This will be "unpopular opinion" it seems, but…

386 - Windows 3.11
486 - Windows 95
Pentium or newer - Windows 98

max out on RAM in all cases.

GemCookie wrote on 2025-08-14, 09:25:

I'll take Windows 95 on any hardware. Both operating systems are horribly unstable, but 95 at least runs significantly faster, even on a Pentium 4 system. I also have a soft spot for the underrated releases – I've skipped 32-bit Windows XP for 2000, XP x64 and Vista on several of my machines.

Echoing the sentiment, everyone already knows my opinion but here goes again anyway:

Windows 95 OSR2 up to something in the ~1 GHz range, always. Pentium 4/AthlonXP is where I tend to draw the line. On hardware older than that Windows 98/SE doesn't offer any tangible benefits, and is often less stable and slower, even with its supposedly improved memory management etc. In some instances you'll find drivers for things out-of-box in Win98 that you would have to manually add for Windows 95, but that's a minor issue - just have the drivers ready to go and its not a bother. You'll usually have to update the drivers shipping with the OS to newer versions anyway.

For P4/Athlon-era hardware, one might as well skip ahead to Windows XP - but there some people prefer Windows 98 because it allows them to keep "real DOS" for older apps and games.

Jo22 wrote on 2025-09-06, 00:14:

+1 […]
Show full quote

ppgrainbow wrote on 2025-08-16, 08:14:

OS/2 2.0, 2.1, 2.11 and 2.11 SMP can all perform well if 64 MB or more RAM is installed. 😀

In OS/2 2.0, Windows 3.0 only supported Standard and Real Mode and can address up to 64 MB of memory in the subsystem. For OS/2 2.1 and up, Windows 3.1x supported Standard and 386 Enhanced Mode and is capable of addressing up to 128 MB of memory in the subsystem.

+1

There's a commercial/training video about OS/2 v2:
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLC5zoB … GGf3jFOAYV87R_u

In essence, OS/2 was initially implementing the whole Windows memory-managment within Win-OS/2.

But beginning with Windows 3.1 it patched existing Windows to become an DPMI client.
That's very interesting, because it removed need for XMS/Himem.sys.
Memory now could be accessed from Protected-Mode and with better performance.

In principle, Win-OS/2 would have had offered better performance to
demanding Windows applications that juggled with lots of data.
Provided, that OS/2 itself have had enough physical RAM available.

I can attest to Win-OS/2 running Win16 applications faster than native Win3.1 (under Warp 3.0)