Can Windows 95 run .NET and other modern apps? A YouTuber found the way

.NET Framework was introduced in Windows 98

Reading time icon 2 min. read


Readers help support Windows Report. We may get a commission if you buy through our links. Tooltip Icon

Read our disclosure page to find out how can you help Windows Report sustain the editorial team. Read more

.NET Framework install on Windows 95

Windows 95 was revolutionary in the 90s because it allowed everyone to operate it without any technical skills. Apparently, there’s a lot of fun in teaching an old dog new tricks and an YouTuber who calls himself MattKC found a challenge in making Windows 95 run thousands of apps that Microsoft deemed obsolete.

However, he first needed to port .NET for everything else to work, and that proved much more challenging than he thought.

In this almost 52 minutes long clip, MattKC almost gave up because he also struggled to install KernelEx and missing DLL files and still couldn’t get .NET Framework to run. For the record, .NET was first introduced with Windows 98 which ran on a Windows NT architecture.

He finally discovered that the ndphlpr legacy driver, which was necessary to .NET to run was also causing it to crash.

MattKC finally found the coding problem behind it using WinDebug, that was also a struggle to install. The YouTuber managed to get the error to appear in a window and he could fix the DLL compatibility. Finally, he got Snipping Tool and Lego Island Rebuilder to run on Windows 95. Victory!

This was only a very short version of the story. You can find more info on Windows Central, and, of course, in his clip. We don’t know how many hours he spent on this troubleshooting almost impossible mission but the video is the very least entertaining, so we encourage it to watch it.

Comparing it to Windows 95, Windows 7 is a modern OS and many are still using it right now. By the way, anyone tried to run Copilot on Windows 7 and maybe confront with Clippy? Tell us what you think in the comments below.

More about the topics: .NET Framework, Windows

User forum

0 messages