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Really, and how do you do this without having to use a 3rd party paid app?

Why would you think that it would have to be a paid app? There are heaps of free programs available for Windows for doing stuff like this. My first search on Google found a couple of examples to get the start menu back.

Or you could just hack up your own start menu without any extra programs.

This concept is not new. There was a program called Calmira that made Windows 3.1 look like Windows 95. Have a look at this screenshot!

Really, and how do you do this without having to use a 3rd party paid app?

Why would you think that it would have to be a paid app? There are heaps of free programs available for Windows for doing stuff like this. My first search on Google found a couple of examples to get the start menu back.

Or you could just hack up your own start menu without any extra programs.

This concept is not new. There was a program called Calmira that made Windows 3.1 look like Windows 95. Have a look at this screenshot!

Then again, what wasn't better than Windows 3?

Um... Windows 2 and 1?

Of course if it's 3.1x, you can fix it with Calmira. Go ahead and laugh, but it helped me get the last life out of a 486 Thinkpad with only 8mb. If there'd been a 16bit browser that could handle CSS, I'd have kept it for even longer.

Worse, there's Calmira which is a rather good w95 style interface for 3.1. It's on my old 486 8mb Thinkpad that can't install 32bit 95 thanks to a memory flaw, and it runs great.

But yeah, like a number of people I have a w98 partition on my main machine for gaming -- it's depressing and shocking how fast basic duties are handled. Want to dig up a file with the file manager? BANG, things open. You can turn off all the eye candy you want in KDE and Gnome, but you never get anywhere near that responsiveness, or even the responsiveness the 98 interface has on late Pentium I machines. Nor with any of the lightweight '*box' managers, which aren't as feature-rich as 98.

[Fair's fair - we should point out to the unexperienced that 3.1 is crummy for graphics, and there are no CSS-capable browsers for 16bit. You /can/ use it online, but only in the same way you /can/ use Lynx.]

I believe Windows NT 3.51 was 21 floppies...

Anyway, there's something much newer than what you used, for the taskbar... Calmira. And, there was a fork updated in March of this year...

(And, speaking of NT 3.51... Microsoft actually wrote their own Explorer shell for NT 3.51, called NewShell, although it wasn't meant for general release. Installing it on 3.51 actually causes it to report as NT 4.0, as the original NT 4.0 alphas were merely NT 3.51 with NewShell installed.)

So...question:
An OS is required to interact with the hardware? I used Calmira for YEARS, and always considered it an OS in it's own right... Now that's not to say I'm not wrong, I sure as hell am human!


Edit: OK so I can't really edit but I always sit on my posts for a bit and think before I submit, and figured I might as well concede. there's a huge difference between being the OS (Windows 3.1) and a shell (explorer.exe, calmira...etc...)

Well cool, I learned something new today!

Check this out for your Win 3.11 installations.

http://www.calmira.de/

I suppose you could do a piece-meal Windows -- start with the NT kernel and add functions as you want them or as applications you want to use demand them (ideally the apps would be written to a certain open API so you could install a different chunk of code (ie firefox instead of IE) if so desired) but in all honesty, does anyone REALLY want that? You instantly made computing much more complex and for what purpose?

This was fairly popular during the days of Windows 3.11 The Calmira shell replacement for Windows 3.11 is still very popular among people who have relatively weak hardware. In fact, using Calmira on Windows 3.11 has about the same niche feel that Linux had in its early days. It's even spawned a bit of a side-market where people are either developing custom apps or porting existing apps back to Windows 3.11 so that they don't have to deal with Windows XP, et al.

I've seen WinAmp back-ported, as well as other multimedia and internet-related apps.