I'm going to add another solution since prices have gone down significantly the past few years: a 128GB SSD. You can get them for €20 and with a PATA-to-SATA connector they work great with older PCs. I use one for Windows 98 SE and it works brilliantly. Of course, this PC detects drives up to 32GB so I don't have the 4GB limit. A good thing too since 4GB is absolutely tiny for a Windows 9X machine.

red_avatar wrote on 2021-02-03, 11:24:

A good thing too since 4GB is absolutely tiny for a Windows 9X machine.

It's so funny how much we take for granted these days. 😁

I remember back in ~1997 or so my brother had our system (only computer in the house other than a Tandy 1000HX) running Windows 95 with a 133Mhz Cyrix at that time (later upgraded to a P200 MMX), a Scream'n 3D Verite 1000 (which I still have) and I believe an Aztech Sound Galaxy Washington 16 (could never forget that name). He was using a ~500MB drive for Windows (left over from a Packard Bell) and a secondary 1.2GB drive of some sort. The 1.2GB died (he lost a bunch of 3D rendered artwork, very sad day...), which didn't leave us with much! To add insult to injury, we had just mail-ordered Westwood's Bladerunner game after waiting for it to come out. Once it arrived, we had this horribly tiny drive to work with and had to run it mostly from the CD, which I believe was a 2x drive also left over from the PB. Not a good time! 🤣

He eventually bought a 2GB Quantum Bigfoot, which helped tremendously... even if it was a Bigfoot.

4GB solid state storage purchased in bulk for a few dollars each is so far removed from what we had back then. I remember the 6.4GB Quantum Fireball drive in my cutting edge ~$1700 Gateway G6-400 in early 1999 seemed positively massive.

u don't need a swap file if you have a enough ram. you can just swap directly to memory.

Yeah it's all about perspective. My Windows 95 machine had 1.3GB as well but was very quickly full so in less than a year I upgraded to 4GB and then a year and a half later to 20GB. If you consider that Unreal alone took a 300MB installation ... and a LOT of games moved away from FMV and CD audio to fit actual game content on the disc which then could be installed for "extra performance".

My current Windows 98 machine - the IBM PC 330 (P166 upgraded to a P233MMX) can handle 32GB which is ideal - I can easily install 100-200 games and have room to spare. To get stuck with 4GB these days ... ouch.

On win98 builds, I set this in he system.ini file to reduce some of the extra paging that happens :
[386Enh]
ConservativeSwapfileUsage = 1

The only negative with that switch is that your system may run a little slower when your system does need to page.
Switch doesn’t do anything in Win95 as far as I know.

http://smallvoid.com/article/win9x-conservative.html

I had a 2GB drive with my P166/Win95 and I bought a CD Burner for it. Early CD Burning software and the drives themselves didn't do too well with disc-to-disc, so I had to rip everything to the hard drive first.

What a juggling act that was with only 2GB to play with, but those burnt audio mix CD's I made blew everyone's mind away...