computergeek92 wrote:Should I avoid installing Windows 95 on a Pentium III? Even though SSE would not work, would the SSE software being multitasked just not activate it's SSE function? Would Win95 bug up if I try running any SSE programs at once or will the SSE on the program just won't activate on the Win95 system? I hope i'm making sense....
Well yes, running Win95 on a PIII is a risk.
You see, there is the CPUID instruction that any program can call, which lets the CPU tell the program directly what kind of features it supports, including SSE. The OS cannot block this. I don't think even the BIOS can.
So any software that supports SSE, will see the capability of your CPU, and in most cases it will automatically be enabled.
You can get away with this as long as you run a single program with SSE. But it's very difficult to control that, because any kind of background process may also use SSE. As soon as two or more SSE programs are running at the same time, they will corrupt each others registers at every task switch, so that will turn into a big mess soon.
Perhaps you should look at Athlons for the fastest possible Win95 machine.
Any pre-Athlon XP does not have SSE support. The fastest Athlon you can get is 1400 MHz, so you're way up there with the fastest PIII CPUs, but without SSE 😀