I remember when Win95 first came out back in 1995. I went to the release party at a local Amusement park in Silicon Valley at the time called “Marriotts Great America”. Microsoft and Bill Gates had a BIG Celebration there and were giving away demo CD’s of Win95.
So I picked one up and tried it on my 486dx-33 computer with 4mb ram and 5400rpm iDE hard drive.
Well it loaded but was really slow and took for ever to install. I later upgraded the motherboard to a VLB with 486dx2-50 motherboard
And 8mb of ram But it was still to slow for Win95.
I have a AMD 5x86-133 right now with 32mb ram and CF card and it is running WIn95. It works okay for Win95 but it struggles to play
Some MP3 music or Video.
What runs amazingly well is Win3.11 on a Pentium 200mhz CPU. This is how Win3.11 is suppose to run.
It runs so well and responsive on a Pentium 200 it is amazing.
Infact I remember back in computer education school we use to run WinNT-351 on Pentium CPU computers
Pentium 75 thru 100mhz computers.
In Fact I think this is the best CPU for DOS gaming and Win3.11
For DOS gaming or Win3.11 a Pentium 75 thru 233mhz works bests.
On the 486 computers that I do have I only run DOS and WIn3.11
It performs okay but its like night and day compared to a Pentium CPU.
You really notice the difference.
I would not waste to much money on that 486 computer if you plan on running Win95 on it.
16mb of RAM or 32mb. max should be enough for Win95.
64mb of ram will not help improve performance much .
The 486 CPU is the bottle neck
Its going to run very slow but it probably will work.
I have found that for DOS gaming a 486dx2-66 CPU or higher is best.
256kb of cache is the sweet spot but I would not waste my time and money on cache.
A CPU upgrade will help improve performance best.
16mb of RAM is the sweet spot. Anything more is just excessive for Win3.11
The CPU is really the bottle neck in performance.
Adding more RAM and cache will only minimally help improve performance.
For noticeable performance gains you really need to upgrade the CPU.