Back in the day we had Win95 on a 486 / DX2 50mhz. 13 floppy upgrade. Didn't yet have a CDROM or sound card. Ran fine considering the specs, was either 16 or 32 mb RAM, forgot...
P1: Packard Bell - 233 MMX, Voodoo1, 64 MB, ALS100+
P2-V2: Dell Dimension - 400 Mhz, Voodoo2, 256 MB
P!!! Custom: 1 Ghz, GeForce2 Pro/64MB, 384 MB
I got a Pentium 66 in 1995, and it had 16MB of RAM, which was considered quite luxurious for home use at that time, so I would be very surprised about 32MB in a 486.
I would stick with DOS/WFW 3.11 as well.
I run Win95 on my Cyrix 5x86 system with 32MB of ram, and 256k of cache. This is my only 486 atm.
I previously had a DX4-100 CPU in there, it was acceptable for Wind0ws 95 but that would probably be my limit.
If going for Windows 95 on a 486 computer, avoid installing the Windows Desktop Update which integrates Internet Explorer features into Windows Explorer like Windows 98. For FAT32 partition support, go for OSR2 or later.
VIA C3 Nehemiah 1.2A @ 1.46 GHz | ASUS P2-99 | 256 MB PC133 SDRAM | GeForce3 Ti 200 64 MB | Voodoo2 12 MB | SBLive! | AWE64 | SBPro2 | GUS
Depends what you're trying to use really, 3.1 is gonna be ample and efficient on 93-94 stuff, then mid 95-96 stuff, to be running on Win3.1 although you can, it's gonna be on a wobbly pile of software soup, questionable svga drivers, winGs and win32s, which experience tends to pale after the novelty wears off. So early Win95 version may actually run nicer for that kind of thing, unless you're tight on RAM, which is gonna give you swap thrash in 3.x anyway if you're doing things that want more than 4MB.
Unicorn herding operations are proceeding, but all the totes of hens teeth and barrels of rocking horse poop give them plenty of hiding spots.
