital photos. I have Win95 with SP1 installed on the computer. It does not now have a USB port. The PCMCIA to USB adapters available are not obviously usable with Win95. Are there any that would work? Am I giving the friend more headaches than the computer is worth? Should I try to load a later version of Windows? Thanks for any suggestions.

 

Exactly what kind of work would they be doing with a Pentium CPU and 96MB of memory?

 

Are we talking about this:

See:
Micron Millennia Transport XPE | Laptops | Reviews | PC Pro


Do your friend a favor and don't give it to him - at least not for digital photo editing.

 

As I remember USB didn't come until the second version of Win 98. There is some info on google when you query Win 95 and USB but it looks like it is a kludge and not a sure thing.

 

photo editing ? That sounds like some demanding application and I doubt a 15+ years machine can handle it (may be a 640x480) and what software you want to run(some ancient photoshop) ?

This is simply impractical even it is free.

 

I'm with everyone else here. Tell him to look for better refurbished laptops. That one just has zero chance of working for even the most basic tasks.

 

Yeah to the above, you are better off with a refurbished notebook around 300-400 for that. For the headache of trying to get a 15 year old notebook to do what you want plus the parts go buy a new machine.

 

1. As repeated above, this is not a computer for even basic photo editing.

2. If you want to play around with this system, look into a light-weight Linux install as a possible OS replacement. You'll be able to get some features that Win 95 does not support, but don't expect miracles.

 

Keep in mind even with a lightweight Linux, you still don't have enough RAM for even basic web browsing to be even remotely pleasant. Using that computer is like trying to dig a tunnel with a spoon. It might be a bit fun and adventurous, but don't expect to actually get anywhere.

 

Depends what you want to do. I've used PCMCIA USB adapter with W95 before (first version that doesn't support USB at all) just for flash drives. You can do this by using a DOS driver for the USB mass storage device with simple FAT file system and W95 will be able to use it.

 

If you can get crysis running on that machine then i would give it to your friend... otherwise try damn small linux or puppy linux