I have W95a on a 486 dx2/66 with 32mb ram and its popping. Maybe add a bit more ram - say to 16mb - and you should be fine.

EDIT: if you can add cache to the motherboard 128 or 256kb will do wonders especially for W95 snappiness (I added 256kb). But for basic purposes the system will be good. I use my 486 for games that run too fast on Pentiums and I think W95 runs just fine too.

YEARS ago, in '95 I had a regular customer come in with her heavily loaded 386, in as much as it was full of newer hardware. The little, middle-aged lady who owned it just had this thing about using high-quality, name-brand parts. IIRC her particular 386 was a DX-33 which had 16MB of RAM, a VLB video card and an SB16, possibly a bus-card for her mouse.

Point being that her 3.11 Workgroups install was so messy by this time that I decided to put a copy of Windows 95 on it. (this was before OSR2 came along) The thing ran so snappy that I didn't really put thought into the system requirements of Windows 95, at the time. During the install I got scared that this was a big, unresolvable mistake. However, when it was finished, the system ran great! And all she had to do was reinstall a few of her 3rd party programs to be back in business. This system actually ran Win95 better than some of the 486 systems we had in the shop which ran generic hardware, but which we imagined were comparable.

I don't think you'd notice these sorts of differences between hardware, these days but back then it paid to use good hardware.

its surely going to be very slow.
i tested with 486dx2/66 and 64mb ram and i still feel it responses very slowly. when win95 finish loading, unused ram left is 40mb, so you know how much ram does it take to run.
3.1 is a better choice for rigs with 4mb and even 8mb ram.

I have ran 95 on systems with only 8MB and while I felt that the performance was ok it was on Pentium era machines. For just only the most basic tasks the cpu will do ok but you need to do everything you can to upgrade that ram as 4MB is on the lean side. 8MB will work no problems but 16MB is a lot better and it gets a lot smoother as you go up.

Upgrade your ram and you should be all set.

Yeah, you will need more RAM. 8 MB is barely enough. 4 MB won't cut it.

As said... it will be slow because of heavy virtual memory usage. I'd say 16MB is practical minimum.

It will be better if you use CF card as old small IDE drives are painfully slow and with all the virtual memory swapping, CF will be far better.

I've installed Win95 on my 386DX-40, 32MB, 512MB CF card and Cirrus Logic 5429 2MB ISA video card. It runs quite well 😉

4MB is the official minimum requirement. 8 Megs is recommended.
The Wikipedia article on Windows 95 says "Also, in some cases, if any networking or similar components were installed the system would refuse to boot with 4 megabytes of RAM."

I agree with the other answers, WfW 3.11 would be a better choice. If the only thing you want to do is to convert floppies it will work just as well. You could still network the machine with more modern Windows versions.

It'll be fine, after it's swapped a few things to disk, if all you're doing is copying disks and lots of extra software isn't installed. I ran OS/2 on 8MB for years, 4MB on 95 should be ok.

ynari wrote:

It'll be fine, after it's swapped a few things to disk, if all you're doing is copying disks and lots of extra software isn't installed. I ran OS/2 on 8MB for years, 4MB on 95 should be ok.

I recall back in the mid 90's a buddy of mine who worked at a computer shop where they sold many Windows 95 PC's with only 4MB of RAM.
However, this is the bare minimum and is only ideal for single task operations.
If you are only wanting to copy files then this should suffice but, don't expect anything more with only 4MB of RAM.
8MB will still get you much better performance.

4Mb? Well, I am using W95 on a 486DX4-100Mhz with 64Mb-72pin and without any complex apps my ram is always full. It's not running badly but I still think that W95 and 486 architecture were just not right. It's like anything it's using 100% and more cpu power not to mention disk swap.

I never satisfied Windows 95 in 486DX2/66 with 18MB ram in 1996...

Evidence

Operating System: IBM PC DOS Version 7.00 Date & Time : 1996-08-09 14:47:10 Model ID : FC Sub-Model ID […]
Show full quote

Operating System: IBM PC DOS Version 7.00
Date & Time : 1996-08-09 14:47:10
Model ID : FC Sub-Model ID : 01
BIOS Revision : 00 BIOS Date : 05/26/94
BIOS Type : Phoenix
Machine Type : IBM AT-339 - Compatible
Processor : Intel 486
Estimated Speed : 66 MHz
CoProcessor : Integrated
Bus Type : AT 16-Bit Bus
Keyboard Type : Enhanced
Pointer Type : Serial Mouse Buttons: 2 Int Level: 4
Pointer Version : 8.20
Equipment : 1 Parallel Port(s)
: 2 Serial Port(s)
: 2 Diskette Drive(s)
: 1 Fixed Disk(s)
: Pointing Device
: Math CoProcessor
Serial Port 1 : COM1: 03F8
Serial Port 2 : COM2: 02F8
Parallel Port 1 : LPT1: 0378
MSCDEX Driver : Version 2.25 CD-ROM Drive(s) 1 MSCDEX Drive(s) L:
Primary Video : VGA
Diskette Drive A: 3.50" - 1.44M - 80 Track - Type 4
Diskette Drive B: 5.25" - 1.2M - 80 Track - Type 2
Fixed Disk 1 : 515MB ( 527,696KB) ( 540,360,704 bytes) Type 40
Logical Drive C : Size 261,184KB ( 255.0MB) Avail 132,248KB ( 129.1MB)
Logical Drive D : Size 135,756KB ( 132.5MB) Avail 94,036KB ( 91.8MB)
Logical Drive E : Size 129,972KB ( 126.9MB) Avail 22,694KB ( 22.1MB)
Logical Drive L : Size 131,070KB ( 127.9MB) Avail 0KB ( 0.0MB)
Total Memory : 18,048KB (17.6MB)
Conventional : 640KB Free: 622KB
Extended Memory : 17,408KB Free: 0KB
XMS Memory : 14,599KB Free: 14,599KB
XMS Version : 3.0
Adapter ROM 1 : Addr C0000-C7FFF Tseng

20 years old me back to DOS after increased RAM.

(not to subject : Why I dispose this system 😵 😵 )

I ran Chicago on 8MB of RAM with a 486DX-33 for a year. If you don't do anything too silly it should be fine provided he hard drive isn't horribly slow. I seem to think that I somehow got it to run Hover (Though how, I do not remember).

For networking and file management purposes, you likely wouldn't run into any problems as I don't with similarly spec hardware. For copy/backup/floppy stuff it should be good enough if you can't use Windows 3.11, it just might take a minute to get from the "Starting Windows 95..." to the Desktop.

386SX wrote:

4Mb? Well, I am using W95 on a 486DX4-100Mhz with 64Mb-72pin and without any complex apps my ram is always full. It's not running badly but I still think that W95 and 486 architecture were just not right. It's like anything it's using 100% and more cpu power not to mention disk swap.

64MB is way "too much" ram for Win95. Usually the problem with Win9X was disk caching that consumed all the available memory and usually never released it. Windows then used swap file and performance was degraded.

You can use this simple app for limiting cache memory usage:
http://www.outertech.com/en/cacheman-classic

or set it manually in System.ini
http://thpc.info/ram/vcache.html
http://thpc.info/ram/vcache95.html

With more then 32MB I'd set max cache size around 4-8MB - depend on what apps you're using.

16MB system 2MB
8MB system 1MB
4MB system just 128KB

Thankx, I'll try. However it's already a miracle to use W9x with a 486 cpu but the problem still is how we're used to work with smartphone/tablet/powerful notebook nowdays that clearly accelerated "speed requirement" even when you actually would not need it.
So if anything will not start immediately we feel something is not running right or the system is locked up...

Like always... you should also check other components that might hold the system back - like HDD and VGA. HDDs were always the slowest part and replacing it with some good CF card you get much more responsive system overall (like today with SSDs).

And be sure to disable unnecessary startup junk that may be slowing things down. Run msconfig.exe [start menu -> run -> msconfig] go to the Start Up tab and unclick all but the necessary item(s); I only have "System Tray" enabled for instance.

Per Kixs comments above, with 64mb of ram I set cache to 6mb using Cacheman.

I realize I have a DX/66, but I quite enjoy the vanilla W95a experience.

Years ago I saw Windows 95A on 486SX 25 Mhz and 12 Mb ram and was pretty fast and was installed on Seagate 130 Mb Hard Drive, and that was a normal install of windows without any tweaks, you can use that windows with that rig, but good is add more ram and eventually good videocard like Tseng ET4000.

Yes. A 1 or 2mb video card is all you really need for a system like this - and that's including many games of the period too.

Been there, done that. When I first installed Windows 95 back in the days (much earlier then release date, I was a beta user) my machine was a Cyrix 486DX-33 with 6MB of RAM. It was running quite acceptably. Later, I get the release version and upgraded the machine to 8MB RAM and used it like this for a long time, happily.