This is about the most convoluted and psycotic way of doing it but it does actually work! Infact this is how I put windows 95 on an old epson ActionNote 650c(50mhz 486dx2, 20mb ram, 250mb hd, floppy, no-cdrom, 640x480px screen).
You're going to need a second computer and a laplink cable to pull this off.
1) Create a bootable floppy disk with all the required tools fdisk.exe, format.com, sys.com, emm386.exe, etc. make sure to have a copy of interlnk.exe and intersvr.exe. these two programs let you share drives over a laplink cable.
2) boot from the floppy and setup the laptop. basically you want a clean install. so fdisk, format, and run sys to make the laptop able to boot up into dos by itself (without the floppy). copy all the files over from the boot floppy just to make life easier.
3) create a config.sys file with the following contents
-- config.sys --
device=c:\himem.sys
device=c:\emm386.exe
device=c:\interlnk.exe
-- end of file --
3) use the boot floppy for the second computer who's job will be to run intersvr.exe and share your windows 95 cdrom. actually it works best if you can setup the second machine to have a fat partition and copy the contents of the windows 95 cdrom to that partition.
4) after booting up the second computer with the floppy run intersvr.exe so it will share the partition with the cdrom files on it.
5) connect the two computers via the laplink cable
6) boot up the laptop. hopefully interlnk will start up, connect to the "server" and you will find you have a new drive on the laptop that has the contents of the windows disk. just run setup from this new "drive" and you'll be good to go!
it's pretty slow installing over the laplink cable but it does work. Like I said, I did it to my fathers old laptop that had windows 3.11 on it. I wiped it clean, installed 95, and now use it as my chat box.
Using that same laplink cable I setup windows xp to accept incomming connections via the parellel port and use the direct cable connection feature that windows 95 has. they link up and talk just fine and the laptop then has full network access through my xp box. The laptop is too slow and the screen limited to use it for surfing or email but I can fire up Mirc, plug in a full keyboard and chat all day long on it. It's great to move chat over to a seperate machine to free up my main box to do real work. Only complaint I have is I can't install trillian in win95 otherwise I could shift all my communication stuff onto a seperate machine.
Ok I've rambled enough
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