It "technically" can - i used Win95 on an AMD 386DX with 4MB of RAM back in the 90s for a little. Most of the time was spent waiting for the computer to do something while the HDD was constantly working.
The Pentium MMX with 32MB i replaced it with was MUCH faster, practically everything was instant.
I tried installing it on my 20mhz 486 IBM but the install never would finish even though the minimum specs listed 386. I always thought that was being too generous. I did use it on faster 486's at some point in school (I think 66mhz or faster?)
Back in the mid 90’s I got it to “run” on a 386, but it was miserable. It was basically wondering if it was hung or just really slow on every command or mouse click.
Yes. I remember one of the MS guys saying the goal for win 95 was win32s equivalent performance on a 386 with 4 Mb ram. But win32s performance on that hardware was crap :)
supposedly with a minimum of 4M RAM even! [1] I have a machine with twice that clock and twice that RAM that a friends parents wanted to toss out[2]. I spent the better part of a day getting Windows 3.11 and Office 4.3 to run. Playing around with it for a bit, I highly doubt that Windows 95 on minimum requirements would be anything but endlessly frustrating. I was not masochistic enough to try.
I ran Windows 95 on a 386SX-16 with an 80387, with 5MB of ram for a year as my main machine. It ran about as well as 3.1 did. The only real drawback was the disk space required for 95 over 3.1 + DOS.
Good question. I ran Slackware Linux and DOS 5.0 on mine. I think Win95 was my Pentium 100 MHz already so it sounds a bit sus, but the FAQ section of OP had items about Win95, that is where I got the idea from.
We had Win95 running on a 25MHz 4MB FPRAM 286 back in high school. Poor teacher, half of first period was roughly how long it took to boot up, only for them to exit into DOS mode because the grading software and report card software was DOS-native and would hang if you tried running it under the GUI.
It "technically" can - i used Win95 on an AMD 386DX with 4MB of RAM back in the 90s for a little. Most of the time was spent waiting for the computer to do something while the HDD was constantly working.
The Pentium MMX with 32MB i replaced it with was MUCH faster, practically everything was instant.
I tried installing it on my 20mhz 486 IBM but the install never would finish even though the minimum specs listed 386. I always thought that was being too generous. I did use it on faster 486's at some point in school (I think 66mhz or faster?)
Yup, the RAM was the main bottleneck. 8MB was the minimum for Win9x, 16MB and above led to a fast experience.
Back in the mid 90’s I got it to “run” on a 386, but it was miserable. It was basically wondering if it was hung or just really slow on every command or mouse click.
Yes. I remember one of the MS guys saying the goal for win 95 was win32s equivalent performance on a 386 with 4 Mb ram. But win32s performance on that hardware was crap :)
> Win95 can technically run on a 20Mhz 386DX
s/technically/allegedly/
supposedly with a minimum of 4M RAM even! [1] I have a machine with twice that clock and twice that RAM that a friends parents wanted to toss out[2]. I spent the better part of a day getting Windows 3.11 and Office 4.3 to run. Playing around with it for a bit, I highly doubt that Windows 95 on minimum requirements would be anything but endlessly frustrating. I was not masochistic enough to try.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_95#System_requirements
[2] https://goliath32.com/hw/machines.html#pc386
I ran Windows 95 on a 386SX-16 with an 80387, with 5MB of ram for a year as my main machine. It ran about as well as 3.1 did. The only real drawback was the disk space required for 95 over 3.1 + DOS.
Good question. I ran Slackware Linux and DOS 5.0 on mine. I think Win95 was my Pentium 100 MHz already so it sounds a bit sus, but the FAQ section of OP had items about Win95, that is where I got the idea from.
We had Win95 running on a 25MHz 4MB FPRAM 286 back in high school. Poor teacher, half of first period was roughly how long it took to boot up, only for them to exit into DOS mode because the grading software and report card software was DOS-native and would hang if you tried running it under the GUI.
You certainly did not, as Win95 requires 32-bit, 80386 or better. 286 was a 16-bit CPU.
Windows 95 had a beta build for 286 systems, which is what this system 'ran.'
Bet you don't even know about Windows 97.
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