A Central Shared Installation

Let's say you're tasked with installing Microsoft Office onto 50 computers in a workplace. What's the first idea that comes to mind? If you're not aware of the power of local area networking, relaying the same CD from one computer to another is probably what you're guessing. If the 50 computers in question are already connected to the network, Windows NT has built-in file sharing, so you could just pop the CD-ROM in one computer and have the rest of the computers access it. It's an effective way to save 700MB of hard disk space, but if you need to finish this quickly, there is a better way to go about it...

Office 95 Setup can be executed with a switch that allows creating a shared administrative installation on a server's hard disk. This installation can automatically fill out the organization name for successive installations and control how the software should be installed if desired. As for the whole thing with the MSAPPS folder, I never bothered finding out what it's supposed to do. Maybe it's supposed to work in Windows 95 should that end up being used as a workgroup server (which is not far-fetched).

Realistically, if there was a situation where most of the Office files would have to reside on the network, I would just have a giant RAM disk loaded with the installation, but 1GB of RAM to store an entire CD in fast memory was nothing but a pipe dream, even when the 440FX (Pentium Pro) chipset from 1996 was capable of addressing that much. Even now with a dual Pentium Pro server on hand, achieving the full 1GB of RAM in SIMMs is a large challenge with little return apart from RAM disk applications. As such, I'd just let users install Office to local disks, and all the user-made documents can be stored on a network server if necessary.

To conduct an administrative installation of Office 95, type SETUP.EXE /A in the root of the installation CD-ROM.

Now, if this very incompetent employee I love to fire can stop wasting time on FreeCell for once, I can show you how the clients are to install Office 95...

Alright... from here, installing Office 95 to the target system is simply a matter of loading the setup program from the network share the same way you would run it from the CD. As mentioned before, it takes care of a tad few things for you, and, if allowed, you can choose whether you want to run the program off the network server or your local hard disk. For even faster installation across 50 computers, I'm certain Office 95 can also take an unattended setup file, but I haven't cared to look into that. My need for loading a ton of updates and drivers into Windows 95 punctually led me to make 95D Lite, but I'm really not in any hurry to install an office suite on any of my computers...

In fact, the only times I do install Office on old computers is more often for the sake of a joke. Excel isn't a terrible program, it has legitimate uses, but I see it as that one abusive piece of software corporate executives always make their employees use for 8 hours a day without rhyme or reason. Word isn't much better in that regard. Don't even get me fucking started on PowerPoint...

So comes time to do office work where user BingBong types up a summary report on why whales are the best, and there is a new convention which has opens ! It a whale which can cosplay as another whale , WOW !!! You may be able to name at least one of the characters depicted in the bitmap drawing, but as for the second from the left, well... many years back, I wanted it to be for something else, but scrapped the character because it looks fucking stupid. What was it for? See also: Hardcore Windows 95

Wow. What a dumbshit convention that was. They didn't even have anyone portraying the flagship maroon whale! It was still a few months before that kicked in, but actually, some of the second whale's design attributes did end up influencing the maroon whale's design. I always wanted to make characters differently from how they were usually portrayed - sort of realistic (big ass white sclerae outlawed per se), but having some of that cartoonish flexibility.

Roaming Profiles

One of the things Hardcore Windows NT suffered from was a lack of a proper demonstration of roaming profiles, something that was planned from the beginning. Truth be told, roaming profiles tend to be unreliable in practice, but I wish I had gone around to demonstrate them properly - how to set them up, and the effects of logging into multiple workstations. Windows NT Server is also capable of serving roaming profiles to Windows 95 clients, but I never bothered to check if 9x and NT profiles are one in the same or there has to be a separate profile for each family.

That was just one of the things that was missing from Hardcore Windows NT... there were other "cooler" things I could've also shown like Voodoo2 support on Windows NT; no joke, I actually tried that on the Legend 994CDT before, likely some time before Hardcore Windows 95 was recorded. Hardcore Windows NT was meant to be more network-centric with a few other obscure features here and there, so I can't say I regret leaving it out, but forgetting to show roaming profiles more so reveals the problem with this old style of production - mainly just recording and editing everything as I go along rather than having a clear-cut outline ahead of time.

That approach would change by the end of the year, but as time went on, Hardcore Windows NT couldn't really be redone, so a smaller, harder-to-follow series was created to make up for it somewhat.

wint 4 profile roam ?

Nonetheless, Segment 3 was a turning point for the series, where the line between serious and weird would start to become blurred. It's definitely not the first time I tried making videos of old computers turn out so comedic or strange, as I always did have that background of a 2007 Smosh wannabe, much as I also took influence from bad creepypastas. Segment 3 is the first of its kind to employ abrupt tonal shifts in a non-conclusive manner on the same video.

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