With those specs, I think you'd be much better off with Windows 98SE since that will give you support for most 802.11b and g cards and with a patch called KernelEx installed, you can also run current Firefox versions.

For Windows 95, I'm sure you can run older versions of Thunderbird. Eudora would also be a good app to consider.

And there is always Linux!

Alphakilo470 wrote:

With those specs, I think you'd be much better off with Windows 98SE since that will give you support for most 802.11b and g cards and with a patch called KernelEx installed, you can also run current Firefox versions.

I have editted my post - it is not 233 but 133Mhz.

It doesn't need any WiFi card as it will be connected into a LAN PCMCIA which is detected by Windows 95, so I think as far as it runs well, it is enough.

Mau1Wurf1977, older Linux (like 2.4 series) are having much issues. I tried installing DSL on a similarly spec'd machine and running Firefox is a pain. Tried to install Seamonkey, but compiling from sources are hard to do in this slow machine, and dependencies are getting harder. I prefer Linux for my newer machine though.

For a web browser perhaps seamonkey, k-meleon, opera 9

I remember Outlook Express 5 worked fine on a Pentium MMX 166 with 95B but its a bit old and you probably don't want IE or OE on that 95 install.

Seamonkey and Opera both have inbuilt email clients I think not that I've used either.

OffByOne from Homepage Software, if you don't mind a CSS-less but fast web and the most uninforming download manager ever.

Even on a 133mhz Pentium Windows 98SE will still run fine. I have Windows 98 running on my Mitsubishi tablet computer which has 48mb of memory and a 133mhz AMD 5x86 and all runs well.

However, Windows 95 might bring a little less clutter. There's some trade-offs but I still think 98SE would be the most useful OS just for being able to run current Firefox versions alone.

As for e-mail, Thunderbird 2 is my pick for Windows 98 and Eudora or Outlook Express if you use Windows 95.

do you purposely not want fancy features ?
if so basic browser it doesnt support flash, java, javascript, activeX or anything really. to some people thats an advantage
also it doesnt need to be installed

Stick with Win95, though make sure you have OSR2 and get the various unofficial updates to go along with it. Get Opera 9 for the browser... I can't remember if 9.5/9.6 works on Win95 or not, but I know 9.27 does. Use the built-in adblocker, with Fanboy`s block list (and I recommend the element hider as well).

That setup was quite tolerable for web browsing on a P133/64MB machine I had. And "tolerable" is about as good as you're gonna get on that sort of machine.

IIRC Opera 9.64 Classic Installer should work fine on. Windows 95.