Hardware tips
HP Laserjet 4Si allows you to print on both sides of the page painlessly - just specify the option in Print/Properties/Page setup.
Yamaha OPL soundcard - default MIDI quality can be quite mediocre. To drastically improve it, goto Control Panel/OPLSoftSynth and change setting from 'Normal' to 'Excellent'. This makes a world of difference!!!
HP Deskjet - after the driver files are copied by 'add printer', it wants to install "Deskjet Printer Software". At this point you can safely click "exit installation" - ignore the warning "your printer will not work". It will work just fine, thank you.

How to speedup HP Scanjet 5100 scanner

I was shopping for a scanner and decided to buy Scanjet - I had a 5P version at work for a while and it's great. The salesman said that 5P is discontinued, so I should get 5100. I did. The quality was very good, but the scan process was taking forever - I could go have some tea, read a book, come back and it still wouldn't be done. I griped at the destiny, Allakh and Hewlett Packard till I decided to check their website. And there was THE solution: goto BIOS and make dead sure that your printer port is set to EPP mode (not "BI-DIR"!). After that I reinstalled scanning soft and now it's faster than a Speed Racer. Yeah!!

How to get rid from junk software on Compaq Presario

Do this one at your own risk.

Compaq Presario has enormous amount of junk preloaded. Main place where those programs are loaded is registry - do search for Run and Runservices keys and you'll find a bunch of crap there. On fresh Windows95, the only thing in Run should be systray.exe and RunServices should be empty (don't quote me on that, though :).

Anyway, I deleted all other junk from these keys and, surprisingly, haven't noticed any changes in system performance... except it now boots faster! The only thing I lost is those big blue letters that used to show up on screen when I pressed Sleep or Play buttons on CPU.

How to enable graphical chars on Panasonic KX4450I

Offline
Font, enter, enter,
courier 10, enter
symbol set, up arrow, change to 10u - graf symbol set
enter to save, back online.

How to install NEC CDR-25 under Windows95

It took me all night, but when I finally solved it, I was amazed how easy it was! To my best knowledge this IS NOT PROPERLY DOCUMENTED ANYWHERE, so if you know somebody else with CDR-25, feel free to share this info with them.

Keep the DOS CDROM drivers for now. CDR-25 is usually attached to Trantor T130 SCSI controller. Goto Control Panel/Add new hardware/SCSI Controller. Hilite Adaptec. Select Have Disk, goto {your cd letter}:\DRIVERS\STORAGE\ADAPTEC. Pick Trantor/T130 Miniport Driver.
Click next.
When prompted to reboot, say no. Edit CONFIG.SYS/AUTOEXEC.BAT and comment out DOS CDROM drivers.
When you reboot, Windows95 will see your SCSI controller, as well as EVERYTHING ATTACHED TO IT - for me, it instantly and seamlessly detected both CDR-25 and SCSI ZIPDRIVE!