That last part is arguable. Win95 installed is still relatively thin on the Win9x side of the family as long as you avoid IE4.

leileilol wrote:

That last part is arguable. Win95 installed is still relatively thin on the Win9x side of the family as long as you avoid IE4.

100+mb is still a lot considering i only have 2*500mb disks in total.

i wont recommend even the first edition of win95 for anything less than Pentium 133MHz and at least 16MB of RAM.

High end 386 runs Win95 quite good actually - in terms of loading and opening basic programs.

Config like this:

- 386DX-40
- mobo with 256KB cache (can also be a 386/486 hybrid with VLB)
- 16 or 32MB of memory
- VGA card that supports Windows acceleration
- CF card for HDD

I probably wouldn't run Windows games on anything pre-Pentium MMX to begin with

jheronimus wrote:

I probably wouldn't run Windows games on anything pre-Pentium MMX to begin with

-> A P166 MMX was my first Windows XP rig. 386/486 is more period-correct for Win95, I believe. 😉

Period correct:

286... Windows 3.0 & 3.1
386... Windows 3.11
486... Windows 3.11 & Windows 95 & WinNT 3.51
Pentium... Windows 95, NT4
Pentium MMX... Windows 98, NT4, 2000
Pentium II, III, IV... Windows 98, 2000, XP

386 will run Win95, but not much more then the OS itself.

Pro's
"runs a lot more applications/games and see how it performs"
Poorly would be my answer, Sure it opens but is it really useable?

"pretends to be a modern computer"
haha, WIn95 is modern? People are arguing if WinXP is retro, Think any Win9x OS is safely no longer considered modern

Cons:
"extremely slow"
You said it!

"takes a lot of hdd space"
Can be trimmed down, but 386 terms I would agree

1 Pro you didn't mention is easier file management/networking. Even then I would stick with Windows 3x
Do understand you don't intend to keep Win95 on your 386, just experiment, which means you left out the most important Pro
"gives me a reason to play around with my 386!"

@kixs On paper, yes.. But to be honest, in its early years, the Pentium was not affordable for many users.
Back in the day I've seen quite a few low-end systems that were forcibly upgraded to Win95 RTM.
386SX, 4MB RAM, 80MB HDD.. The Win95 hype made it possible.

386 will run Win95, but not much more then the OS itself.

Tell that my dad. 😉 He upgraded his 386DX40 to 16MiB of RAM in ~95, just for Win95.
He used his PC for business tasks only, though. Visual Basic, e-banking, MS Works, Netscape 2.x, WinCIM,
printing visiting cards, Gupta SQL, FoxPro etc.

Personally, I think RAM is the key factor.
The OS/2 Warp people also recommended to have at least 8MB installed in practice.

Here's someone's else story about installing Windows 95 in '95.
25 MHz 386 running Windows 95

I wouldn't recommend running Windows 95 on a 386 (even a high end one) - it won't "break" anything but it surely isn't going to be very fast.
Back in the day, Microsoft just marketed it as being able to run on a 386 in order to appeal to a much wider audience (believe it or not, some people did still have 386 PC's in 1995 and ran Windows 3.11 on it quite happily 🤣).
I would suggest at least a 486DX-33 with 8MB RAM to have some level of acceptable performance.

Wrong forum. Marvin is for using old hardware.

Moved.

Answering your question: yes it will run.
But i don't see the "pros" compensating the "cons".
Btw you didn't mentioned the ram amount but 16mb should be fine.

I will never run Win95 on machines below Pentium-1 and think that machines up to and including 486 are better left for pure Dos. Shure I run pure MS-Dos-6.22 on my P-166. Yet that is how I use my computers. Shure it can be done on a 386, the question is, how masochistic one really are.

Joey_sw wrote:

i wont recommend even the first edition of win95 for anything less than Pentium 133MHz and at least 16MB of RAM.

incorrect, windows 95 already runs fine on a mid 486 dx2 with 8 mb ram.

I've not yet tried running Win95 on a "high-end 386".

That said, just for shiggles last year I did manage to shoehorn/forcefully coerce Win95 onto a system with a 20MHz 386DX, 8MB RAM and a 40MB hard drive. Had to compress the hard drive with DriveSpace, but even then the installer refused to run so I had to manually copy the Windows folder over from my 486, and even then I STILL had to manually go through and delete lots of unneeded files (Wavs, wallpapers, etc) to get it to fit. In the end it managed to go on the thing with about 8MB to spare.

As for how it performed...eeeeeeehhhhh, better than I was expecting to be honest, but otherwise not something worth attempting beyond mere curiosity. It struggled just to simply play a midi, let alone do much more. Needless to say, multitasking was impossible. It would be more apt to say "it crawls Win95" rather than "it runs Win95". 🤣

Maybe for a laugh, because that is a joke. I don't even put 95 on my 486DX4, because I like Win 3.11 for certain things.

brostenen wrote:

I will never run Win95 on machines below Pentium-1 and think that machines up to and including 486 are better left for pure Dos. Shure I run pure MS-Dos-6.22 on my P-166. Yet that is how I use my computers. Shure it can be done on a 386, the question is, how masochistic one really are.

My first Windows 95 PC was a Pentium 166 MMX - my friend had a year-and-a-half older Pentium 75 with 8MB of memory which still came with DOS and Windows 3.1. When he tried to install Windows 95, it ran like a dog. So yeah ... I concur. I mean, on my 386, even Windows 3.1 runs slowly and it has 6MB of memory! Takes about 10 seconds to run Paintbrush for crying out loud let alone running Windows 95.

To answer "will you run...", NO.
What I'd like to mention here and is actually the reason for me posting this is that when Win95 were released many, many users still had a 386 and installed them having 4 (or 8 in the best-case scenario) MBs of RAM. Yes, we all eventually got at least a 486DX/4 after the experience but this was a reality for a bit.