Sorry, can't help you with this. I only know that back in the day (~94-95) 16MiB were a lot and some laptops still shipped with only 4-8MiB RAM.
Also, some magazine claimed that the official Win95 requirements were false and it needed about 32MiB to stop it from constantly using the swap file.
So even though Win95 runs on little memory and disk space, maybe it is more of a resource hog than Win98.
And there was also an interview with former Win95 developers, where they said that Win95 wasn't ready when they had to finish development.
But I don't know if this affects only the first release or later ones, aswell. Maybe that memory bug is gone in Win95c, don't know.
If you want, you can also use Win98SE with the Win95 explorer. This thing was called 98lite or something.
But if you really want a number, I would guess that 96MiB would be a sweet spot for Win95.
This amount of memory caused the fastest boot up in my VMs. But this doesn't have to say much..
Maybe it's just because of the design of the VM or 9x memory managment (up-down vs down-up, etc.).
But I could be wrong. I'm not that of a Win95 guru. 😉
Saying that, I wasn't even able to afford that much memory (126MiB-256MiB) for my first XP machine, which was running at 64MiB.
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