4 ms·

386 and W95? Not a good combination. By the time W95 was out on the market P5 was the latest and greatest and a 486 was the low budget one. You might want to re

386 and W95? Not a good combination. By the time W95 was out on the market P5 was the latest and greatest and a 486 was the low budget one. You might want to reconsider those memories. As for loading times it all boiled down on how many check-up you wanted or not in your BIOS. As a rule I've always did memory check by BIOS only one time when buying/putting together a new PC and after that I've check it off in BIOS, halving the time it need it to boot. It was perfectly easy to have a 3 seconds BIOS time, sometime was even a nuisance to make it that short because you'd had to be fast to press Del (or whatever the BIOS key was) if you wanted to go to BIOS instead.

dmead 7y ago
you're conflating a bunch of stuff here.
avian 7y ago
> By the time W95 was out on the market P5 was the latest and greatest and a 486 was the low budget one. You might want to reconsider those memories. Maybe the 486 was the low end of what you could buy at the time, but not everyone bought a new computer. My parents upgraded their 386 from Windows 3.1 to 95. It was slow, but usable.
- unnouinceput 7y ago
  In 3rd year at Uni, in good old '96 I had a P5 with W95 in my dorm room. Granted, not mine, but the friend and colleague who had it was not some rich parents kid, just middle class. We played HOMM2 on it all day long, much to his gf dismay.
vardump 7y ago
I remember 100 MHz 486 with 12 MB RAM being the point when Win95 was nice to use. With 8 MB it would just swap too much. Of course it'd run with much less.
karmakaze 7y ago
There was a long time where the 486 was the sweet spot before Pentiums were commonplace. I didn't so much run Win3x/9x but did have both OS/2 and WinNT i486 (desktop and laptop) machines with up to 66 MHz 40 MB ram before moving off them.
- unnouinceput 7y ago
  486 DX4 at 100MHz was something like 250 USD in 1995. I remember this perfectly because my sister in law saw this in a ad and wanted to buy it for her business and need it my help for negotiating the price down to 200 USD, since that was all the budget she had for such a purchase.

dmead 7y ago

you're conflating a bunch of stuff here.

avian 7y ago

> By the time W95 was out on the market P5 was the latest and greatest and a 486 was the low budget one. You might want to reconsider those memories. Maybe the 486 was the low end of what you could buy at the time, but not everyone bought a new computer. My parents upgraded their 386 from Windows 3.1 to 95. It was slow, but usable.

unnouinceput 7y ago
In 3rd year at Uni, in good old '96 I had a P5 with W95 in my dorm room. Granted, not mine, but the friend and colleague who had it was not some rich parents kid, just middle class. We played HOMM2 on it all day long, much to his gf dismay.

vardump 7y ago

I remember 100 MHz 486 with 12 MB RAM being the point when Win95 was nice to use. With 8 MB it would just swap too much. Of course it'd run with much less.

karmakaze 7y ago

There was a long time where the 486 was the sweet spot before Pentiums were commonplace. I didn't so much run Win3x/9x but did have both OS/2 and WinNT i486 (desktop and laptop) machines with up to 66 MHz 40 MB ram before moving off them.

unnouinceput 7y ago
486 DX4 at 100MHz was something like 250 USD in 1995. I remember this perfectly because my sister in law saw this in a ad and wanted to buy it for her business and need it my help for negotiating the price down to 200 USD, since that was all the budget she had for such a purchase.