when win95 was out, its advertised minimum ram requirement was 4mb. however, in china there were rumors that english version of win95 could run with 2mb or 3mb, because less ram is spent on fonts than the chinese version.
also, its difficult to make 3mb out of 1mb and 256kb sticks, the only way i can think of is 386sx boards with 8 simm slots, or with 1mb ram in chip slots.
has anyone ever tried?
Well, not personally. I know that 4MB worked, since I saw it crawl on such poor equipped 386 laptops.
After this, I felt not urgency to see anything worse. 😉
Anyway, I know one site that did similar experiments.
https://www.winhistory.de/more/386/winq.htm
Though it doesn't really has got this very same min. RAM experiment with Win95.
I've got no suitable machine for testing at the moment (only an XT and a few 286es are set up), but what speaks against using 86Box or PCem ?
- They should allow setting below 4MB (VirtualBox has got a 4 MIB limit, don*t know about VPC). 😀
"Time, it seems, doesn't flow. For some it's fast, for some it's slow.
In what to one race is no time at all, another race can rise and fall..." - The Minstrel
//My video channel//
386sx boards with 8 simm slots are not that common but they do exist, with which you can get 2.5, 3 or 3.5mb.
I have a similar problem.
On my retro 486 Win98SE first complained that it wants at least 16MB RAM to install.
Then, after putting in 16MB, it complained it wants at least a 66MHz processor.
That sucks... I think I have sometimes heard people talk about a "Wintel cartel" extorting people to buy unneeded hardware.
Anyway I'll just copy the Win98SE installation on my other retro PC on the 486 via Samba, and then reconfigure it via safe mode. This way I hope I can just install once. (I still hope that Windows does the check for minimum processor speed only when installing, so I can get around installing a faster processor...)
wrote:I have a similar problem. On my retro 486 Win98SE first complained that it wants at least 16MB RAM to install. Then, after putti […]
I have a similar problem.
On my retro 486 Win98SE first complained that it wants at least 16MB RAM to install.
Then, after putting in 16MB, it complained it wants at least a 66MHz processor.
That sucks... I think I have sometimes heard people talk about a "Wintel cartel" extorting people to buy unneeded hardware.Anyway I'll just copy the Win98SE installation on my other retro PC on the 486 via Samba, and then reconfigure it via safe mode. This way I hope I can just install once. (I still hope that Windows does the check for minimum processor speed only when installing, so I can get around installing a faster processor...)
i think i have seen a setup option which skips the cpu check of win98 setup to get it install on 386 machines, but forgot about the detail. i don't care about it anyway because entering win98 alone takes up ~20mb of ram, so i won't consider it on machines with less than 64mb of ram.
i did ran win95(initial version) on my 486 with 4mb when it was out, and it was chinese version. later i added 4mb of ram and it got much better.
i wonder if its possible to run with evern less. in china there were rumors that english version of win95 could run with 2mb or 3mb, because they need less ram on fonts than the chinese version.
Were you running Win95 in 1995 in China?
"Will the highways on the internets become more few?" -Gee Dubya
V'Ger XT|Upgraded AT|Ultimate 386|Super VL/EISA 486|SMP VL/EISA Pentium
wrote:Were you running Win95 in 1995 in China?
i tried it for some days, needless to say it was very slow, and there wasn't many programs for win95 at that time, so i deleted it soon.
after a year or so i added 4mb of ram and installed it again, its working better then.
It ran acceptably well on a 486DX4 with 8MB RAM at the time.
Retronautics: A digital gallery of my retro computers, hardware and projects.
wrote:I have a similar problem. On my retro 486 Win98SE first complained that it wants at least 16MB RAM to install. Then, after putti […]
I have a similar problem.
On my retro 486 Win98SE first complained that it wants at least 16MB RAM to install.
Then, after putting in 16MB, it complained it wants at least a 66MHz processor.
That sucks... I think I have sometimes heard people talk about a "Wintel cartel" extorting people to buy unneeded hardware.)
Well, a 486DX2-66 was the official minimum requirement. 😀 Makes me wish Vista/7 had some check like this, too, but with a reasonable high mimimum requirement,
so sneaky PC sellers weren't able to sell their crappy fleamarket hardware to customers as "Vista/7 Capable", which in the end ruined the reputation of these OSes (Vista's, at least).
Anyway back to Windows 98SE.. It required a math coprocessor, too. If you run setup manually with a special switch (setup /nm), though, you can bypass the check.
It' also mentioned here -> https://www.computerhope.com/win95set.htm
Some people claimed to sucessfully ran Windows 98SE on a 386 with FPU, too, but I would never like to check this myself.
I once had a Compaq Prolinea (?) 486 that was fine on WfW 3.11 and plain DOS, but slow as hell on Windows 98SE.
Edit; It wasn't just Windows that required a reasonable amount of memory in the 1990s.
OS/2 also required 8MiB of RAM, better 16MiB. On something little as 4MiB, the system would crawl due to its sheer complexity and progressiveness.
Here's an interesting video of the time, telling that 8/16MB were no luxury for these advanced OSes: https://youtu.be/-DAojx2Hgec
"Time, it seems, doesn't flow. For some it's fast, for some it's slow.
In what to one race is no time at all, another race can rise and fall..." - The Minstrel
//My video channel//
wrote:OS/2 Warp 3 ran on 4 MiB of RAM. Well, run is probably an exaggeration. 8 MiB was definitely much better.
I ran Warp 3 on my 8MB DX33 for a year before upgrading to a DX4, it was flawless. I operated a BBS on it too. Warp 3 was a fantastic OS..
Retronautics: A digital gallery of my retro computers, hardware and projects.
Somewhat related to the original post, I've shoehorned Windows 95 onto some ridiculously small hard drives too. 😀 I believe the smallest was a 20 MB or 40 MB model that required DoubleDisk in order to work. I was also running the bare minimum RAM and he result was more theoretical than practical. 😀
Still, it's neat to see what you can get running on what.
I have an old sys m569 motherboard with “shared video memory “
I remember starting it with 4mb installed 2x2mb Simms and an AMD PR133
You could adjust the video buffer from 256k-4mb
Windows 95 will run on 3.75mb I know for certain and 98 on 8mb
I could not get 98 to start on less than 8mb, but I never tried the 98 lite version
I suppose I could dig that out of storage some day and use the frame buffer to reduce availabie ram to see where the breaking point was.
I do recall 95a ran faster on lower end systems, I had it on a 386sx25 w/ 4mb for a time
Worked fine as a backup albeit slow
wrote:Windows 95 will run on 3.75mb I know for certain and 98 on 8mb
I could not get 98 to start on less than 8mb, but I never tried the 98 lite version
did you try 3.5mb for win95?
what size did you try for win98? 7.75mb?
i think the largest possible ram size next to 8mb is 6.5mb.
I've never tried running Windows 95 on anything less than 16MB.
I've never tried running Windows 98 on anything less than 64MB.
I've never tried running Windows XP on anything less than 256MB, and it ran horribly.
I've never tried running Windows Vista on anything less than 4GB.
I've never tried running Windows 7 on anything less than 8GB.
I've never tried running Windows 8.1 on anything less than 4GB.
I've never tried running Windows 10 on anything less than 4GB.
