What about Windows for Workgroups 3.11?

Most dos era programs will handle 32mb just fine.
Even 3.11 is pretty blazing on 32mb even though it’s minor overkill.

Before I upgraded to 95 I had 20mb of ram.

vetz wrote on 2024-04-30, 19:23:

What about Windows for Workgroups 3.11?

+1 to this, even though we ran Windows 95 on a 486DX2-66 back in the day, I always advocate 3.11 on anything from that era below 100MHz. Slips in and out of DOS 6.22 easily.

That said, the P60 would handle Win 95 much better than our old 486 did.

The first release of Micro$hit Winblows 95 should run pretty well on a P60 with 16MB of ram. I probably wouldn't bother playing games on it though. Usually games of that period had both DOS and Windows versions, and the DOS versions usually ran faster.

vetz wrote on 2024-04-30, 19:23:

What about Windows for Workgroups 3.11?

sure i mean dos 6.22 + win 3.11

exactly the same software configuration of 486 DX2/DX4… probably i can install XP but… I think Pure DOS is more appropriate…. or not?

I ran both OS2 Warp 3.0 and Win 95 on my Zeos Pantera 60 Back in the day without problems.

I dont remember how much ram I had but probably a good amount as I used that system for CAD/CAM programming and I dont ever remember running into the floating point error that processor suffered from.

I remember buying OS2 Warp as it released before Win95 as I didnt want to wait another year and installed it on a secondary drive to dual boot from as for programming it had NT. . I know this order of events as the next computer I got was a Micron Millennia XKU P300 and that didnt come out until '97. Wish I still had that Zeos and its giant tower case but I still own that Micron.

AlessandroB wrote on 2024-04-30, 18:55:

I know that I can easily install Windows95 on it, but my question was that considering the performance they were CPUs that mainly targeted MS-DOS 6.22 and therefore would you recommend installing a maximum of 16MB of RAM?

They targeted DOS and Windows 3.1 for the simple reason that when the Pentium 60 and 66 were released in early 1993, Windows 95, NT or indeed even Windows 3.11 did not yet exist. Apart from DOS/Win3.1, the alternatives back then were OS/2 2.0, or SCO Unix for the serious workstation users.

By the time Windows 95 came along, they were over 2.5 years old, which goes a long way to explain why Pentium 60/66 systems generally didn't shine under the new OS. Actually the CPUs themselves aren't the biggest problem. Given RAM prices in early 1990s, even though Socket 4 systems generally supported 192MB of RAM, it's unlikely such systems would have more than 8-16MB installed, and Windows 95 will run on that, but it will perform poorly. Moreover, early Pentium chipsets were absolute slugs in terms of performance and motherboards with them also tended to include buggy CMD IDE controllers. The total package was underwhelming by the time Windows 95 rolled along and the i430FX chipset had revolutionized memory and I/O performance.

Just think about trying to run Windows 98 on a late 1995 Pentium 133, or Windows XP on a 1999 early Pentium 3. Yes, with RAM upgrades they would be able to run the OS, but no, it wouldn't even come close to the performance of low-end contemporary options. The same applied to the P60 and 66 when Windows 95 came along.

AlessandroB wrote on 2024-04-30, 21:15:

vetz wrote on 2024-04-30, 19:23:

What about Windows for Workgroups 3.11?

sure i mean dos 6.22 + win 3.11

exactly the same software configuration of 486 DX2/DX4… probably i can install XP but… I think Pure DOS is more appropriate…. or not?

I would certainly agree that pure DOS or DOS + 3.1 would be more appropriate than XP; the Pentium 60 would really struggle with that OS even if the installer worked with it. I think even 98SE might be a stretch.

Dan386DX wrote on 2024-04-30, 21:56:

AlessandroB wrote on 2024-04-30, 21:15:

vetz wrote on 2024-04-30, 19:23:

What about Windows for Workgroups 3.11?

sure i mean dos 6.22 + win 3.11

exactly the same software configuration of 486 DX2/DX4… probably i can install XP but… I think Pure DOS is more appropriate…. or not?

I would certainly agree that pure DOS or DOS + 3.1 would be more appropriate than XP; the Pentium 60 would really struggle with that OS even if the installer worked with it. I think even 98SE might be a stretch.

I've run Windows 98SE on a Pentium 75 once.
It had 24 MB of RAM, which was the lower limit, I suppose.
To what I can tell, the experience was neither good nor really bad.

Windows was waiting for the hard disk often, so opening the Windows Explorer wasn't done in an instant. Rather step-by-step.

But browsing the internet with IE 5.5 and a 56k modem worked just normally.
Windows 98SE ran much better on that spec than SuSe Linux 6, I remember.

I suppose that a Pentium 60 wasn't that much of a difference here.

Unfortunately, I didn't play much games on this PC back then. Not Windows 9x games, at least.

What comes to mind were Moorhuhn, a demo of Sven Bømwøllen, Need for Speed II SE and, err, Wet: The Sexy Empire.
I, I didn't buy the game, honestly. I've found the CD laying around on the sidewalk, a few metres away from home. 😅

Your going to do most your gaming in dos, so 16MB is more then enough.
Windows will be more used for system management site of things.

Dos 6 with or without Win3x won't benefit from more than 16MB, but it won't hurt either.
Win95 gives you the benefit of dos 7 enhancements like fat32, long file names as well as nicer? GUI it'll work with 16MB but 32MB will feel more responsive.

AlessandroB wrote on 2024-04-30, 18:55:

I know that I can easily install Windows95 on it, but my question was that considering the performance they were CPUs that mainly targeted MS-DOS 6.22 and therefore would you recommend installing a maximum of 16MB of RAM?

16MB of RAM would have been a luxury back then... then again, so were the P60/66s. Normal mortals got 486s.

Keep in mind that in 1995, I paid $250CAD for 4 megs of RAM. So... 16 megs would have been CAD$1000 in RAM alone.

Realistically, Windows 3.1 and 95 running period-correct software will scream on 16MB of RAM. If you're running software from 1998 on Win95, multi-tasking, etc, then you need more RAM. But... you also probably don't want a P60/66.

Except servers, maybe. WfW 3.11 with enabled network can make good use of 8, 12 MB or more RAM.
In offices, a WfW mail server had need for lots of RAM, too.
I think I've seen an article once in a magazine, which was about this.
The server was a 486 with lots of RAM. It was being stored in a broom closet, I think.

But these are special cases, of course.
Likewise, software development PCs sometimes had unusual amounts of memory.
8 or 16 MB in the 486 era, for example.
The memory was used for ram drives or disk caches, at worst, if there was no better use.

In the DTP and picture editing fields, memory was getting low very easily, too.
Same goes for audio editing in the studio or in the production of video files (mov, avi, mpg).

I remember that certain PC magazines had whole video episodes on CD. They were low-res, of course.

But the video compression at the magazine's office surely had required lots of RAM, too.
Maybe an encoder board, as well. So there were power users with 8 to 16 MB of RAM in the 486 days.

OS/2 2.1 or Warp needs 8 MB of RAM to be useable, at least.
With 12 to 16 MB onwards, the system was beginning to run smooth.
Similarly to how Windows 3.1 did on a 286 with 4 MB of RAM.

Edit: BBS/Mailbox systems were a thing in early-mid 90s, too, I almost forgot.
Their sysops surely had a need for a fast 486 with 8 or more MB of RAM.
The BBS software had to be run multiple times, maybe, one instance for each port/node/user.
So the Megabytes just flew, I imagine.

Edit: Again, these are just special cases in the grand picture.
Home users didn't invest in memory, because they saw no practical use.
For running MS Word, Works 2 or Chips Challenge on Windows 3.1 it wasn't needed.
And games.. They either did fit into memory or not.
Except DOS4GW extender games, maybe, with virtual memory.
They swapped around if physical memory was too low.
So games could be sold to users of underpowered hardware just fine.
The games became more and more playable over time, as hardware on the user's side has improved.

I was doing an early adoption win95 rollout in August 1995 for a fortune 500 company. We were installing Win95 on end user systems as slow as HP omnibook 600 or a Deskpro XE 433. Pretty much anything that could get upgraded to 8MB ram and a 200MB hard drive got the new OS. The end users were happy with the stability and 32bit office suite. They might need to get a cup of coffee while it booted, but the performance was fine once the page file settled down. We encouraged users to get 16MB of ram though. Pentium 60 CPU would have been a no brainer for an upgrade. But this was Win95, not Win98. We hadn”t seen anything faster than a P90 come through purchasing at that point.

In case you were wondering, corporate messaging was driving the upgrade. All of the effort was worth it to get away from the Exchange client for Win31 betas and the DOS ndis network stack for MS Mail.

I’d be fine running Win95b on a Pentium 60 as long as it had a 2d window acceleration.

Jo22 wrote on 2024-04-30, 23:04:

I've run Windows 98SE on a Pentium 75 once. It had 24 MB of RAM, which was the lower limit, I suppose. To what I can tell, the e […]
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Dan386DX wrote on 2024-04-30, 21:56:

AlessandroB wrote on 2024-04-30, 21:15:

sure i mean dos 6.22 + win 3.11

exactly the same software configuration of 486 DX2/DX4… probably i can install XP but… I think Pure DOS is more appropriate…. or not?

I would certainly agree that pure DOS or DOS + 3.1 would be more appropriate than XP; the Pentium 60 would really struggle with that OS even if the installer worked with it. I think even 98SE might be a stretch.

I've run Windows 98SE on a Pentium 75 once.
It had 24 MB of RAM, which was the lower limit, I suppose.
To what I can tell, the experience was neither good nor really bad.

Windows was waiting for the hard disk often, so opening the Windows Explorer wasn't done in an instant. Rather step-by-step.

But browsing the internet with IE 5.5 and a 56k modem worked just normally.
Windows 98SE ran much better on that spec than SuSe Linux 6, I remember.

I suppose that a Pentium 60 wasn't that much of a difference here.

Unfortunately, I didn't play much games on this PC back then. Not Windows 9x games, at least.

What comes to mind were Moorhuhn, a demo of Sven Bømwøllen, Need for Speed II SE and, err, Wet: The Sexy Empire.
I, I didn't buy the game, honestly. I've found the CD laying around on the sidewalk, a few metres away from home. 😅

Thank you for the review! Windows 98 on that system does not sound like a fun time 🤣

Regarding Wet: The Sexy Empire, I believe you that you found the game in the street.

Many would not 😉

In my memory, if you had a P60 and 16MB of RAM when Win95 came out, you were doing pretty good. We didn't even have that.

As far as today, it's just a matter whether you are running something like a more mature win32 app, or something that requires min Win95. In '95 there weren't exactly too many programs that really needed Win95. So you could get away with either. So DOS 6 + Win3.1 is also fine, unless you wanted more stability with Win95, and that should work too. Basically it's up to you.

the focus of discussion of this post is not on whether it is possible to install win95/win98 or xp on a Pentium60 (which I will certainly try to do out of curiosity) but whether in your opinion it is a machine that expresses its potential at 90% in the field of pure dos

AlessandroB wrote on 2024-05-01, 04:06:

the focus of discussion of this post is not on whether it is possible to install win95/win98 or xp on a Pentium60 (which I will certainly try to do out of curiosity) but whether in your opinion it is a machine that expresses its potential at 90% in the field of pure dos

No, as pure DOS runs fine on a much slower machine.

The point many people are making is that RAM, not CPU, is a big limiting factor for a lot of other stuff and that a typical P60 had very little RAM which was more limiting than CPU capabilities themselve (mine came with 8MB, which meant it struggled with MS Office 6 on Windows 3.1 - this I fixed by installing another 2x 4MB at great expense in january 1996)

dionb wrote on 2024-05-01, 07:55:

AlessandroB wrote on 2024-05-01, 04:06:

the focus of discussion of this post is not on whether it is possible to install win95/win98 or xp on a Pentium60 (which I will certainly try to do out of curiosity) but whether in your opinion it is a machine that expresses its potential at 90% in the field of pure dos

No, as pure DOS runs fine on a much slower machine.

The point many people are making is that RAM, not CPU, is a big limiting factor for a lot of other stuff and that a typical P60 had very little RAM which was more limiting than CPU capabilities themselve (mine came with 8MB, which meant it struggled with MS Office 6 on Windows 3.1 - this I fixed by installing another 2x 4MB at great expense in january 1996)

ok bau for a gaming side, gaming tailored for win95 are too heavy for P60 i think..

in the same way a 486DX4 is considered a pure dos machine (P60 power is close to DX4 i have seen here)

Windows 3.1x can use up to 256MB of RAM. But yes after 32MB it does not really matter to perfomance.

And if you intall MS-DOS 6.xx delete DBLSPACE.BIN DRVSPACE.BIN from root to free some RAM.