Yeah, just like my 5x86. Sure 95 is rather usable on a 5x86 and there are some "windows 95 only" games that will run well on a 5x86, but it's not really pleasant to use. Now that I've installed Windows 3.11, that computer is just so much faster ! I've got plenty computers running windows 9x, so the need of 95 on a 5x86 or below is really thin to me. Instead, I'm using it as a beefed-up DOS machine (I've put MS-DOS 6.22 with 4DOS and DOSMAX on this. I've got 624 or 625K of free ram on this and now I'm trying to put as many good retro sound cards as I can ^^)

I still say at least a Pentium-133 and 16/32mb of ram for Win95. Unless we are talking about the machine only running Win95 and no games/programs at all. Shure I ran all beta/alpha/testreleases of Win95, that cam out in 1995 plus the final product on a 486dx2-66/8mb Ram. I did not do it just because I could, back then. I did it because I needed to use Word and Wordperfect for Win95. Then again... I only loaded up Win95 for word processing and to copy files on the local network. I still tripple-booted Win95, Os/2-warp3 and MS-Dos-6.22 up to and including the K6-II-500 i got in 1998/99'ish (still ran Dos on daily basis in 2003). Os/2 was for testing out new software and Dos was for gaming. It is only just now, after 2010 that I have begyn to even load Doom on Win98. Back then it was all on pure Dos, and to be honest, I still do not like Dos games on Win98. It has to be on pure Dos.

486s are fine for Win95. I think the whole Pentium minimum mindset here are quite on the excessive side. I'd only think about Pentiums when the case of Win98 comes up (though I haven't had much trouble with that on a 486 either)

WinME and the NT4+'s though? Forget it 😀

well guyz, i am going to use 16mb ram. i had hoped for 32mb but the board has only 4 simm slots, so the max it can support is 4*4mb.
guess thats not enough to run the quake2 slideshow, a feat that i only heard of back in 1998.
i also managed the quake3 slideshow on an amd486-133 at 0.5fps, i guess 1fps is possible with geforce2mx.

I remember when I was young installing Windows 95 on a 386 for the fun of it. I also installed Win2k on a 486, again just because 😀 I ran Win95 OSR2 back in the early 2000s on my 486DX2-66 w/ 24mb ram as my day to day computer (IE4, ICQ, MSN messenger, battle.net, Office95)...

But right now I would prefer to run it on a Pentium based system.

Back in the day ('96 ish?) I ran (in serious manner) Windows 95 on a 386 16Mhz and 8MB RAM. I do not recommend it. At all. Slow is an understatement. A 40Mhz would obviously be faster and at least 16MB of RAM minimum. It might be okay, but I consider a 486 (even 25MHz) much better suited as a minimum standard for Win95.

chinny22 wrote:

"pretends to be a modern computer"
haha, WIn95 is modern? People are arguing if WinXP is retro, Think any Win9x OS is safely no longer considered modern

yeah but at least the look isn't different by much.

I wouldn't, but you can run an old version of OS/2 (1.x ).

okay guyz, would you prefer original win95 or osr2?
osr2 takes more hdd space, while fat32 doesn't save much on such small drives. however osr2 was said to have better compatibility for dos games than the original one.(not sure about my memory though)
and i don't want to bother installing real dos, due to short of floppy drives and disks. so i would rely solely on win95's dos mode even if its not perfect.

Would I run it? No, not likely, but that's mainly because anything I'd want to do that needs Win9x or NT4 really, really wants a Pentium or better. I tend to like DOS+OS/2 on 386/486 class machines, but there are exceptions.

I did run Win95 on a few low-spec machines back when it was still currentish (98 and NT4 were out, but 95 was very much still supported) - I found the biggest issue was having enough RAM. 16MB, at least. 32MB, much better. 64MB, great if you can (but probably only 486/Pentium).

As for OSR2 vs initial release - I vote OSR2. It's bigger, but it fixes tons of bugs. Win95, on release, was notoriously buggy. OSR2 fixed a lot of those bugs.

jade_angel wrote:

Win95, on release, was notoriously buggy. OSR2 fixed a lot of those bugs.

Yes, but strangely, from my experience it wasn't that buggy on normal 386 hardware.
Also, the early Win32s and NT 3.1 applications were less bloated and worked just fine here.

The story might be different on overbred +100MHz hardware with PCI/AGP, APM and APCI/APIC. 😉
That is stuff I would never bring any near to Win95 RTM.

I remember it being really witchety on even late 486 and early Pentium-class hardware. Though, of course, the Pentiums definitely had PCI and a lot of the late 486s did too.

jade_angel wrote:

I remember it being really witchety on even late 486 and early Pentium-class hardware.

Me, too. Win95 RTM and OSR2.x were like day and night.
Perhaps our copy at home was a bit more stable also, because we had a localized version.

In my opinion, the original release of Win95 was still at a beta stage when it was released.
As far as I remember, there once was an interview in which MS employees stated that
they had to finish Win95 development due to time contraits. I have no references at hand, though.

Anyway, it would make sense. The original Win95 behaves like a hot-rod version of Win3.1+Win32s.
Maybe that's why it runs more stable on classic 386/486 PCs, as its foundation
was made in ~92/93 already.

Here's an article at betaarchive. It also links to a Microsoft video of January 1993.
https://www.betaarchive.com/wiki/index.php?ti … _Testing_Builds

IIRC, I've run Win98 on a 486, and it was only to do it, not to do anything with it. I didn't leave it like that, since that is a sin.

I forgot.. There's a really old trick to speed-up Win95 on slow PCs.
It will disable the "last access" log entry for accessed files.
Just add "ACCDATE C: -" to config.sys.

It's similar to the Windows NT NtfsDisableLastAccessUpdate.

Windows 95 on a 486DX-33 with 8MB was a real dog. The DX4-100 and DX5-133 ran it fairly smoothly (with 16MB) though. You really needed either a Pentium or a Pentium class CPU for everything to run smoothly. I had a friend who ran Windows 95 on an IBM SLC2-50 with no L2 cache and 16MB RAM, but the CPU still held it back. One day I installed it on my 386DX-40 with 32MB just to see how well it would go. The UI ran smoothly, but anytime you wanted to run other software there would be considerable slowdown. It wasn't practical at all.

Just checked my old PC magazines..
In my place, in March '96, the latest in technology available was a Pentium 90 or 120 (166 available "soon").
Most machines were stil not sold with more than 8MiB of RAM, though.
A 16MiB configuration was pure luxury and the maximum you could buy.
Also, a CD-ROM drive was still not obvious. PC makers still sold Pentium machines without them.

Correct. Windows 95 needed 16MB of RAM to run properly, but nobody could afford 16MB of RAM...which is why I went back to WFWG311 until 1997 when memory prices came down. I remember in 1995 or so, in Canada 1MB of RAM cost $100. So if you wanted 16MB, you had to pay $1600. You could buy an entire computer for that much. At that time the Canadian dollar was only about 60 US cents, and we had 15% sales tax.

As for new PCs not selling with CD-ROM drives in 1996, let's just say that anyone who bought one in that configuration would soon be investing in a 3rd party upgrade kit. CD-ROM drives were pretty bloody common after early 1994 (mainly due to affordability of the CDU-33A and CR-563B 2X drives)

I've ran 95 (I think it was OSR2 or OSR 2.5 or so) on a DX4-100 with 64MB RAM, 1GB IBM harddrive. It ran fairly fast, but I remember it not being the fastest (even on a fresh install, I ended up using it quite a bit and never reinstalled the OS).

noshutdown wrote:

well guyz, i am going to use 16mb ram. i had hoped for 32mb but the board has only 4 simm slots, so the max it can support is 4*4mb.
guess thats not enough to run the quake2 slideshow, a feat that i only heard of back in 1998.
i also managed the quake3 slideshow on an amd486-133 at 0.5fps, i guess 1fps is possible with geforce2mx.

I actually intended too try out 95 on a 386, but never got around to it. Btw, are there actually any 386 motherboards that will work with 16MB 30p SIMMs?