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COPYING THE WINDOWS 9x CAB FILES

If you've taken a look at your Windows 9x CD ROM, you've no doubt found that there is a WIN95 folder (or Win98 folder) which contains a bunch of files each having an extension of ".CAB". For instance, on my old Win95 install CD there are files called WIN95_02.CAB, WIN95_03.CAB, and so on up to WIN95_29.CAB. These are "cabinet" files which contain the Windows 95 code compressed. My Win98 install CD had similarly named files, except that the 95 was replaced by 98.

The program that decompresses the files (much like PKUNZIP or WINZIP or various others, which decompress files with an extension of ".ZIP") is called EXTRACT.EXE. Many of you who bought your computers fairly recently (at least since Windows 95 came out a few years ago) will have a copy of these same files on your hard drive, often in a WIN95 folder or Win98 folder. My old Windows 95 Hewlett Packard Pavilion computer came that way. Another common place to store these folders is in a folder called

Windows\Options\Cabs.

My Dell computer that came with Windows ME installed on it had those files stored in a folder named as above. It takes up a fair amount of space (at least 40 megabytes), but it's a fast way of installing different Windows components, without having to dig out the CD. If you have the room on your hard drive and you don't already have a WIN9x or Option\Cabs folder, then you can use Explorer to copy the CD ROM folder onto your hard drive.