Anonymous Coward wrote:

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 far are CD-ROM drives 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 agree completely. I vaguely remember there also was a solid-state/memory crisis
somewhen in the late 80s or 90s. Prices went sky high for a short amount of time..
As far as Win95 is concerned, I remember that inoffically even 32MiB was required to make
the virtual memory manager work as intended. With less memory installed, it would constantly use the pagefile.
With just 4MiB a lot more than with 16MiB, of course. Unfortunately, I can't remember where I originally got that piece of information.
It has been so long since I worked with Win95.. Maybe it also was only relevant
for Win95 RTM an got "fixed" later on. I dunno. So let's better thread is as an urban myth, but keep it in our mind.
On my own machine(s), I pretty much went the 3.1-98SE-XP route. 😄

All in all, 16MiB is a safe amount of memory I think. It is the maximum RAM old versions of DOS
(or rather himem.sys) and 286/386SX machines or 486 machines w/ four 30-pin SIMM slots can handle.
Windows 98SE, who had got an improved virtual memory managment, also required 16MiB as a minimum.
Personally, I ran 98SE with 24MiB on a P75 for a long time and it worked okay - even for browsin' the web with IE 5.5.
Even though 64MiB would have been way better, I guess. ^^

Speaking of Windows 98SE, the worst I've ever encountered was a Compaq Deskpro 4/66 running 98SE.
I've never seen a slower machine before. Maybe it was just because of the hard drive.
Such a 486DX2-66 CPU is normally quite capable. Usually, a Compaq machine runs Win95 or WfW quite well.

Tetrium wrote:

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?

Wait, they do really exist ? I heard of them, but I thought they were some strange server stuff with parity, etc. 😳

Tetrium wrote:

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?

i doubt there were any, because 16mb 30pin simms showed up pretty late, that the 386 chipsets would not have known of their existence.
and to think, the minimum combination of 16mb simms that works with a 386dx is 64mb, and the latest 386 boards were probably made in 1995 or so.

16MB 30-pin SIMMs were actually around for a while. I believe when I checked PC magazine from 1991/92 I was surprised to see them there. They were used primarily in servers of course....and were well over $1000 per SIMM (a set of four needed for operation).

There are indeed 386 motherboards that support 16MB 30-pin SIMMs. They may be far more common than you think. All of the ones that I have seen are those tiny little 1/2 AT sized boards based on 486 type chipsets from OPTi/UMC/ALi. Some of them can take up to 128MB of RAM. Of course, as these boards only have 128kb of cache, when running in writeback mode you can only cache the first 16MB!

I think a DX-40 with 16 megs of Ram (and cache more importantly) is more than capable to run Win95. Of course you would not run Quake on it, probably Office and a couple of other low demanding apps. I'll build a test system and try. Windows 95 is nice, but I overused it when I was a kid and got tired of it :-p

At the time I had a K5 with 8 megs of Ram and no cache, and my dad's DX4 beat the crap out of it. Processor is the least important thing, unless CPU power is required (games, games, games).

My 386DX-40 works fine with 80mb ram (1x64 72pin and 4x4mb 30pin), but it has only 128kb of cache 🙁

A lot of 386 boxen lacked cache outright. Having 128k helps quite a bit - it's not far removed from the days when you could have a machine with only 128k of RAM, after all! (Though I suppose you'd never see a 32-bit machine with that little, true enough.)

A lot of 386s have no cache simply because they don't need it. I believe 25MHz was borderline. It needed cache if you had slow memory, but if you had 60ns RAM you could run 0 wait states and cache wasn't required.
Most of the 33MHz and 40Mhz motherboards without cache are the cost reduced SX models. Almost all 33 and 40MHz DX motherboards had cache.

I've had 95 OSR2 on my 386dx40 since the early 2000's (same install as a matter of fact, but I don't use it very often).
The system has a 387, 32mb ram, 128k cache, a ATI Mach64, and dual 4gb hard drives.

If I remember correctly, I could never get the IDE/atapi Zip drive to work under DOS and that is why I stuck with 95.
Most DOS games that I play on it work just fine full-screened while in Windows and then I can always reboot to DOS mode for the ones that don't.

Tetrium wrote:

Btw, are there actually any 386 motherboards that will work with 16MB 30p SIMMs?

Yes... quite a few.

I have upgraded at least four of my 386 motherboards to 64MB (4 x 16Mb sticks), I might have more motherboards yet to test... though can also confirm there are a few which cannot post with 16MB sticks.

Online configuration/jumper settings I have found to not always be the most reliable either... they may say 32MB limit when 64MB runs just fine!

noshutdown wrote:

pros: runs a lot more applications/games and see how it performs pretends to be a modern computer […]
Show full quote

pros:
runs a lot more applications/games and see how it performs
pretends to be a modern computer

cons:
extremely slow
takes a lot of hdd space

Referring to the original post... it depends on your system. Everyone's systems differ somewhat from each other.

Windows 95 runs just fine on a 386 if you optimise the system... just slapping the OS on any system using any random board along with 70ns DRAM will of course increase latency and potential lag experienced.

I've only bothered to run it on faster 386 builds... using optimum memory settings with the fastest DRAM available.

eg... on a typical 33MHz FSB system, each system cycle is; - 1/33MHz = 30ns...

... so if you use 60ns RAM SIMMS... memory read write ops will only take 2 cycles... whereas if you use 70ns RAM SIMMS... you will need to wait until the third cycle 30ns + 30ns + 30ns = 90ns before memory can be addressed. With Windows 95, using hardware with the lowest latency goes a long way.

ive also got a 386DX40 that i rescued that im still working on trying to get booting from CD
have any of u guys found a way to be able to boot a win95 installation cd?

Anonymous Coward wrote:

A lot of 386s have no cache simply because they don't need it. I believe 25MHz was borderline. It needed cache if you had slow memory, but if you had 60ns RAM you could run 0 wait states and cache wasn't required.

how is wait stats calculated in detail after all?
my board has an amd386dx-40 and 70ns dram, shall i get away with 1wait or 2wait?

chrisNova777 wrote:

ive also got a 386DX40 that i rescued that im still working on trying to get booting from CD
have any of u guys found a way to be able to boot a win95 installation cd?

Best I can come up with is either to use Smart Boot Manager to boot from the CD after first booting the BM from floppy or hard drive. That, or boot from a Win95 boot floppy with a CD driver, then install from there. (That's what I do for Win98. I found that the first Windows install CD I could reliably boot on anything was for Win2k.)

it runs fine on my 40mhz 486 with 8mb of ram , pretty fast too , i dont see why a high end 386 wouldnt be able to match it.

Joey_sw wrote:

i wont recommend even the first edition of win95 for anything less than Pentium 133MHz and at least 16MB of RAM.

I use WIn98SE on a 486DX4-100/16mb laptop and photoshop 5.0, ACdsee and Office97 run ok. AS well as WAdAuthor and DooM.

As a few others have pointed out, RAM's really the key thing. If you have enough, you're fine; if not, welcome to pain-ville.

My family's first 486 was upgraded from Win95 to Win98 vanilla when it still had 16MB RAM (although it was eventually upgraded to 64MB), and I honestly don't recall it running any slower than Win95 does. Admittedly though, it's been perhaps 20 years since I last used that system in that configuration and my memories of any performance deficits may have been lost to time. My current recreation of that system will remain with Win95 RTM though since that's what the childhood system it recreates originally came with.

A question I just thought of which I haven't seen mentioned in this thread yet...how much better would Win95 perform on a 386 if you changed the default shell from Explorer to the old Program Manager? IIRC it was still in Win95 and maybe even Win98. Yes, you would lose the new UI that was one of the main selling points of Win95, but you'd still retain the program compatibility without the overhead of explorer.exe running.

what is the fastest "highend 386"???? i have a box powered by 386DX40 processor
surely in 2017 we can run win95 on a 40mhz 386DX processor? using SSD, Compact Flash Etc
with todays modern disk drive enhancements, is the cpu still the most limiting factor with using win95 on a 386?

CPU?
Disk speed? (using SSD or compact flash instead of old IDE - still limited to PIO/udma16?)
RAM? (having 16-32MB instead of 8-16)

There is no UDMA16. Better go for SCSI with a bus master capable controller. With a (too) modern drive the cache will act the same as a SSD would do.
Most 386 boards won't cache more than 16 MB RAM.
A 386 CPU is always a limiting factor if you look after Win95 games. You can probably try running Diablo, but it will be just a tech demo - don't forget a BitBlt capable ISA card.

I suppose if one were to try to spec out the most skookum single-CPU 386 they could, not limiting it to period-available hardware, it might end up looking something like this: (Additional caveats - no RapidCAD or other upgrade chips like that, since they're actually 486-class hardware, and if we want a 486, we'll build a 486, belike)

CPU: Am386DX/40
FPU: Cyrix FasMath-40
RAM: 16MB of the fastest stuff that'll work. More if the board can cache it.
Cache: See if we can scare up one of those boards with 256k.
Graphics: Tseng ET4000AX 2MB
Sound: ESS Audiodrive (1869) with Dreamblaster X2. Not period-correct, but what the hey?
Network: NE2000, or SMC, or 3Com 3c509. Any of these is pretty workable and a good way to get files from a modern machine to this one without burning CDs constantly.
Storage: Adaptec AHA-1542 SCSI controller with SCSI2SD and 8GB SD card; ATAPI CD-RW, GOTEK floppy emulator

I don't know how much one can gain from one I/O controller over another, so I'd just opt for one that's not irritating to set up. There were some VLB 386 boards, but those seem weird to me in the same way as those VLB Pentium boards that are floating around out there.

But anyway, I figure that'd run Win95b/c just fine. Now, as for any games that really need Win9x, probably not so much. The CPU is definitely what's holding those back. Off the top of my head I can't think of any games that both require Win9x (as opposed to working in it, but being DOS programs) and will run on a 386 acceptably. I'm not sure there are even that many true Win9x games that'll run well on a 486.