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I am not sure. I want to have Windows 3.1 so I can use specific Win3.1 apps but I no longer have the floppy drive so I can't install it. Is there a way to legally install Win 3.1 with IMG? I don't think MS supports Win3.1 at all.

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    "so I can use specific Win3.1 apps" ahahahahahaha
    – Chris
    Jan 10, 2010 at 5:09

2 Answers 2

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There's no free Win 3.1. But, you can get a USB floppy drive pretty cheap on ebay.

Now all you have to do is find an MS-DOS machine to install it on - did you remember that Win 3.1 needs MS-DOS? Copy the Win 3.1 install files onto a CD or the local disk first, because I don't think you'll have much luck getting MS-DOS to read the USB floppy.

Don't forget that 32-bit Windows OS's support running Win 3.1 applications - more or less. The x64 versions don't (at least I think the Win16 support is still there in 32-bit versions - you might need to check). It would be worth seeing if your regular Windows installation will run the program.

I really can't imagine what Win 3x apps you'd want to run except out of curiosity (of course, there might be more reasons to want to run MS-DOS: http://blogs.msdn.com/virtual_pc_guy/archive/tags/Gaming+under+Virtual+PC/default.aspx).

Finally, if you do go through with an actual installation, I hope you're planning to do it in a Virtual Machine - getting that stuff to install in a VM will be painful enough - I'd guess that trying to get it installed on a modern system is likely to be futile.

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    Actually, Windows 3.11 and MS-DOS are both available on my TechNet Subscriber Download Page as Self-Extracting RAR files. I don't see why you couldn't burn them to a CD and boot from them? Especially if you were trying to do this in a Virtual PC or VM environment.
    – James Watt
    Apr 24, 2010 at 1:36
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    Yes, but TechNet isn't free. Apr 24, 2010 at 2:04
  • Correct, but the first half of this answer is that you need to have a floppy drive.
    – James Watt
    Apr 24, 2010 at 4:15
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I have not done it myself, but sources suggest that 3.11 runs like a champ with Dosbox. I do know from personal experience that it runs just about any DOS app with ease.

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    much better idea than installing it on a machine (unless of course you have an old machine lying about, but then again, if you did, you'd have 3.1, right?) Jan 10, 2010 at 10:12

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