Yes, from what I remember, Win95 was quite quick and "stable" on 386/486 hardware if "enough" RAM was available.
I assume that's because these platforms were ISA-only most of the time.
VLB also looked like ISA to the OS, I think.
586 systems introduced PCI, APIC, ACPI etc. which differed quite a bit from the architectures of pure ISA or EISA/MCA systems.

Jo22 wrote on 2020-09-18, 14:54:

Yes, from what I remember, Win95 was quite quick and "stable" on 386/486 hardware if "enough" RAM was available.

I think enough RAM is indeed the key. Of course instable drivers, malware, weird tweaks and whatnot will ruin a system but RAM ... I've seen enough ad's and PC's in person with so little RAM and yet so many background programs. I remember a budget system with a 900MHz Celeron, Windows 98SE and just 32MB of RAM! Even with 64MB it would be 'unpleasant' to run that system with a printer-systray application, a scanner-application and a virus scanner sniffing on the background.

Always glad to see when people took 128MB and a few MHz less, rather than a higher clock with too little RAM.

Regarding your GUI performance: it does matter what graphics card/chip you are running. Some accelerate Windows better than others. Personally I also like to use TweakUI and increase the start menu animation speed to 'Fast' to make things snappy. Actually I still disable 'Animate windows when minimizing and maximizing' on new Windows 10 systems to make it easier to fly through your system 😉.

Did the system updates include the shell update?

If so it will run very slow. The shell update uses more RAM and is slower due to just being Internet Explorer masquerading as a file explorer.

This is a Unisys 486 made in late 1995. It actually has LBA, power management, ... and an intel PCI chipset. In fact, I'm pretty sure the Cirrus GD5228 video is hanging off the PCI bus. I think it works so well because Unisys was a PC of choice for serious businesses willing to pay a premium for tested, guaranteed compatible hardware. That, and everything is built into the motherboard -- Ethernet is an AMD chip, I/O is ECP and 16550, and you could get it with onboard SCSI and sound too. Since it was all integrated, it inherently got tested to work with each other.

Part of me would rather this be the quintessential Vogons dream white box clone with the megahertz readout, but in all honesty those tended to be made of unrolled slice your wrists steel casing and weird, discount Taiwanese chipsets mounted to dodgy looking circuit boards. Plus, all that hardware didn't get exhaustively tested as a functioning system. Which is fine when your OS is too dumb to do more than one thing at once, .ie DOS, or is advanced enough to isolate all its tasks and hardware, ie, Linux or Windows NT. I won't pretend to know the technicalities, but Windows 95 is basically running a grand spinning plate experiment between the hardware, software, and drivers where piece of hardware is expected to respect each other's address space, memory .etc or else every the whole system locks up. And some of those drivers might be running under real mode in DOS -- not even designed to do this.

I used to think people were dumb back in the day for spending thousands extra on real IBMs, Compaqs, AST .etc when Taiwanese stuff was so much cheaper. But nope, I get it now, and I don't plan on trying to run Windows on anything that isn't a former business-class Yes, It Runs Novell type desktop.

As Keenmaster said did you let IE4 install? That kills performance.
You can still install 2.5 just remove the CD on intial boot (or remove teh IE branded cab files if installing from the HDD)
On a 486 I dont see any point for any of the updates unless a prrogram specificly needs it.

But I agree. High end business OEM systems were never the fastes but that had propper R&D to ensure they were stable. I'd take stability over a few extra frames.
It helps that retro machines are pretty "static" as well. Now we install our set of drivers and software and thats it. No more updating or uninstalling software. We also dont install nearly the same amount of software or have as much running in the background as we did when they were daily drivers.