Comment by userbinator
16 hours ago
95 and 98 were roughly the same speed; any differences would likely be due to drivers. The main difference between the 9x and NT lineage is the former is actually a hypervisor for DOS VMs (and the GUI itself can be considered a DPMI application, running in its own VM) while the latter is a "full" OS with a very limited DOS emulator.
IIRC the largest speed difference was caused by Active Desktop. Windows 98 burned a "lot" of memory and clock cycles in order to view dynamic content inside Explorer.
Back in the day there used to be custom builds of Windows 98 that had Internet Explorer completely stripped out. Those were much closer to Win95's performance.
Not on low-end kit.
I cut down Win95 to run from a 16MB SSD in 1996, paid for by PC Pro magazine. I knew that OS inside out.
Around the turn of the century my travel laptop was an IBM Thinkpad 701C, the famous "Butterfly". 40MB RAM and a 75MHz 486DX4.
Win95 was great on it, better than OS/2, but the thing is Win95 had a max of 4 IP addresses. In total.
I had a dialup modem (1), an Ethernet card (2), AOL for toll-free dialup (different stack, so 3) and Direct Cable Connection (4).
Add a different modem or Ethernet card and it couldn't bind TCP/IP to it. No more addresses.
I tried NT 4 but it had no power management, no PnP, no FAT32.
I tried Win2K. Not fun in 40MB of nonstandard (and so vastly expensive to upgrade) RAM.
I tried 98SE. Too big, too slow.
So I cut it down as hard as possible with 98Lite.
(Still around, remarkably: https://www.litepc.com/98lite.html )
No IE, no themes, no built in media stuff, no Active Desktop, and it ran reasonably on a 486 in 40MB of RAM.
And it supported more IP addresses!
But it was hard work to get it working, and it was never entirely stable.
No. I reject your statement based on considerable personal experience and benchmark testing.
98 was considerably heavier than 95.
Just look at the ISO files!
95 OSR 2.1 with USB support:
https://winworldpc.com/product/windows-95/osr-21
385MB.
98SE:
https://archive.org/download/windows-98-se-retail
622MB.
98 is a significantly bigger and more complex OS.
Same design, but a lot more stuff piled on top.
I remember that myself.
When people bought a new W98 PC, which was often the first computer for so many consumers, it really did perform quite similarly to earlier-adopters' W95 PC's that were already in action.
The specs on the newer hardware were so much better which made up for it, and progressive sluggishness of Windows was swept under the rug for mainstream consumers, continuing to an extent today. You know, like a snail without a shell ;)
This is why in the '90's when Grove was running Intel and Gates was running Microsoft, professional geeks coined the phrase: "What Andy giveth, Bill taketh away." They didn't wait until WindowsME to say this.
It wasn't really worth it for mainstream apps, but if you had a challenging Office 97 workload, with or without VBA, something like live "real-time" data acquisition, or god forbid any type of ML or simulation, the best improvement you could get was to wipe W98 off the HDD and start fresh with W95. It always has seemed like there was some uncalled-for obstacle to prevent easily installing a previous version of Windows on a new PC though.
Even now this still works to an extent, buy a new mainstream W11 consumer PC, install W10 in a regular ordinary Microsoft dual-boot configuration and see for yourself.
Most people would have so much SSD space left over they could even try a triple boot, how about that W10 ISO from 2015 if you really want to emphasize the difference in how much less sluggish things could have been now. Woo hoo. Plan to stay off the internet when booted to this one, in Device Manager you could even pre-emptively disable the ethernet & wifi.
Of course try it on a HDD if you haven't done that in a while, to see how that feels compared to earlier Windows when you were using nothing but HDDs.
Windows 8.0 is also still fairly installable in new PC's if you want to see what it was like when they had one of their many brilliant engineers taking focused responsibility to achieve faster boot times in particular.