First post, by radiounix
So I just installed Windows 95 OSR 2.5 on my 486 DX2/66 with 16MB of RAM. On a fresh, untouched install it was snappy like a modern PC with an SSD. Really quite impressive. Now I've got the official Microsoft runtime library and system updates installed, and have installed a bit more than a dozen programs. And have used it for a few days, rebooted it some number of times, .etc. It's still about as fast doing something CPU-bound like unpacking an archive, but UI-related things like Windows Explorer and application interfaces are at best running at about half the speed. I've still got more than five megabytes of untouched RAM at a fresh desktop with no swap usage -- and don't seem to be using more than a few megabytes of swap file even with several programs running. The CPU sits at idle when I'm not doing anything, the hard disk still has 200MB free, and there's nothing on the sys tray.
So, is this as good as it gets? Or is there some update I shouldn't be installing, .etc? Other than setting the vcache with maximum and minimum values and using a permanent swap file, are there any other tweaks worth trying?
One problem I'm not having, actually, is instability! I've yet to make the system crash, have an unexpected error message, .etc. It feels at least as stable as XP. I wonder how much of people's problems with Windows 95 were caused by some combination of; a malware infection, terrible bugged drivers, no system updates, Hamster Dance desktop bling, DLL stomping by Kewl Shareware Hits 2000 type software with broken installers, having a PC Chips motherboard and fake UL mark power supply -- maybe even a sanded down, remarked CPU. The 95 era truly was the frontier of popular for the masses computer adoption, and it was as messy, visually loud and under permanent construction.gif abandonment.