Comment by deaddodo
7 hours ago
Windows 95 was Microsoft's biggest commercial hit at that point. Selling 40m copies in its first year.
There's no doubt that it went in to upgrade plenty of 386s/486s until the owners upgraded their hardware.
7 hours ago
Windows 95 was Microsoft's biggest commercial hit at that point. Selling 40m copies in its first year.
There's no doubt that it went in to upgrade plenty of 386s/486s until the owners upgraded their hardware.
You needed at least 12 MB RAM to run Windows 95 smoothly. There were plenty of 8 MB systems that really really struggled. Even booting up was a swap fest.
I remember immediately upgrading to 12 MB. 8 MB was painful.
Not all 386 class systems could be upgraded to 12 MB or more.
I did a ton of upgrades from 3.1 to Windows 95 in late 1996 and early 1997 on 386 and 486 machines with 4MB of RAM. I still have a "mark" from the tedium. Some of the machines didn't have a large enough hard drive to store a copy of the setup files (the "CAB files") so until the company issued me a ZIP drive I had to do "the floppy shuffle" with 20-ish disks.
It ran like crap with 4MB of RAM but it did run. Opening anything much resulted in paging.
Your mileage may vary. I remember 4 MB booting, but being absolutely useless.
8 MB was still swapping all the time, you couldn't really run much beyond some simple software.
12 MB was finally enough to do something productive, but definitely nothing luxurious.